It is 3.27am.
The World Cup is on. Ivory Coast — the Gold Coast, Côte d’Ivoire, call them what you will — is playing Ecuador, and trust me, thousands of Africans are still up right now. Some for the football. Me? I’m up for this.
Let me tell you what I have been doing for the last three days.
On Thursday, I couldn’t sleep. Not unusual, you know by now that this is what keeps me up at night, literally. What was unusual was that my desktop wasn’t with me. It’s at the office.
My last laptop blew up while I was editing (a story for another day), and since it wasn’t exactly the hour you travel home alone at night — someone very close to me has been very clear on that — I had to work with what I had.
My phone. And I just started.
For a long time, I had been bothered by something. I write, I create, and somewhere along the way, I started noticing a pattern on the platforms I relied on — LinkedIn and Facebook.
I love them, and I’m not here to bury them, but if you’re a creator, you know the feeling. You put something out. You feel it. You mean it. And then… nothing. Like the algorithm has decided that’s as far as your voice goes.
Throttled. That’s the word.
And the validation thing, I want to be honest here, because some people will say “you shouldn’t write for validation,” and yes, I agree, but that’s not the whole truth either. Sometimes you just want to see: okay, is this landing? Is this reaching anyone?
So I started asking a bigger question. What if I had something that didn’t depend on any algorithm? Something that was mine — not on LinkedIn’s terms, not on Facebook’s terms, but mine.
Something that could outlive me, honestly. Something that could still carry my work years, even decades from now.
The answer that kept coming back: a personal website.
I won’t lie to you, I don’t have current coding skills. Save for back on campus, I had started a programming journey with Andela, which was making a lot of noise across East Africa at the time.
For a moment, I genuinely thought software development could be my path. I even flirted with the idea of quitting school for it — yes, I had consumed too many Silicon Valley startup stories.
But that chapter closed, and many years later, here I was, deep in agribusiness and entrepreneurship, far removed from all of that.
But here’s the thing about living in this era: you don’t have to be a developer to build something.
Using Claude and ChatGPT — my two favourite late-night companions by now, don’t laugh — I was able to write, revise, and bring a website to life. Every piece of it. No developer hired. No designer paid. Built on my phone, at home, in the early hours of the morning, between checking on Ivory Coast and Ecuador.
Two days of that. Come home, tinker. Go to work, do what I do at Afrifama. Come back, tinker some more.
Then I had to figure out hosting. I remembered I had opened a GitHub account back in 2018 — just sitting there, collecting dust. So I had to learn in real time: what are repositories? How do I work within them? How do I push the site live? What even is Google Search Console, and how do I get indexed? All of this, new, figured out on a phone, in the early hours of the morning.
And then I went live.
I spent less than six dollars on a domain. That’s it. Thanks to the early bird offer.
And I’m telling you, every time I open that site, something happens. Because this is my work. I vibe-coded this. Or close enough to it.
My story is there. My founder notes are there. My YouTube. If you want to invite me to speak somewhere, there’s a link for that too. And you are already here — this is it.
I know there are people reading this right now who will have ten suggestions for how to improve it. And I welcome that, genuinely, I do — but first, let me sit in this moment. Let me celebrate this win.
This reminds me of a post I came across years ago from Strive Masiyiwa — the Zimbabwean entrepreneur who built Econet Global, and someone I deeply respect and look up to.
He referenced Exodus 4:2: “What is that in your hand?” — the moment God turns to Moses and asks him not what he wishes he had, but what he is already holding.
Strive used that scripture to challenge us — Senior class, as he likes to call us — African entrepreneurs, creators, builders, to ask ourselves the same question. What do you actually have? What are you holding right now and not using?
For me, that answer was a phone. A six-dollar domain. AI tools. A GitHub account from 2018 that I had completely forgotten about. And a thought, at 2am on a Thursday night, that I decided to act on.
I built a website.
If you are a founder, a creator, an entrepreneur, and you are living in this era, right now, with everything that AI is placing in our hands, and you haven’t started using these tools seriously, I don’t know what else to say except: you are sitting on a gold mine, and you have not yet decided to dig.
The tools are there. The phone is probably in your hand right now. The question is only what you decide to do with it.
It’s 4.27am. I’ve been vibe coding, talking, and writing for more than five hours.
And as I wrap this up, the final whistle just blew. Ivory Coast won. Amad scored. Every African I know is happy right now, and honestly, that’s what this continent does — when it matters, we are one. Go go go our boys!
Me? I’m going to bed very happy. What else will I build? That can wait for another day and a moment of inspiration, my guy.
Afrifama still needs me. Office at 8am.
See you in the next one.