Enterprise Suite
Following the problems experienced at Eucheria Hub, this idea took further credence with a challenge my mom faced. She produced powdered soybean beverages which her customers loved. A solo operator. Producing and selling all by herself. No production system, no marketing plan, not to mention branding and packaging. No QA. It wasn't even formalised. Just hard street hassles.
Barely teen, I would advise that she can't continue that way. She needs distributor stores who offtake her products. But, none of us knew what to do beyond her excellent soy beverages production. Nonetheless, she did prospect some stores, and they all turned her down. With valid reasons. Her produce wasn't shelf-worthy. That miniscule shelf product finessing, the branding, the packaging, the compliances. Quality assurance. Certifications and the likes.
As if that wasn't enough, she lost a nutrition partner deal with FMC where she was known and patronised by medical staff and the customers, for reasons of not meeting relevant health and safety certifications.
I initially thought E-Suite was an ERP. ERP? For solo, micro and small businesses? Next…!
Work in progress
Enterprise Suite logo repping at an event
The "Missing Middle" Is Not Missing Ambition. It's Missing Support.
Africa has more entrepreneurs per capita than anywhere else in the world. It also has one of the lowest densities of large businesses globally. Of an estimated 244 million businesses in Africa: 94.8% are solo firms with zero hired employees. 3.1% are micro-enterprises. 1.6% are small ventures. 0.38% are medium. 0.05% are large.
Sources: Innovation Village / EIB (2026), FMO (2024), World Bank (2025). Content was rephrased for compliance with licensing restrictions.
Read more on this topic here. Now is the time for this.
Have coffee
Stay up late designing the product & system
Daybreak, eat-work at dinner table. Repeat.
With that intersection of my personal, family and SMS community-lived experiences, the wealth of knowledge gained from my MSME communities and clients, I began building something that can get ambitious solo, micro and small business out of survival mode, towards a better business, a better life, a better nation, and a better Africa. Business owners can now have better utility for online stores and CRM tools like Bumpa, and even fintech tools like Paystack and the likes — of which most currently don't have need of, or are under-utilizing. Such ripple effect!
I believe that now with the policy system around TaxID, we are attuned in such a way that more businesses will now be competing to recover the $232 million deficit.
This got validated when as one of ten from Africa I gained acceptance into the HerStartup acceleration program and got featured as part of HerStartup's cohort of female-founded businesses covered by leading media.
User journey experience designing v1
DESIGN THINKING APPROACH
I designed the onboarding for distrust of the user's own self-knowledge. Because, my experience with solo, and small businesses reveals that they can be unreliable narrators of their own business situation.
Key decisions that guided my design: Empathy architecture. 'NOT PROVIDED' labels for product quality. Signals engine for a controlled proactivity. Homework over quick analysis on demand. AI UX identity engineering (think "My advisor said this, .... "). Reduce the psychological distance between the user and their business data. Never overwhelm. Mobile-first responsiveness.
System thinking questions answered:
The facts of the problem, and the bits of knowledge I possessed are like nodes in my mind's network. Connecting these nodes to become a relatable solution was not a task for the weak. Feel free to call me a strong founder.
What should trigger the needed change in the behaviour of my user .... What outcome(s) should this change in behaviour lead .... What is the non-negotiable outcome to resolve in the life of my user .... What are the common use cases and workflows that are valuable expressions of my solution .... How do I design experiences that make it simple for customers, and agents to traverse these workflows and execute actions .... How do I drive coherence across the combo of features so that the system as a whole provides a truly greater sum of impact than the individual features that make up the part.
The Tea: How do all of these ladder up from product through customer experience to revenue and eventually enterprise value, serving the paying users (since we don't offer no freemium), business and stakeholders with good ROI.
Brand UI vocabulary: The design uses one brand colour (#901708) and three (3) of its opacity variants for different states.
We choose the bold and confident red color because we want users to experience the feeling of aliveness. We are advocating the move away from boring-ness aka minimalism to expressiveness and the lifeness that colour brings to the world.
Okay. Okay. We even work on the ground
Graphics templates design from a blank canvas
Scrambling insights on CTO recruitment
