Why I Started a Podcast About African Tech
The JuneGeeks Show started with a simple frustration. African tech stories were too often told from the outside, usually as funding headlines or trend pieces, and rarely by the people actually doing the building.
The founders, designers, product managers and developers I work with every day have hard-won lessons about building for markets that do not play by Silicon Valley rules. Most of those lessons never get written down. They live in WhatsApp groups, late-night calls and conversations after meetups. I wanted a place to capture them.
The gap I kept noticing
Working across product, design and development, I kept running into the same pattern. Most of the advice we consume as builders was written for a different context: stable power, cheap data, card-first payments, users on the latest phones, and abundant venture capital.
That advice is not useless, but it is incomplete. Here, the questions are different:
- How do you design onboarding for users who are cautious about sharing financial details online, and for good reason?
- How do you price a product when your customers’ purchasing power shifts with the exchange rate?
- How do you build trust when people have been burned by scams before?
- How do you ship quickly with small teams, tight budgets and infrastructure you cannot take for granted?
The people answering these questions in practice are the ones I wanted on the show.
What the show is about
The JuneGeeks Show is conversations on product, design and building tech in Africa, for founders, designers and developers navigating markets that reward people who can design, build and think commercially at once.
Each episode focuses on the practical side of building:
- Product decisions and the reasoning behind them, including the ones that did not work.
- Design for real users: real devices, real networks and real behaviour.
- Engineering trade-offs when time, money and people are limited.
- The business side: pricing, sales, clients, hiring and staying sustainable.
The aim is for every listener to leave with at least one idea they can use the same week.
Why a podcast, and why now
Writing is great for frameworks and how-to guides, and I will keep doing that on this blog. But conversation does something writing cannot. It captures the nuance, the doubts and the “here’s what we actually did” moments that rarely survive the editing of a polished article.
The timing also felt right. There are more people building serious products across the continent than ever, and more people trying to break into product, design and development. Both groups benefit from hearing honest stories from people a few steps ahead of them.
Why JuneGeeks
JuneGeeks is the name I use for my work at the intersection of product, design, technology and media. The podcast sits naturally alongside the portfolio, the writing and the digital products on this site. It is all the same mission from different angles: helping people build better products for African markets.
What I want it to become
Long term, I want The JuneGeeks Show to be a library of practical knowledge from people building in Africa, something a new product manager in Lagos, a designer in Nairobi or a developer in Abuja can return to when they face a problem someone else has already solved.
I also want it to be a platform for builders who do great work but rarely get a microphone. Not just the founders who raised the biggest rounds, but the designers, engineers, operators and small business owners whose work quietly keeps things running.
Be part of it
If you are building something in African tech and have a story worth sharing, or a topic you want the show to cover, I would love to hear from you. Suggest a topic or pitch yourself as a guest, and listen to the latest episodes.