Achieng Owino

Not my photo, but this is every Nairobi co-working space at…

Two years after leaving backend for devrel: what I miss, what I don't, and what nobody warned me about

Not a thread this time. Just a reflection, because several of you asked in DMs whether you should move from engineering into developer relations. What I miss Owning a system. For six years I could point at a payments service and say: that is mine, it moved money for a lot of people today, and it did not fall over. Devrel work is spread across talks, docs, samples and conversations. It matters, but you can rarely…

If you are building for users across Africa, which payment method do you integrate FIRST?

Your 'global remote' salary band has a Lagos discount. Let's talk about it (1/14)

1/ A European company posts a "fully remote, work from anywhere" role. A senior engineer in Lagos and one in Lisbon get the same title, the same tickets, the same on-call rota. One salary is 40% of the other. Let's talk about why, and whether it holds up. 2/ The company's argument is cost of living: "we pay for the local market". It sounds reasonable. It is also convenient, because it is always the company that…

Why your SaaS pricing does not work in Kisumu (1/15)

1/ Every month a founder emails me: "we launched in Kenya, the traffic is great, nobody pays". Then I open the pricing page. $29 a month, card only, 20% off if you pay annually. Let me explain why that page is a wall. 2/ Start with the card. Most of your customers in Kisumu do not have a credit card. Many have a debit card that does not work online, or works until the bank's fraud system sees a foreign merchant and…

The African startup funding winter, explained without the doom (1/16)

1/ Every week someone asks me if African tech is dead. It is not dead. It is cold. Here is why it got cold, who froze, and what the survivors are doing differently. 2/ 2021 and 2022 were the hot years. Money was cheap everywhere, interest rates were near zero, and every fund wanted an "Africa thesis". Fintech took the biggest share by far. 3/ Then rates went up worldwide. When a fund can earn a safe 5% on government…

If your job depends on the internet (it does), spend ten minutes on this map. Zoom into the west coast of Africa and count the lines. Then zoom into the North Atlantic. Then reread my cable thread.

Gentle reminder: Africa is 54 countries, a couple of thousand languages and at least four very different ways of paying for things. Your 'Africa launch' is Lagos, Nairobi and Cape Town. Which is fine! Just say that.

Building APIs for users on 2G, prepaid data and phones from 2017: 20 things I learned the expensive way (1/20)

1/ Your users pay for every megabyte. Prepaid, in a currency that may have lost value this year. Every KB your API sends is money out of their pocket. Start there and most of this thread follows. 2/ Test like your users live. Chrome's "Slow 3G" preset is a holiday. On a Linux box between your test phone and the internet: sudo tc qdisc add dev eth0 root netem delay 400ms 100ms loss 2% rate 400kbit # remove it again…

In early 2024, African internet broke three times in three months. A thread on undersea cables, for people who think the cloud is in the sky (1/18)

1/ If you work remotely from Africa, your job is attached to a handful of cables lying on the sea floor. In 2024 we all learned exactly how few. 2/ February 2024: several cables in the Red Sea were damaged, including Seacom, AAE-1 and EIG. The damage was widely reported to have come from the dragging anchor of a cargo ship that had been attacked and abandoned. East African traffic to Europe and Asia had to be…

Nobody outside Africa understands why mobile money won. Let me explain. (a thread, 1/22)

1/ Every few months someone in a San Francisco podcast "discovers" that Kenyans pay for tomatoes with their phones and calls it leapfrogging. It was not magic and it was not an accident. It was a series of boring, specific decisions. Here they are. 2/ M-Pesa launched in Kenya in March 2007, run by Safaricom (Vodafone was a big shareholder). The original pilot was not even about payments. It was a way to repay…