Tribe Technologies

Entrepreneur Journey

TRIBE did not begin with an idea for an AI company. It began with a problem I kept seeing everywhere I went. While studying at the Catholic University of Cameroon in Bamenda, the Anglophone crisis disrupted school for a period, and I decided to take a temporary job as an MTN sales agent. The work took me through different communities, from Bamenda and Santa to the predominantly French-speaking city of Bafoussam. That experience gave me my first real look at how many small businesses in Cameroon survive every day. I met hardworking business owners who opened their shops each morning without knowing how much they would sell. Most had no real marketing systems, customer databases, or tools for consistently finding new buyers. Their businesses depended heavily on people who already knew them. I began noticing a pattern: for many of them, the majority of sales came from repeat customers, while only a smaller percentage came from completely new buyers. On days when their regular customers did not show up and no new customer walked in, sales could simply be poor. There was very little the business owner could do about it. That stayed with me. After university, I moved deeper into freelancing, branding, design, and digital work. Over the years, I have worked with close to 200+ brands and small businesses across different industries. I expected the problems I had seen earlier to change as I worked with more businesses. Instead, I kept seeing different versions of the same thing. A business could have a great product but still struggle to consistently find customers. Someone could have hundreds of previous buyers but no system for following up with them. Sales, inventory, and debts were often tracked in notebooks, WhatsApp chats, or from memory. The businesses were working hard. What they lacked was leverage. That pushed me and a small team I put together to begin experimenting with commerce ourselves. We first worked around digital products and later explored how the same system could support physical products. One of our most important experiments was an affiliate model where ordinary people could help businesses sell products and earn commissions without owning inventory themselves. At the peak of that test, we onboarded approximately 100 affiliates. The experiment showed us that businesses could reach customers beyond their usual circles while creating earning opportunities for other people. But it also showed me that solving sales alone was only one part of a much larger problem. I later worked with an e-commerce company based in Germany that imported African products and sold them in Europe. That experience gave me a different view of commerce: how products could be organized, marketed, sold, and managed within a structured digital system. The contrast was difficult to ignore. On one side, I had seen what organized digital commerce could look like. On the other, I was still working with businesses back home managing customers, sales, inventory, payments, and debts through several disconnected tools or no tools at all. For years, I kept returning to one question: how do you give a small African business the kind of leverage that normally requires several software tools, more employees, and more money? Then artificial intelligence changed what was possible. As AI became better at understanding natural conversation and WhatsApp continued becoming a major part of everyday communication and commerce in Africa, I began to see how the different pieces could finally come together. Instead of forcing a business owner to learn complicated accounting, inventory, or CRM software, what if the technology could simply understand them? A shop owner could say, “I sold three shirts today,” and the system records the sale and updates inventory. They could ask which products are running low, who still owes them money, how much they sold this week, or ask the system to follow up with previous customers. An individual could similarly track transactions, manage spending, make payments, and access financial services through simple conversation. That thinking became TRIBE. For the past three years, I have been building the platform largely from scratch, financing most of the development from my own pocket and working with a small team to bring the different pieces together. Today, the core product is largely built and undergoing testing. We have developed our web platform, conversational AI system, and business-management infrastructure. Our next major step is completing the payment and financial API integrations required for a wider public launch. TRIBE is the accumulation of everything I have learned along the way: from working in shops as an MTN sales agent to serving hundreds of small businesses, experimenting with affiliate commerce, working in international e-commerce, and eventually seeing AI make possible things that would have been extremely difficult only a few years ago. We are not trying to build another complicated fintech app or another e-commerce website. We are building an intelligent layer between people, their money, and their businesses, designed around how Africans already communicate and work. TRIBE is starting in Cameroon because that is where I first experienced the problem. But the problem is much bigger than Cameroon, and so is the vision.