We Are Building. Why Can't Anyone Find It?
Cameroonians are building plenty of products. Builderswave proved it. But a wall of cards is not discovery — and the average consumer is being left behind while everyone builds for big business.
The other day I came across a platform called Builderswave and could not put my phone down. App after app. Fintech, agritech, edtech, logistics, healthtech; twenty-two categories of products, plenty of them built by Cameroonians, people with faces and names sitting right there on the card. I knew our people were building. I did not know we were building like this. The pride was real.
But after the pride settled, I saw clearly what I was actually looking at. This is builders discovering builders. A founder seeing the work of other founders. And that is genuinely valuable ; we need to know each other, to feel the size of what is being made, to stop thinking we are each alone in a corner. Builderswave does that well, and I am glad it exists. But it is the ecosystem talking to itself. It is the inside of the house. It is not the road to the people outside.
Because there are two completely different problems hiding under one word. The first is discoverability for builders and founders; people in the scene finding products, partners, inspiration. That one is being solved, and platforms like Builderswave are solving it. The second is much harder and almost untouched: a pipeline to consumers. The ordinary Cameroonian who will never open Builderswave, never read a launch competition, never care which tech stack you used. How does a product actually reach that person? That is the question nobody has answered.
The Western world has its answers. Over there, the consumer pipeline often runs through newsletters; a product earns a place in people's inboxes and drips its way into their attention, week after week, until trust is built and the sale is natural. Email is a real channel there. It is a habit, almost a culture.
That playbook does not transfer here. And I am not guessing; I have tried it. I built the newsletter. I did the work. It did not land, because the Cameroonian consumer does not live in an inbox. Email is not where attention sits. People are on WhatsApp, in the comments, in the market, on the radio that plays in the taxi. You can copy the Western tactic perfectly and still reach no one, because the channel underneath it was never ours to begin with. So we are left holding a real problem with no imported solution: where exactly is the pipeline to the Cameroonian consumer?
Look at the ground for a moment, because the gap is not demand. By the end of 2025, internet penetration in Cameroon was 41.9 percent; about 12.6 million people online, with social media reach around 19.6 percent. Meanwhile the eCommerce market is projected to pass $505 million by 2025 and keep climbing. The money is moving. The consumers are there. What is missing is the road between the product and the person; and the trust that road is supposed to carry.
And I think this is the quiet reason for something I keep noticing: nearly everyone who is building is drifting toward big businesses. Everyone is doing procurement. Everyone is doing invoicing software. Tools that only a large company will ever open. Part of the logic is money, yes; big businesses pay, and they pay on time. But part of it is escape. Selling to one big buyer means you only have to reach one person, sign one contract. Reaching the consumer means solving distribution, and distribution here is unsolved. So builders quietly avoid the hard problem and call it strategy. Meanwhile the average Cameroonian, the person with the most unmet needs, is left with almost nothing built for them; and no channel through which the few good things could even find them.
I am not writing this from the outside. I build. I have felt this exact pain; putting real work into a product, then watching it sit in silence, not because it was bad, but because I had no way to put it in front of the people it was made for. I tried the obvious imported answers. They did not work.
What I have, after putting down the phone, is a large and stubborn question mark. We are clearly building, and builders can now find each other. But the road to the consumer is still missing. Maybe it runs through WhatsApp. Maybe through radio. Maybe through something nobody has shaped yet. The builder who finally finds that pipeline may matter just as much as the one who builds the best product; because here, the product was never really the hard part. Sales.
What does sales for Digital Products look like in Cameroon? if you have answers let me know.
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