I spent the first year of BuynSell in markets, not accelerators. Talking to vendors in Kampala. Building a waitlist the slow way. Shipping an MVP that actually matched how people trade here.

Uganda is where I start. Africa is what I am building for. That work got us 2,000+ vendors without spending a dollar on ads. It also left a gap I couldn't close from product work alone: how to turn organic demand into a growth system I could run on purpose. In July I joined LvlUp Labs. I also went through LvlUp Marketing Labs. This is what that actually looked like as a founder building from Africa.

Two programs, two jobs

LvlUp Labs is the room. Weekly office hours. A founder community that is not all in the same city, the same sector, or the same stage. Direct access to the LvlUp Ventures team the way portfolio companies get it: not a once-a-month guest lecture, but people you can actually ask a question.

LvlUp Marketing Labs (their Marketing Edge program) is the work inside that room. Bi-weekly 1:1s with their in-house marketing team. Live masterclasses. A self-paced growth curriculum that is supposed to mold to your company instead of forcing every founder through the same funnel template. The pitch is execution, not theory. That distinction mattered to me. I did not need another slide deck on CAC.

Why I applied

I'm a technical founder. I can ship. I can sit in a market stall in Kampala and learn why a vendor will not list on a platform that forces shipping. What I was weaker at was treating acquisition as an operating system.

Word of mouth is a real channel in African commerce. It is also a trap if you never instrument it. You feel busy. Vendors keep arriving. You still cannot answer basic questions: which story converts, which channel is repeatable, what happens after the first listing. I applied because I wanted operators around me who would make that uncomfortable, and investors who would take a marketplace built from Africa seriously without asking me to pretend we were building in San Francisco.

What transferred, and what didn't

Most digital growth playbooks assume email lists, credit cards, cheap paid social, and buyers who will purchase from a stranger on a screen. That is not how trade works across African markets. If I had copied the eCommerce and CPG playbook wholesale, I would have built a funnel nobody here would enter.

The useful part was one level up from the channels:

  • Positioning before ads: If you cannot say who it is for, what pain it removes, and why it is different in one sentence, paid growth will just scale confusion.
  • Cadence: Bi-weekly working sessions beat "I'll think about marketing when I have time." Growth is a calendar, not a mood.
  • Measurement: Organic waitlists feel like traction until you ask which message, which city, which vendor type actually moved. Then you find out what you do not know.
  • Systems over tactics: A WhatsApp group, an SMS reminder, and a market visit can be a funnel. They just do not look like one in a Western dashboard.

I started translating, not copying. Mobile money instead of cards. Pickup and in-person trust instead of forced checkout. WhatsApp and SMS instead of assuming email is the default. The Labs work made that translation explicit. Before, I was doing it by instinct. Instinct does not scale. And the translation is not a Uganda-only trick. The same constraints show up in markets across the continent: patchy data, cash and mobile money, trust built in person, shipping that often does not make sense.

What changed at BuynSell

I did not throw out the thing that was working. Vendors still tell other vendors. That is still our strongest signal that the product is real. What changed is how I treat everything around it.

The story got tighter. Not "African Amazon." The actual story: a marketplace built for how Africans already trade. Optional shipping. Local pickup. Mobile money. Offline-first. We are proving it in Uganda first because that is where I can sit with vendors every week. The point of starting here is to build something that can travel. Labs forced me to say that the same way to investors, vendors, and myself.

I also stopped treating marketing as something you do after the product is finished. For a marketplace, the product is distribution. If vendors cannot find buyers, and buyers cannot find vendors, the software is a brochure. Marketing Labs made that obvious in a way that sitting in my own head did not.

What I would tell another founder

  • Do not join a program to avoid users. The markets in Kampala still teach me more than any masterclass. The program is useful because it sits on top of that, not instead of it.
  • Take the operating habits, leave the channel dogma. If a tactic assumes infrastructure you do not have, it is not a tactic. It is a constraint you already knew about.
  • Show up. Office hours, 1:1s, and a founder community only compound if you actually use them. Being selected is not the work.
  • Build from Africa, not a generic "emerging market." Uganda is the ground. The continent is the market. The constraints are specific: mobile money, pickup, trust built in person, patchy data. The interesting part is whether you build for those constraints or against them. The founders who got this immediately were the ones worth talking to.

Where this leaves us

BuynSell is still the same company. We are still onboarding vendors from the waitlist. We are still raising $200K pre-seed to scale infrastructure and acquisition, starting in Uganda and built for African commerce. What is different is that I now have a clearer way to turn "people keep showing up" into a system I can run, measure, and explain.

LvlUp Labs gave me the room. LvlUp Marketing Labs gave me a way to work inside it. Neither replaced talking to vendors. Both made the next stage of this company more honest.

If you are a founder considering the same path, apply if you will do the work. If you are an investor interested in African commerce, let's talk.