WAWU Creators
Rebuilding a Nigerian creator marketplace from the ground up
Role
CTO, WAWUAfrica — product architect & engineering lead
WAWUAfrica's original app had outgrown its own architecture — a post-feed product bolted onto a Laravel monolith, hard to extend and harder to trust in production. As CTO of WAWUAfrica Technology, I made the call to rebuild rather than patch: a new Next.js consumer app, a new NestJS API, and a shared identity service so every future WAWU product — Creators, Basket, Beauty — authenticates against the same source of truth.
Approach
Shared identity first
Before touching the consumer app, I built WAWU-ID — a standalone NestJS/Prisma auth service. Every downstream product, launched or not, plugs into it, which meant the rebuild had to get identity right once instead of reinventing it per app.
Rebuild, don't refactor
The old post-feed logic didn't map cleanly onto what a creator marketplace needed. Rather than incrementally refactor a Laravel monolith under load, I stood up WAWU-Backend as a parallel NestJS/Prisma service and migrated feature-by-feature, keeping the old system live until each surface was proven out.
Design-matched tooling
WAWU-Dashboard, the internal admin surface, was deliberately built to match the visual language of the other admin dashboards across my product line (OjaEwa, OweMe, Kudimata Securities) — same component patterns, same operational muscle memory for whoever's on call.
Outcome
The rebuild is live and actively shipping — this is the most 'launched and moving' of the new WAWU generation, with the old post-feed app being phased out as Creators takes over.
Next project