Build for the People You Actually Know

Some of the best product thinking I have seen did not come from a conference or a book. It came from a friend who looked closely at his own community and asked a simple question: who is this actually built for?

I want to tell you about him, and about what he built, because the way he thinks is the way I want ATAS to think.

Who Samuel is

HAGENIMANA Samuel is one of my closest friends, and I should say that plainly, because it colors how I write about him. We struggled through high school together. In our fourth level, in the first term, we attended our first math competition together, AIMS Rwanda. In the second term, we went to the AI hackathon in Kigali. Nearly everything I achieved in those years, I achieved beside him.

What I noticed most about Samuel is that he solves problems. Not in a showy way, but patiently, from the details. After we graduated, he founded Oliviuus LTD, and that instinct is what the company is built on.

The problem

Oliviuus built iSanzure, a property management platform at isanzure.com. On paper, it sounds like many things you have seen before: tenants can find houses, and landlords can manage their properties.

The difference is in who it is for.

When Samuel and I tried the housing platforms we could find, something felt off. They felt foreign to Rwandans. Many of the listings were priced in the range of millions of Rwandan francs, an amount that, for most people, feels like a dream and not a plan. Imagine a person in a local community, looking for a place to rent, opening a platform that shows apartments most people they know could never afford. The platform isn't wrong, exactly. It just wasn't made for them.

The reason is not mysterious. The people who build these platforms are aiming at a particular market, usually the one with the most money in it. Almost everyone who enters this field aims at that same market. Very few people build for the community right next to them.

What he did about it

Samuel saw the gap and decided to fill it from where he lived. He began in his local community in Musanze district, and built iSanzure so that people with any budget can find a place. On the platform, you can find listings starting from around 25,000 RWF, a price that is reasonable for a large number of people.

That single design decision, deciding whose budget the platform has to work for, changes everything about the product. It changes which properties get listed, what the search looks like, and who feels welcome using it.

The lesson I keep coming back to

There is a trap in technology that I have fallen into myself: building for everyone. It feels ambitious and sounds impressive. In practice, it tends to mean building for no one in particular, and ending up with something nobody really uses.

I learned this the hard way with the first version of AcademiaPlus. It was designed to work anywhere, and it fit no one well until I rebuilt it around Rwandan schools, curriculum and exams. Samuel arrived at the same conclusion from a completely different direction, by starting with his own community and letting the product grow from there.

The thinking behind iSanzure is the same thinking behind ATAS: a real place, with real people, with real constraints, is a better starting point than an imagined global user.

What I take from it

Start with a specific person. Not a market segment. A person you could name, in a place you could point to on a map.

Let the price, the language and the context come from them. If a platform only makes sense for people who already have money, it hasn't solved the problem. It has moved it.

Build where you have the advantage. Samuel knows his community. That knowledge is not something a larger, better-funded competitor can simply buy.

Then grow. A product that works well for one community has earned the right to expand. A product that works vaguely for everyone has earned nothing.

A note on honesty

Samuel is my friend, and I am proud of what he is building. I am not claiming to be neutral, and I am not claiming iSanzure has solved housing in Rwanda. I am saying he asked a good question, chose a specific answer and started building. That is worth writing about.

If you are building something right now, ask yourself his question. Who is this actually for? If your answer is "everyone," keep going until you can name a person.