From Food Vendor Naija to Vendoh: A Seven-Year Journey to Reimagine Africa's Service Economy
It started as an academic project on building digital innovation around stressful painpoints in my everyday life experience
In 2019, I developed a mock-up vendor service marketplace digital innovation project and created a one-minute showcase video to pitch the idea. The premise was straightforward: Nigerians are busy, food is a daily necessity, and the gap between hungry customers and excellent local vendors was being closed almost entirely through informal word of mouth. That prototype was called Food Vendor Naija, and it was the earliest version of an idea that would go on to shape the next seven years of my work.
At the time, I was working deep in the geospatial field, applying GIS, remote sensing, and spatial analytics to development problems. But the same question kept surfacing in my day-to-day life: Nigeria's informal food economy is massive and vibrant, yet almost entirely invisible to technology. The mama-put vendor two streets away might make the best jollof in the neighbourhood, but unless someone told you about her, you would never know she existed.
That disconnect between supply and demand, between genuinely excellent services and the people who needed them, became the foundation of everything that followed.
The original vision: a three-sided marketplace
Food Vendor Naija was never designed as a simple food delivery app. From the beginning, I modelled it as a three-sided marketplace: customers looking for food, food vendors offering their services, and delivery agents bridging the gap between them. The onboarding flow was deliberately simple. Users would download the app, register, and select the role that applied to them.
Behind that simplicity sat a more ambitious architecture. The original concept, published on my Geospatial Innovation blog, included hygiene verification through partnerships with community health offices, real-time location tracking powered by geospatial technology, a vendor certification system with tiered memberships, and a city-by-city expansion plan targeting thirty Nigerian cities and more than a thousand vendors by 2020.
Some of those targets were, in hindsight, wildly optimistic. But the core insight turned out to be correct. Nigeria's informal service economy needed a digital layer built around three principles: trust, location, and accessibility.
What the market taught me
Between 2019 and the years that followed, I kept listening. And the market kept teaching me things that reshaped the original Food Vendor Naija concept in fundamental ways.
The first lesson was that the problem extended far beyond food. The same discovery gap that affected food vendors also affected plumbers, makeup artists, event planners, tailors, and electricians. Every service provider operating in Nigeria's informal economy faced the same invisibility problem. People were not only struggling to find food. They were struggling to find any reliable service nearby.
The second lesson was about trust. WhatsApp groups and Instagram DMs had become the default channels for finding services in Nigeria, but neither offered any meaningful accountability. A vendor could ghost a client, deliver substandard work, or overcharge, with no mechanism to prevent or penalise that behaviour. The trust infrastructure I had sketched for food vendors, including ratings, verification, and community oversight, was needed across the entire service economy.
The third lesson was about how Nigerians actually communicate. We are a voice-first culture. Roughly seventy-eight percent of Nigerians send voice notes on WhatsApp every day. Typing out searches for services felt unnatural in a country where most people were already speaking their needs into their phones. The interface, therefore, needed to match the culture, not the other way around.
From Food Vendor Naija to Vendoh
These three lessons, broader scope, deeper trust, and voice-first interaction, transformed Food Vendor Naija into Vendoh.
The name itself reflects the evolution. "Vendoh" sounds like "vendor" spoken with a Nigerian inflection: familiar, warm, and rooted in the culture it is built to serve. But it now represents something far more expansive than its food-only origins.
Where Food Vendor Naija had food vendors, Vendoh hosts more than 321 service categories, spanning everything from catering to carpentry, from makeup artistry to mechanical repairs. Where the original concept relied on standard app interfaces, Vendoh is powered by AI voice search. Users speak what they need, and the platform interprets the request and matches them to verified vendors nearby. Where Food Vendor Naija imagined city-by-city expansion, Vendoh uses a five-kilometre proximity engine that turns every neighbourhood into its own marketplace from day one.
Some things, however, have not changed at all. The three-sided marketplace structure is still there. The focus on vendor verification and trust is still there. And the founding belief that technology should serve the informal economy, rather than replace it, is still there.
Why seven years matters
The startup world rewards speed. There is enormous pressure to move fast, to launch yesterday, and to grow at any cost. I would not pretend the journey from 2019 to 2026 was a perfectly planned arc. There were years of doubt, periods where the idea sat dormant, and seasons where building alone felt impossible.
But there is also something valuable about living with a problem for seven years. You develop what I have come to call patient conviction: a deep familiarity with a problem that survives hype cycles, technology trends, and the noise of the startup ecosystem. When I first built the Food Vendor Naija concept in 2019, AI voice technology was not yet mature enough to power a marketplace. By 2026, it is. The vision did not change. The technology caught up.
That is the part of the founder's journey that is rarely discussed. It is not always about pivoting faster or iterating quicker. Sometimes it is about holding onto a core insight long enough for the world to be ready for it.
What comes next
Vendoh is preparing to launch in 2026, and it carries the DNA of every lesson learned since that first sixty-second video in 2019. When a user in Lekki speaks into their phone and says "I need a plumber near me," the system that responds is built on seven years of understanding how Nigerian commerce actually works: the trust gaps, the communication preferences, and the economic rhythms that define daily life.
Food Vendor Naija was the seed. Vendoh is what grows from it.
And we are only getting started.
Alex Nwoko is the founder of Vendoh, a voice-powered service marketplace for Africa's informal economy. He writes about the intersection of geospatial technology, digital innovation, and emerging-market commerce.