The Customers

Software claims are cheap. Renewal is the only review that costs the reviewer money.

Who they were

Hundreds of small organizations: medical offices and clinics, retail pharmacies, laboratories, and insurers — mostly in Zimbabwe, with live deployments in Botswana. Their staff were receptionists, dispensers, technicians, claims assessors: capable people with zero patience for software that wasted their day. Their budgets were tight and their tolerance for failure was zero, because the software sat in the money path — billing, dispensing, claims.

What kept them

Three things, in order: the software worked; when it didn't, a competent human answered and stayed on the problem until it was fixed; and the relationship compounded — I knew their workflows, their data, their quirks. That's why typical relationships ran past ten years. It's also why I say support is a craft, not a cost center: it was the moat.

The network effect

The platform's exchange and payment services connected to a verified network of over 5,000 healthcare service points at peak scope — which meant an office joining the platform joined an ecosystem, not just an app. Building and maintaining that network taught me onboarding, verification, and partner coordination at a scale one person rarely gets to own.

What this experience is "worth" in the US

I'll say it plainly: some screeners discount experience from African markets. I'd offer the opposite reading — every one of these customers was won and kept without a brand name behind me, in an economy that punished unreliable software immediately, with no one to escalate to. If you want someone who takes complete ownership of customer outcomes, that environment is where such people are formed.