A Decade Building for Others. Then I Started Building for Home.

Getting laid off from Microsoft wasn’t the plan. But it gave me the one thing a decade of full-time employment rarely does: space to actually think.

I’d spent roughly ten years as a software engineer building for international clients and companies. The work was good — technically demanding, high-standard teams, the kind of environment where you’re constantly learning how serious engineering is done. Proper architecture reviews. Documentation that actually gets written. Systems designed to be maintained by someone who wasn’t in the original meeting. I absorbed a lot of that without fully naming it at the time.

When the layoff came, I sat down and took stock of what I had. A decade of experience building systems for companies mostly outside Africa. And right next to me — in Nairobi, across Kenya, across the region — a whole economy of businesses that couldn’t access any of it.

That’s the part that got under my skin.

SMEs in Africa are not small problems. They’re often the spine of how things actually get done — real estate agencies managing hundreds of units on WhatsApp, landlords reconciling M-Pesa payments in Excel, logistics companies stitching together operations with spreadsheets and prayers. These aren’t unsophisticated businesses. They’re growing businesses being underserved by their tools.

The options available to them are roughly: generic SaaS built for a different market, expensive enterprise vendors who want a five-year contract, or a freelancer who’ll disappear after deployment. None of those options bring senior engineering thinking to the actual problem. None of them produce systems that the business can actually own and maintain three years from now.

I’d spent a decade learning how to build things that last. And that knowledge wasn’t flowing anywhere near the businesses that needed it most.

That’s what Audriam is about.

The name is mine to explain later. But the point of the company is simple: transfer what I learned building at a global level to SMEs in Kenya and Africa. Not as a consultant who bills hours and moves on. As someone who treats every engagement like I’ll be the one paged at 11pm when something breaks — so I have every incentive to build it simply, document it properly, and hand it over in a state that the client’s team can actually work with.

We’re also building products directly. The first one is a property management SaaS for the Kenyan market. Not a port of a US product with M-Pesa bolted on, but something designed from scratch around how property management actually works here. We’re building it in partnership with property agents who are testing it on actual gated communities and properties — which means the feedback loop is real, not hypothetical. We’re building it in public too, writing about the decisions we make, the things that don’t work, and the trade-offs we have to live with.

The second product came from a problem we kept running into while building the PMS — landlords spending hours every month reconciling M-Pesa rent payments against their records. But the more we looked, the more we realised this isn’t just a property management problem. It’s an SME problem. Any business collecting payments through M-Pesa or bank transfer faces the same Monday morning ritual: download statements, open Excel, start matching. We’re building a tool to clear that entirely.

We’re also going deep on AI — not as a buzzword, but as a practical layer for automating the kinds of workflows that currently eat time in small teams. Document processing. Transaction categorisation. Workflow routing. The boring stuff that compounds.

This blog is where we’ll document all of it. The decisions. The mistakes. The things I would have wanted to read before we made them.

If you’re building or running a business in East Africa and your systems are holding you back, this is probably worth following. And if you’re an engineer thinking about what serious craft looks like applied locally — same.

Let’s get into it.