Why we built SellSquare instead of selling consulting
The story behind our flagship product — and the lessons that shaped how we approach every client project.
In 2023 we had a choice. Continue stacking client projects, or carve out 50% of our team's time for a product no one was paying us to build.
We picked the harder thing. Here's what we learned.
The pain we kept seeing
Every African SMB we talked to was running their business across at least four tools:
- A POS system that didn't sync with their inventory
- A separate inventory spreadsheet that drifted from reality within a week
- WhatsApp for customer orders (with no record of who bought what)
- A bank app for tracking money
None of these tools talked to each other. None of them spoke the way African businesses actually run. And every "modern" alternative was built for Western SaaS pricing.
What we built
SellSquare consolidates all of that into one multi-tenant platform:
- Point of sale + inventory in the same data model, so stock updates the moment a sale closes
- Customer CRM automatically populated from every transaction
- Public marketplace storefront so customers can buy without creating accounts
- AI storefront assistant powered by Claude — handles WhatsApp and web chat orders end-to-end
- Realtime sync across devices via WebSockets and MongoDB change streams
The hard parts
Multi-tenancy from day one. Every query is scoped by business. Every event-bus message is signed and tenant-tagged. This is the kind of architectural decision that's painful to add later, so we paid the cost upfront.
Offline-first mobile. The Chatalog buyer app and the SellSquare cashier app both work in low-connectivity environments. Sync queues, conflict resolution, optimistic UI — none of it glamorous, all of it required.
An AI assistant that doesn't make things up. Our Claude integration is tool-use only — the model has zero authority to invent inventory or prices. Every order it processes hits the same backend APIs a human would.
What it taught us about client work
Building our own product changed how we run every other engagement:
- We're harder to fool by demos. When you've shipped your own infrastructure, you can smell vaporware from across the room.
- We can quote timelines with confidence. We know what's hard because we lived it.
- We design for production from day one. Multi-tenancy, observability, performance — these aren't bolt-ons.
If you're considering building software — your own product or a tool for your business — and you want a partner who's done it, we'd love to talk.