Sheriff Adedokun is an entrepreneur and software builder with over a decade of experience building and scaling technology businesses across Africa and international markets. He started in 2013 with Hostmeng, a software development and web services company that grew to six-figure annual revenue in USD.
He has since co-founded several ventures, including Techly Innovation, a UAE-based digital agency, and Plugli, the company behind Linksy, an AI-powered WordPress plugin for marketers.
He is the Founder and CEO of Clea, a cross-border payments platform helping African businesses trade globally, and Co-founder of Pushbio, a social commerce platform that helps creators build and monetise audiences beyond social media. He has built products used globally and led distributed teams across multiple countries.
- Explain your job to a five-year-old.
I help people send money safely to other countries. Sometimes, people in Africa want to buy cars, machines, or other goods from abroad, but paying the seller can be hard, slow, and stressful.
Clea helps make that payment easier. It lets users put in their money, convert it to the right foreign currency, and send it safely to the person they are buying from.
My job is to make sure the payment goes through correctly, that customers know what is happening, and that the money reaches the right place.
- Most founders spend years focused on one company. You’ve built several. What keeps pulling you back into starting things?
I would say curiosity, frustration, and belief.
Curiosity, because I am always asking why things work the way they do. Why is this process so slow? Why is this market underserved? Why are people still doing this manually? Why has nobody made this easier? Once I start asking those questions, I naturally begin to imagine a better version of that experience.
Frustration is another big driver. Many of the companies I have built started because I personally experienced a problem or saw people around me struggling with it. I started as a digital marketer and software developer, so I have always been close to both the technical and customer acquisition sides of business. That combination makes it hard for me to ignore problems. Once I see a solution that can be built, I feel responsible for testing it.
Then there is belief. I believe technology can unlock opportunities for people who are often overlooked. I have built for creators, small businesses, agencies, marketers, car importers, and African businesses trying to transact globally. These are not abstract markets to me. These are real people trying to grow, earn, trade, and survive.
I started Hostmeng while I was still in school because I saw myself and my friends needing affordable web hosting. Pushbio came from seeing creators needing more than a link-in-bio page and a better way to own their audience outside social media platforms. Clea came from seeing African importers struggle with global supplier payments.
I do not start companies because I just like starting things. I start because I keep seeing problems that feel too important to ignore.
- How do you decide whether an idea deserves its own company or should simply become a feature inside an existing business?
For me, the first question is whether the problem has its own customer, urgency, and market.
A feature improves an existing product. It makes customers more successful or more likely to stay. A company is different. It solves a painful problem that people actively seek a solution for, are willing to pay for, and will change behaviour around.
I ask: Who is the customer? How often do they feel the pain? Are they already paying for a poor workaround? Can this become a standalone workflow with its own brand, pricing, and distribution?
In Clea, adding a new payout currency or supplier category is a feature because it strengthens the core mission of helping African importers pay global suppliers faster and more reliably.
But if we find a new customer segment with a different pain, buying process, and business model, that may need to become its own product or company.
Too many big ideas inside one company can weaken the core product. It can confuse the team, the customer, and the market. A feature should support the main promise of the business. If it pulls the company in a different direction, it may need to stand alone.
Not every exciting idea deserves a company. Some ideas are good but not urgent. Some are useful but too small. A founder has to separate excitement from real opportunity.
- Was there ever a venture that didn’t work the way you expected? What did it teach you?
Yes, definitely. I have had ventures and product ideas that did not work the way I expected.
One example is a social media marketing tool I built. It had real users and was making money, but it depended heavily on third-party social media platforms. When those platforms changed their policies and restricted access, it affected the core of the business, and we eventually had to shut it down.
That taught me a very important lesson: when your product depends too heavily on another platform, you are building on rented land. You can have users and revenue, but if a major platform changes its rules, your business becomes vulnerable overnight.
Another example is an AI-powered link-building WordPress plugin I built with two co-founders. We had a strong start and made about $150,000 in the first three months through a lifetime deal, which showed there was demand.
But after that, scaling became harder than expected. The issue was not the product itself, but that we focused heavily on building and improving it, without building a repeatable sales and distribution engine after the launch campaign.
That taught me that a successful launch is not the same as a scalable company. A launch can give you momentum and validation, but after that you still need consistent acquisition channels, strong sales, partnerships, content, retention, and a clear path from one-time buyers to long-term customers.
Across both experiences, I learned that business models matter as much as product ideas. You can build something people like, but if the distribution is weak or the revenue model is not strong enough, the business will struggle.
I also learned the importance of positioning. Sometimes the problem is not the product, but that the market does not understand why it should choose you.
The biggest lesson is that failure is not always dramatic. Sometimes it is just a business becoming smaller than your ambition. It may make money but not scale, get users but not retain them, or attract attention but not enough recurring revenue.
- You’ve built products used in Africa and international markets. What differences have you noticed between building for local users and building for a global audience?
The biggest difference is context.
When you build for local users, especially in Africa, you cannot just copy what works in the US or Europe. You have to understand how people live, pay, trust, communicate, and make decisions.
In many African markets, trust is key. People want to know who is behind the product, who else is using it, and that they can reach a real human when something goes wrong. WhatsApp support, referrals, and personal relationships often matter as much as the product itself.
Local users also care about practical realities like payment methods, exchange rates, delays, regulations, and affordability. If you ignore these, you can build a good product that people cannot actually use.
With global users, the expectation shifts. They compare you with the best products in the world. They expect strong UX, self-serve onboarding, fast support, clear documentation, and reliable performance.
Building for Africa teaches you to respect local behaviour. Building for global markets teaches you to respect global standards. The best products combine both, locally relevant but globally excellent.
That is the mindset I try to bring into Clea. We are solving a very African problem around cross-border payments, FX access, and supplier settlement, but the product itself must feel reliable, compliant, and world-class.
- What’s one product-building lesson you learned the hard way?
One lesson I learned the hard way is that building the product is not the same as building the business.
As a technical founder, it is easy to think that once the product works, everything else will follow. You spend time building features, fixing bugs, and improving the dashboard. But customers do not buy features. They buy outcomes.
They want to know: will this save me money, reduce my risk, help me grow, or make my work easier?
I have built products with many features, but weak positioning. I have also seen simpler products with a clearer message perform better.
So now I think about the customer outcome first. What is the main promise? What is the shortest path to value? What must the user experience quickly to trust the product?
- What’s one skill every aspiring founder should develop before starting a company?
Every aspiring founder should develop the skill of selling. And by selling, I do not only mean closing deals, but the ability to clearly communicate value.
A founder is always selling. You sell the vision to co-founders, the opportunity to employees, the product to customers, the company to investors, and belief to yourself when things are hard.
If you cannot explain why something matters, it becomes difficult to move people. Selling also forces clarity. If people do not respond, it may mean the problem is not painful enough, or the solution is not positioned correctly.
My background in digital marketing helped me understand attention, messaging, and customer psychology. Software helped me build, but marketing helped me make people care.
The advice here is: learn how to talk to customers, explain your value, and ask people to pay. If you can do that, you will understand business faster than someone who only builds.
At the end of the day, entrepreneurship is about turning problems into products, and products into businesses that create real value.
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I am the CEO of 9JAGISTLAND.My name is Adedeji Timothy and my co-owner is Oyekola Damilare.This blog is born out of our passion to educating to people in all aspect of internet life.We are enthusiastic about writing posts and articles online.
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