Unscripted SaaS · Interview
Tobiloba Sulaimon on Building AuTrans — Transcription Optimized for the African Voice
with Tobiloba Sulaimon — founder of AuTrans, Lagos, Nigeria
Why this matters for SaaS: The clearest founder-market fit often lives in a market the incumbents ignore. Tobiloba found his by watching mainstream transcription tools treat African-language audio as “noise” — then went narrow (one country, a handful of languages) before going wide. It’s a working example of choosing a vertical, avoiding scope creep, and shipping a product out of a problem you personally feel.
The conversation
Episode overview
Jeremy Rivera talks with Tobiloba Sulaimon, a self-taught software developer from Lagos, Nigeria, who built AuTrans — an AI transcription tool “optimized for the African voice.” Where tools like Otter and Fireflies filter out non-English speech or approximate it into the nearest English, AuTrans keeps every language as it was actually said, with support for Nigerian languages including Pidgin, Yoruba, Hausa, and Igbo. What began as a personal utility — transcribing meeting minutes and church teachings — became a public SaaS after someone watched Tobiloba use it and asked him to publish it. He’s deliberately “African first,” going deep on one market before expanding, and just as deliberately resisting the scope creep that tempts every early founder. With roughly 100 users and its first paying customers, the roadmap now points to mobile apps and API access.
What we get into
Highlights
- Why mainstream tools drop African-language audio as “noise” — and the engine AuTrans built to keep it as-spoken
- Support for Pidgin, Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo & Nigerian English (now ~10 languages, including French, Spanish and Arabic)
- The origin story: a real meeting the existing tools couldn’t capture
- Going “African first” — solving one market deeply before expanding
- The horizontal-vs-vertical SaaS trap, and resisting feature scope creep with a small team
- From self-taught (HTML/CSS/JS off YouTube) to a first client gig to a game-studio dev role — in about two years
- Selling a real cure for a real pain point; traction so far and what’s next (mobile apps, more languages, API)
In their words
Quotes from the episode
“Tangible things were said and their machine did not capture that. And I thought that since I am a software developer, maybe I could build something that would solve this problem.”
— Tobiloba Sulaimon“We are African first. We are focusing on ourselves first — solving this problem within Africa first before we move on.”
— Tobiloba Sulaimon“Everything I know today I learnt on my own. I am a self-taught software developer.”
— Tobiloba SulaimonStay in the loop
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