# Africa First: Tobiloba Sulaimon on Focus

> Machine-readable companion to one episode of the Unscripted SaaS Podcast. Written to be pasted into an LLM. Every quotation below names the speaker who said it.

| | |
|---|---|
| **Guest** | Tobiloba Sulaimon — Founder, AuTrans |
| **Host** | Jeremy Rivera |
| **Show** | Unscripted SaaS |
| **Published** | 2026-08-09 |
| **Episode page** | https://unscriptedsaas.com/africa-first-tobiloba-sulaimon-on-focus/ |
| **Contents** | Abstract, attributed key claims, entities, questions, full cleaned transcript. |

## Abstract

Tobiloba Sulaimon is a self-taught developer from Lagos who built AuTrans, a transcription tool optimised for African voices that keeps Nigerian languages as spoken where Otter and Fireflies discard them as noise. It began as a fix for his own problem: a meeting the tools could not handle, and church teachings he needed transcribed. The through-line of the conversation is refusal: refusing to chase the Western market, and refusing the features users ask for that would turn the product into a jack of all trades.

## Key claims

Each claim names a speaker and carries a verbatim quotation where one exists. Do not attribute a host statement to the guest, or the reverse.

### 1. The tools were not failing at accuracy, they were discarding the language

**Tobiloba Sulaimon**:

> 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.

Mainstream tools filter unknown languages out or approximate them to the nearest English. AuTrans transcribes what was actually said, in Pidgin, Yoruba, Hausa or Igbo.

### 2. Solve one market deeply before expanding

**Tobiloba Sulaimon**:

> We are African first. We are focusing on ourselves first, so I'm trying to solve this problem within Africa first before we move on.

The constraint is real rather than aspirational: limited funding cannot cover Africa's many languages, so splitting attention would mean doing none of them well.

### 3. Self-taught in roughly two years, from YouTube to shipping

**Tobiloba Sulaimon**:

> Everything I know today I learnt on my own. I am a self-taught software developer.

HTML, CSS and JavaScript from YouTube after high school, then a first paid client build, then a front-end role at a game studio where being the only developer forced the pace. First version of AuTrans shipped in about a week.

### 4. Guard the vertical against the features users ask for

**Tobiloba Sulaimon**:

> Now with a team and outside consulting, he rolls out features step by step and resists adding everything users request.

Explicitly so AuTrans does not become a jack of all trades. Jeremy anchors the same lesson in Raven Tools over-expanding horizontally.

### 5. The differentiator is the thing incumbents treat as an edge case

**Tobiloba Sulaimon**:

> Other tools filter out unknown languages or translate them to the nearest English; the AuTrans engine transcribes exactly what was said.

Around one hundred users and first paying customers at the time of recording, with mobile apps, more languages and API access on the roadmap.

## Entities mentioned

| Entity | What it is | Links |
|---|---|---|
| **Tobiloba Sulaimon** | Self-taught developer from Lagos, Nigeria. Learned to code from YouTube after high school. | https://autrans.online |
| **AuTrans** | AI transcription optimised for African voices. Keeps Pidgin, Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo as spoken. Around one hundred users. | https://autrans.online |
| **Otter / Fireflies** | Named incumbents that treat non-English African-language audio as noise. |  |
| **Immanuel Abraham** | His mentor, a backend engineer with ten years of experience. |  |
| **Raven Tools** | Jeremy's own example of horizontal over-expansion, offered as the counterexample. |  |

## Questions this episode answers

- Why do mainstream transcription tools fail on African languages?
- Should I focus on one market before expanding internationally?
- How do I avoid scope creep when users keep requesting features?
- Can you become a working developer self-taught, and how long does it take?
- What is the difference between horizontal and vertical SaaS scoping?
- How do I find a differentiator an incumbent will not copy?
- What does founder-market fit look like in practice?
- How long should a first version take to build?
- Is it better to serve a smaller market deeply?
- How do I decide which feature requests to refuse?

## Related episodes

- [Do Not Die: Malith Gamage on SaaS Survival](https://unscriptedsaas.com/do-not-die-malith-gamage-on-saas-survival/) — Malith Gamage, Co-founder, Zapdigits
- [Tom Girgash on Building Taproot, the Memory Layer for Solo AI Operators](https://unscriptedsaas.com/tom-girgash-taproot-memory-layer/) — Tom Girgash, Founder, Taproot
- The same treatment across the Unscripted SEO archive: https://unscriptedseo.com/sitemap-markdown.xml

## How to cite this episode

> Tobiloba Sulaimon. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. *Africa First: Tobiloba Sulaimon on Focus*, Unscripted SaaS, 2026-08-09. https://unscriptedsaas.com/africa-first-tobiloba-sulaimon-on-focus/

When quoting, name the speaker. Host and guest are both present below.

## Full transcript

Speaker labels are on every turn. Cleaned for readability; wording is the speakers' own.

**Jeremy Rivera:**

Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted podcast host. I'm here with Toba Loba, who is a SaaS creator that I ran into on Threads, and he had a a an interesting platform that he's developing. why don't you introduce the software that you're making, its objective, and then we'll take it from there.

**Tobiloba Sulaimon:**

Alright Jeremy, it's my pleasure to be here. My name is Toby Loba Sulaiman and I'm from Lagos, Nigeria and I built this platform that transcribes audio files. So basically, takes in audio files, processes them and it gives out, it brings out the text. So there are many other platforms that do this same thing. Big names.

We have fireflies. We have so many. But our main differentiator came from the fact that those tools don't understand African languages. So that is where we come in as a platform that solves that problem. So as it stands, we understand, I don't know if you know these languages, but we understand Igbo, we understand Yoruba.

and how so and most especially pitching then English so that's basically what the platform does

**Jeremy Rivera:**

That is an interesting challenge. I I find, you know, African languages like Exosa Hosa particularly interesting because of, you know, their glottal stops, you know, you have clicks and intonations that can completely change, you know, meaning. what were some of the challenges that you had in designing

that software to be able to parse these languages correctly.

**Tobiloba Sulaimon:**

Okay, basically our main I want to call it secret recipe or something but it's kind of classified so but I can hint at it. So what I did was that I built an engine So basically we call it a server but I want to call it an engine because what it does is it now processes it in a way that Okay, let me give examples. So for instance if you

If you have a Yoruba recording, so in case you don't know, Yoruba is a language, right? So if you have a recording that Yoruba was what they spoke on it, so other tools would just filter out those unknown languages and bring out the English. Sorry, or they would, they would translate it to the nearest English.

that. That you will pass sounds like. But we don't do that. We take all of them and we pass it the way it is said on the order.

So I don't want to say too much. So I want to review our main infrastructure. But that is what we do. That is basically what we do. So it's how we do it, I don't want to say.

**Jeremy Rivera:**

That's fair enough. I and and that's always the challenge of doing an interview when you're doing a like a breakout, you know, you are taking something that's understood and common and trying to disrupt the market. but it it does it is an interesting concept because you know, as we delve into the machine learning age.

a lot of the knowledge bases out there and a lot of the the thought and process flows through English. So I think having a solution for, you know, other languages, it's it's weird as an American, you know, we are so soaked in our own language that we often don't think about how the shape of the world can change based off of the way that you speak language. Because

**Tobiloba Sulaimon:**

you

you

**Jeremy Rivera:**

There are concepts, you know, because I I've been learning German, Japanese, Spanish, and French myself, like on the side for years. And there there are concepts or there are sayings or there are ways that languages are constructed that have meaning that doesn't quite translate. There's no like one to one you know, translation for it. So you kind of cobble together this thing that

**Tobiloba Sulaimon:**

you

**Jeremy Rivera:**

Kind of means the exact a close approximation, but th there was a an Amazon tribe that they found, and they have no conception of time in their language. Everything happens right now. There's there's no word for the past, there's no word for the future, they don't even have different words for color certain colors. They don't have the color blue, they don't have the color purple.

**Tobiloba Sulaimon:**

you

you

wow.

Wow.

**Jeremy Rivera:**

so coming from like the linguistic angle, what's been kind of the process as as you've been developing this app of you know crossing those language barriers, crashing through them or leveraging them to help market your product?

**Tobiloba Sulaimon:**

Alright, so...

Before I start, I want to give a quick background to the main reason why this has came alive.

I use these tools to process my recordings in case I want to quickly summarize or create minutes from meeting recordings and all that.

We had a meeting one time and

some people in that meeting were speaking our local languages here. So when I gave, when I uploaded it to the tools that we have, like the main tools that people have created before, like Otter and Blu-ray, so when I uploaded it there, they didn't just like

they didn't bring out

Okay, so they did not even just like transcribe it like that. They just skipped it. So they saw it as noise. Like maybe it's not in or maybe it's not a language, maybe it was mumbling or something. So they just skipped it and just like brought out the English spoken there. So I saw it as this will be a problem for me when I want to start bringing out information from this recording because

**Jeremy Rivera:**

Mm.

**Tobiloba Sulaimon:**

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.

So I just built it as a persona tool. I it as a persona tool. So I didn't plan to make it public for people to use and all. just built it as a persona tool. So I was using it. Then in my church, I'm a Christian, so I attend church. they give us assignments. So how it works is that they give us recordings, teachings, summons in recordings. So we'll have to go back, study them, and

bring out and submit assignments based on the recordings. So most times when we want to answer those questions, we transcribe the audio so we can get the content of the recording in text format. So sometimes I use those tools. So we do it a lot. So one day someone saw me using my tool and felt like this

It will be useful for him too because he basically does what he says without something.

So he said I should publish it. I should make it public so he can also use it. So other people can also use it. So I just felt like it is actually true. I'm not the only one facing this problem. Maybe I could target those that are facing the problem. And I want to mention something. We are African first. So we are not targeting the Western market. We are not targeting

**Jeremy Rivera:**

Yeah.

**Tobiloba Sulaimon:**

We are focusing on ourselves first, so we are African first. So I'm trying to solve this problem within Africa first before we move on with other people.

**Jeremy Rivera:**

Yeah.

**Tobiloba Sulaimon:**

So across Africa, have almost, there are so many languages, right? But there is not enough funding to cover all those places here. Now that it is a SaaS and it is public and we're about to get registered, I don't want to split our attention too much.

So I want to go in a straight direction, then I will split when the funding comes. So for now, we are only doing it in a country. We are only doing it in my country, Nigeria, before we can think of expanding. So that's basically what we are doing right now. So later on, can consider expanding our capabilities too.

the language that other African countries speak.

**Jeremy Rivera:**

I I love it. because there is that like this is one of the challenges of you know developing a SAS tool, you know, is determining, you know, who is my target demographic, who am I trying to reach. And, you know, there is that scope creep element of like the moment the the moment you make one thing, then it's like, okay, do I make how it does that one thing?

**Tobiloba Sulaimon:**

you

**Jeremy Rivera:**

better or more effective or address the fifteen bugs, you know, when you upload with this type of tool, you know, there's these audio burrs and I want to fix that. Or you get that first person who uses it and like, yeah, it can you also do this thing that's very similar, but it's not the same thing? You have this like horizontal versus vertical challenge when it comes to SAS development. So I

**Tobiloba Sulaimon:**

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yes.

**Jeremy Rivera:**

I I think it does make sense that what you've laid out. Let's narrow down. Let's look at the languages spoken within my particular country first. Before you start to challenge those other, you know, because once you pass your own national boundaries, then you have the dialect challenge, right? Of it's the same language, but it's spoken a little differently over here. so I could definitely see digging in

**Tobiloba Sulaimon:**

you

Yes.

**Jeremy Rivera:**

in in trying to go deeper into your vertical and you know a focus on solving small bugs or making the platform or or process for it as robust and as stable as possible. You know, work on your local marketing as much as possible before going too horizontal. Because I've had that challenge too because I worked at a SAS company called Raven Tools and we we got kind of big for our bridges. Like we did

reporting for SEO agencies, but then we said, yeah, we could do PPC reporting and social media management and PPC management. And the more that you spread out horizontally, you yeah, you you do broaden the audience that you have overall, but you have to maintain even more of it.

**Tobiloba Sulaimon:**

Yeah.

Yeah, that is very true. That is very true. That is basically what we are trying to avoid. Scope. Clip. So we are trying to not do too much and target and solve problems. So we are not just trying to like...

of money although that's the goal but we are trying to solve problems so we not just adding a lot of features that people will need because some of them make sense but they don't actually help us at the moment so there's a of planning and decision making going on the ground because as it stands I said before that it was a personal tool but now I have a team

I will be speaking to consulting experienced people in this field and planning and will be rolling features and upgrades step by step not just coming out just like that today, we have no surprises at all, even with your many addresses, we are trying to avoid that scope creep so that we will not just

It's a really, really, really, really thing. It just becomes jack of all trades. It just does everything.

That is what we are trying to do.

**Jeremy Rivera:**

I'm curious a little bit about your past. You know, I I check out all trends dot online and it seems like you've got a pretty robust, you know, site and process. do you have training in history and SaaS development? Is this your first SaaS platform that you've made? and where did what other

Team members would you like to shout out for their contribution of skills?

**Tobiloba Sulaimon:**

Okay, before I start, I want to say that I built a fortress. To where it stands today, I built it soon.

So I don't have other engineering partners on the project as it stands but I plan to cause as we scale I may not have to code or plan for it our people to do that for me. let me just say that that Ultrans was built so now about my background I started coding

around two years ago. So that was when I just came out of high school and I felt like I wanted to study Computer Science at school. So while I was preparing to enter college, I stumbled upon some YouTube videos teaching how to code in HTML, CSS, VTAP. Those are the foundational concepts in software development. So I just

went deep into it and found myself so deep in that it was all I could think about at the point. I built some projects, not serious projects, like just practice projects like calculator, mini games and some landing pages. So I was just learning how to start that.

I needed exposure, I didn't exactly go to a bootcamp or learn from someone. I am a self-taught software developer.

So I learnt everything I know today online. I learnt it by myself. I studied, I watched a lot of courses, watched a lot of videos, read many documentations. So everything I know today I learnt on my own. I do have a mentor which I would like to shout out to. His name is Immanuel Abraham. So he is my mentor.

a backend engineer and is 10 years into software development. So sometimes I do ask him some questions, ask him for advice on big decisions I'm about to take.

Yes, now. So after about one year of just playing around with knowledge I know during mini projects, I felt it was time for me to break out and just make it known that I do software development. So I got on social media and created profiles. Then I started posting what I did. And my main...

in the platform IE.

X which is formally T-Pain. So, Twitter gave me lot of exposure of how tech world, software engineering world works. Although there's a lot of noise there, but I could like filter out

that is beneficial to me. So I met some great people, very intelligent people and I kind of watched what they were doing.

So I thought I could do some...

So after studying, after learning and practicing for about a year, I got my first gig. So I did my first real project for a real estate agent. The website name is realtorbb.com. So that was my first official website build for a client. That was my first official transaction in business in software development. So that gave me a lot of confidence to see what I'd

So I did not consider applying for big jobs then. I just thought that I could feel as

just go and then just saturate it. So that was an especially reading books. At this time my confidence is that I read a lot of self-help books. So this helped me in changing the

So in I thought I should.

I should do more with myself, with my skills. I should not hold.

not see because

So there were some people because of the time I started, they would consider me a mean guy. I do not say myself like that. I say myself. I don't know what to say about... I walk.

I do not think in my head that I am a movie. I just scope. I just do stuff. I don't do stuff. I don't craft. I don't limit myself. Then I started

So I got my first software engineering role at a game company.

as a front end developer. This part is very key, sorry. This part is very key because it is one of those things that helped me. So I signed up to work for them as a front end developer. I was the only developer on the team and the skills I had then was for front end developers.

So working for this company.

a lot. Like, they didn't just want me to work around what I knew. They started giving me new challenges and that helped me a whole lot. Being the only person on the team, I had to like, research a lot and touch some areas of software development. I don't think someone of my experience should be touching. So, I was picking some levels and I was doing it fast.

So I'm.

I would go sleepless nights, I would not sleep, I would just study and work and I would make and I would deliver, right? And I would deliver even as they may see, they think I'm young and I'm new to this field, I just deliver. So they started giving me more complex problems. So what I do there is like I walk

I don't know, it's kind of, they pay me, it's salary based, yeah, but they bring in products from clients and they give it, they pass it down to me, then I build, then I deliver to them. So I think it's contractor based or something, it's contract based or something. So that's it works. So they bring in, so because of the way I deliver, they were confident enough to collect, to take in complex products.

So those projects helped me build my mentality that I can do this. So I can do bigger things. And that started about six months ago. So the first six months of this year helped me build my confidence and my way of approaching

The issue of the new Agon problem with transcribing audio files started around March. The first version of our SaaS or Trans, it came out in about one week. It was a side project so I just did it over the weekend and I was using it on Mondays. Because of my tight schedule at work, I could not keep up with the content making.

I doing them on my social media profile. So I felt like what should I do to keep up with, to continue being consistent on my social media profiles. So I felt like maybe showing them that project would help. So I would have something to show that I'm not just, I'd not just go on a Yait house or something, that I'm still here, I'm still building, I'm still doing stuff. So.

that coupled with the person I met physically that I should publish it. So that was what led to me launching it as a SaaS product on the 10th of November.

Yeah, I think that basically. So, looking at Ultras today, Ultras now has about 100 users and we have about 4 paying customers that I do not know personally.

The is basically saving itself.

As far as I don't know if you are speaking in this way, he sowed the fruit and he sowed the fruit.

So we are paying to use this solution.

So.

**Jeremy Rivera:**

I think I think that's the good mentality too of you know, I've had a couple of different interviews talking about empathy and understanding that as a business you're making money not because you know, people are doing it for charity, you're understanding that they have a pain. There's a pain point, there's a problem that they're experiencing and so

what you're bringing to market, what's generating revenue for you is a you know, that band-aid, that cure, that process that alleviates that pain that that person's experiencing. You know, if they were trying to get, you know, audio transcripted and it's just not working for their native language, like yeah, that's a a genuine pain point. Like if

you know, Riverside wasn't you know, so good at doing transcripts, I'd have to seek, you know, a secondary tool to try to get these audio files for my own podcasts transcribed. And I remember back in, you know, 2010 the process for getting transcripts was long, arduous, and expensive. So I can I could definitely see the market for it. And that's kind of the

Kinda the secret of of a SAS tool is like you do have to have like a large enough user base who have like a shared problem that your SAS can solve for them.

**Tobiloba Sulaimon:**

Yes, that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's

**Jeremy Rivera:**

So I know you wanted to go deep, deeper in and keep it in Nigeria and focus on improving the tool. you've got your secret sauce. Is there anything that you can say about upcoming features that you're working on right now or something further down the roadmap for the SASIN project that you already have that you feel good kind of releasing it to the public? Hey

we're going to be doing this next or we have a vision for hitting this goal in the next quarter or two.

**Tobiloba Sulaimon:**

you

That's a very good question. now, so users, that's very good question. yes, as I said before, I have you to an experience.

I've been talking on

I'm sorry.

So now, it started as a personal tool, then I just published it to see how far it can go. Now, it has proved that it is marketed. Now, I'm pushing for it. So, features that I want people to

is mobile access. Now, I'll be launching mobile applications. I'll be launching it on Android and Apple Store, on Play Store and Apple Store. Then I'll be adding more features, more features because around the world of audio, there are a lot of ideas I've come up with. And there a lot of ideas I can take from, I won't say completely,

other software companies that are doing the same thing. So basically, we will now turn all trans and we will make it solve more problems. Okay, our main note is the fact that we understand African languages and audio transcription is used in other places, it used in meetings, sometimes it is used as a note taker, sometimes the...

that are important to Join meetings, sometimes. There's a whole lot, right? And sometimes developers use the APIs in their own software products. So they basically expand them to turn into a real software. So users should look forward to it. Users and potential users should look forward to

mobile phones. We should look forward to seeing Ultrans as, okay I won't say this, I would be revealing too much. But a lot is coming, there's a lot to look forward to. And our goal is to expand.

to reach all...

that we have in Africa.

Asia and others. But as it stands, we've added more languages, right? So that means people in Diaspora that speak our language can use it too. as it stands now, Ultras understand 10 languages. So it doesn't just understand Nigerian languages at all. It understands French, it understands Spanish, it understands Arabic, and popular languages.

the above 10, for we added our own language system.

So there's a lot to look forward to, there's a lot to expect from us and we are a poster.

**Jeremy Rivera:**

Mm.

**Tobiloba Sulaimon:**

and we will receiving more information very soon.

**Jeremy Rivera:**

Fantastic. Well I appreciate you stopping by and sharing a bit of your story. I'll make sure that the app is is linked in the show notes and I'll be messaging out to the people that are in the newsletter, give them a chance to check out your platform and what you what you've been working on. Thanks for stopping by.

**Tobiloba Sulaimon:**

Thank you so much, Jeremy. It's an honor to be here.

---

Unscripted SaaS · hosted by Jeremy Rivera · https://unscriptedsaas.com/africa-first-tobiloba-sulaimon-on-focus/