
Kwana
A short-let marketplace built for Abuja — verified apartments, Naira-native payments, and money held in escrow until the guest checks in.
- Day one. No app, no backend — a landing page and a host waitlist. Hosts signed up before a line of product code existed.
- The prototype. A clickable front end in the "Savanna Night" system: dark by default, an EscrowMeter on every booking, transfer auto-confirm. Emoji icons were thrown out for a proper icon system — it has to feel like a top-ten app, not a side project.
- Trust first. A host-compliance checklist for Abuja became the verification schema itself — identity plus a light property check at launch, badges guests can see, tightened later.
- The backend. Two services behind Caddy on our own VPS: a verification API with an admin review queue, and a bookings engine that walks every stay through escrow states to check-in.
- The launch. A six-film vertical ad campaign — hero, trust, host, statics, a Detty December teaser — produced in-house. Kwana is live at app.kwana.ng.








