Overview

Consulting engineers across Africa work in English, French, Portuguese and Arabic, and no single platform serves them. We shipped a deliberately narrow first release, a question-and-answer forum, in all four languages, then grew mentorship past page shells into verification, request lifecycle and real-time chat.

Client

Professional network for African consulting engineers

Industry

Professional community

The challenge

• The audience spans anglophone, francophone, lusophone and arabophone Africa, so four locales, including right-to-left Arabic, were a launch requirement, not a later internationalisation pass.
• A community product is worth nothing empty. Launching broad would have spread the first cohort of users across too many half-used features.
• Mentorship is not a directory: it needs verification of who is real, a request lifecycle, and somewhere for the two people to actually talk.

Approach

1. 01

   Ship a wedge, and say what would kill it

   The first release is a forum wedge, questions and answers, with an explicit written kill criterion: 50 questions posted and 75 weekly-returning users by day 90, both required for the bet to continue. Research, video and live sessions were deliberately held back.

2. 02

   Four locales from the first commit

   next-intl across English, French, Portuguese and Arabic, with right-to-left handled in the design system rather than patched on afterwards, and locale coverage asserted in the test suite.

3. 03

   Mentorship with real machinery

   Browse and filter mentors, admin verification before anyone is listed, a request lifecycle with states, and in-app real-time messaging over Socket.IO so a matched pair never has to leave for email.

4. 04

   Boring, regional infrastructure

   Background jobs on BullMQ and Redis, transactional email through Resend, assets on object storage behind a CDN, all hosted in EU-West to keep latency to African users predictable.

What shipped