Practical mobile apps for everyday problems don’t get built by big tech companies.. Big tech builds for big markets — urban consumers, high-income users, people who already have ten apps on their phone and are deciding which eleventh to download.
That leaves an enormous gap.
The problem we kept seeing
The people who need software the most are often the ones who have it the least. Small-scale farmers managing hundreds of animals with a notebook and a memory. Informal traders tracking stock with pen and paper. People running real businesses — often in tough conditions — with no digital tools built specifically for them.
Not because the tools are impossible to build. Because the market doesn’t look attractive enough on a spreadsheet in San Francisco.
We disagreed.
Why we started with pig farming
Our first app, PigPal, came from a simple observation — pig farming is a serious business for millions of families across Africa and Asia, and virtually every farmer we spoke to was managing their animals entirely from memory or handwritten notes.
Feed records. Vaccination dates. Weight gain. Health observations. All of it living in notebooks that get wet, or in heads that forget.
The consequence isn’t just inefficiency. It’s real financial loss — animals that don’t gain weight because a feed problem went undetected. Disease outbreaks that spread because a vaccination was missed. Profits that disappear because nobody was tracking the numbers.
A simple app could fix most of that. So we built one.
How we decide what to build next
We don’t have a product roadmap driven by investor trends or competitor analysis. We have a simple filter: is this a real problem that real people face every day, and is the current solution worse than it should be?
If yes — we’re interested.
If the answer requires someone to change their behaviour dramatically, buy expensive hardware, or have a university degree to operate the software — we’re not interested. Our apps have to work for people on day one, in the field, with patchy internet and a three-year-old Android phone.
The tools that change people’s lives are rarely the ones that win design awards. They’re the ones that work on a bad connection, don’t require a manual, and solve exactly one problem extremely well. That’s the standard we hold ourselves to with every app we ship
What this means for you
If you’re a farmer, a trader, a small business owner — and you’ve ever thought “there should be an app for this” — you’re probably right. And you’re probably also right that nobody has built it yet.
We’re building our way through that list, one problem at a time. PigPal is live now. More are coming.
And if you’ve got a problem you think deserves an app — we’d genuinely like to hear about it. No pitch deck required. Just tell us what’s broken.