AK
Ama K.
Neighbour
About Us
How My Corner took shape.
Our story is told in three stages: identifying the local discovery problem, understanding what residents actually need, and developing a solution that works alongside the way neighbourhood life already functions.
Identify a uniquely African problem
The Problem
Finding local help often depends on who you know.
There are many reasons someone may struggle to find reliable local help. You may be new to the country, new to a neighborhood, or simply outside the networks where recommendations usually travel.
Local hiring often runs through friends, family, neighbours and word of mouth. These networks are valuable, but they are not equally accessible to everyone.
Even when good recommendations exist, the information can be difficult to inspect, compare, preserve and reuse.
Existing local network
Recommendations already move between these people.
Established relationships
KM
Kwesi M.
Family friend
EA
Esi A.
Local contact
YN
Yaw N.
Work contact
Local knowledge
RECOMMENDATIONS · EXPERIENCE · REFERRALS
YOU
You
Same neighborhood
NA
Nana A.
Community member
KO
Kojo O.
Friend of friend
AB
Adwoa B.
Long-time resident
Information travels through existing relationships
The moving lines show recommendations and experience
travelling between people who are already connected.
Notice that none of those routes reach YOU.
Valuable knowledge exists,
but access does not reach everybody.
Diagnosing the problem.
01
Lost local knowledge
Information disappears
A useful recommendation in one conversation rarely becomes reusable neighborhood knowledge.
Good information is shared, used once and then often
lost.
02
Scattered reputation
Local knowledge is fragmented
Provider experience may exist across many disconnected relationships, conversations and channels.
Recommendations lose context, while providers have
limited ways to build a visible, persistent service
reputation.
03
Weak decision context
Comparison and discovery are difficult
People often receive a name and phone number rather than consistent, comparable information about several providers.
Experience, responsiveness, service fit and other
evidence are difficult to compare in one place.
04
Discovery friction
Too much searching and asking around
Unstructured requests create repeated calls, missing details, misunderstandings and unnecessary coordination.
Requests, responses and outcomes remain scattered
across calls, chats and memory rather than one
consistent system of record.
The Opportunity
Today's default is a human network. My Corner adds useful structure around it, helping more people access, understand and reuse the knowledge those networks already create.
The Core Problem
Without My Corner, residents pay for quality they don't receive and suffer consequences they can't enforce. The system doesn't work and it's failing everyone involved.
Understand the need
The decisions behind local discovery
Who can I trust?
Residents do not simply need a plumber, cleaner, electrician, carpenter or mechanic. They need to make a decision that could affect their money, time, home, family and safety, often with very little reliable information.
The real fear is not:
“Can I find someone?”
“What if I choose the wrong person?”
What if they do not show up?
What if they overcharge me?
What if the work is poor?
What if I feel unsafe?
What if something goes wrong and there is no proof?
Every choice feels like a gamble.
A useful recommendation needs enough context to support a real decision.
They are looking for evidence.
Has this person completed similar jobs?
Do people in my community recommend them?
Are their details verified where applicable?
Do they respond reliably?
What exactly have they agreed to do?
Turn “I know somebody” into “I can make an informed choice.”
Confidence is not simply finding a name. It is understanding the decision and what happens next.
They want to say:
“I know what my real local options are.”
“I know why this is relevant to me.”
“I know what happens next.”
“I am not facing the risk alone.”
The problem My Corner must solve
Residents want convenience, but trust is the real product.
Finding reliable local help can feel like a risky gamble with your money, time, home and safety.
From context outward
Start with how people already navigate their day-to-day lives.
My Corner begins with neighborhoods, recommendations, social relationships and informal service networks. Building successfully here means tailoring the product around local behavior rather than importing a generic marketplace and simply changing the currency.
Design principle
Start with local behaviour.
Build the technology around it.
Discovery starts with neighborhoods and service relationships people already understand.
Core journeys are designed first for smaller mobile screens, then allowed to expand naturally on larger devices.
Important information and actions should remain understandable when connections are slower, interrupted or temporarily unavailable.
Discovery uses neighborhoods and broad service areas rather than exposing exact home locations.
Communication should accommodate the language variation people actually use in everyday local interactions.
Local service ecosystems include providers operating across different levels of formality. The product needs to represent that reality clearly and fairly.
Recommendations carry useful human context. My Corner can make that evidence easier to inspect without treating it as a guarantee.
3
Develop the solution
From problem to platform
Build around the ecosystem that already exists.
My Corner is not designed to replace neighbourhood relationships, local businesses, community groups, informal networks or the ways people already exchange information. It gives those existing systems a clearer digital layer — making local knowledge easier to discover, compare and act on.
01
The starting point
Discover what is already around you.
People, services, businesses, items, groups, events and useful neighbourhood information become easier to find without forcing local life into a single marketplace model.
One neighbourhood layer. Many kinds of local discovery.
02
↘
Work alongside existing behaviour.
Recommendations, word of mouth, neighbourhood groups, informal networks and local commercial activity remain part of the system. My Corner organises them rather than pretending they do not exist.
03
→
Add context, not just listings.
Relevance comes from more than a name on a screen. Location, relationships, reputation, community knowledge and local context help residents understand which options are actually useful.
04
Designed to expand
Create a platform that grows with the ecosystem.
Different parts of My Corner can develop as residents, businesses, providers and communities use the platform for different needs. The architecture stays broad enough for the ecosystem to shape how the product grows.
05
◎
Build for African cities from the outset.
The product is shaped around mixed formal and informal economies, mobile behaviour, neighbourhood identity and community networks — not a generic marketplace with a different currency.
06
＋
Keep the product wider than one use case.
Trusted Hire is one part of the platform. Community, Marketplace, Businesses and My Corner AI each solve a different part of the broader finding-things problem.
Explore the product
The rest of the website shows how this becomes a working system.
Continue into Community, Marketplace, Trusted Hire, Businesses and My Corner AI to see how each part addresses a different layer of local discovery.