In April, I told my team something most people wouldn’t.
“I’m going to turn both of our spreadsheets into applications.”
At the time, all I had was some basic programming knowledge and AI.
Looking back, that promise didn’t start in April.
It started months earlier.
In January, I had a conversation with the colleague who manages our finance records.
We had clients paying in multiple currencies, with different instalment plans and payment timelines.
Every new client made the spreadsheet harder to manage.
The problem wasn’t the person using it, the problem was the tool.
I’ve always liked fixing broken processes, so I said: “Let me sit with this for a few days. I should be able to figure it out.”
A few days later, using AI and the programming skills I already had, we’d built a much better finance sheet.
Then I built another one to track sales performance.
For a while, that was enough.
But as we prepared to grow the team, I knew what would happen.
More people, more manual work, and more opportunities for formulas to break, information to drift, and mistakes to compound.
We weren’t outgrowing our people. We were outgrowing our tools.
Around that time, I remembered something my brother, a phenomenal developer once said to me:
“If we can get the logic to work in spreadsheets, we can code it into an application.”
The logic had already been working for months.
It wasn’t the logic that needed changing. It was the medium.
So I kept the promise I made in April.
Today, those two spreadsheets have become Trail and Remit.
Trail helps our sales team log every call and turns those conversations into coaching dashboards, leaderboards, and speed-to-lead metrics that help us improve week after week.
Remit manages the operational side of revenue, multi-currency payments, instalment schedules, commission tracking, and client management.
Together, they’ve replaced manual processes, supported hundreds of prospects and clients, and helped us build a revenue engine that’s generated 9 figures in naira.
Did I know how to build every part of them?
Not even close.
Whenever I got stuck, I asked AI. Whenever I didn’t know something, I learned it.
Building the applications wasn’t the biggest lesson.
The best systems rarely start as software. They start with someone refusing to accept a broken process.
Most big projects don’t begin with certainty.
They begin with one small decision to make something work better than it did yesterday.
Trail and Remit each deserve their own story. I’ll be sharing the thinking behind both over the next couple of weeks.
NB: The pictures attached are demo pictures