From "Mbut Man" to Building a Tech Company in Lagos — IAMNOTSHIFU

Alright guys.

Happy belated birthday to me 🎉

My birthday was on the 20th of May, and omo, I've just been sitting down thinking about how insane the last few years have been for me.

Like, I'm not even joking.

A few years ago, I was just a "Mbut Man" (a name usually assigned to lowlifes back in my secondary school), trying to make a t-shirt brand work.

And writing this blog, somehow:

I registered a company,
launched products,
published a research paper,
dropped my first book,
started a podcast/documentary series,
and I'm still here, coding almost every day, trying to build something meaningful from Lagos that could impact lives.

This life is quite funny ngl.

One of the biggest Ws for me this year was finally registering: NFORSHIFU LOGICFORGE LTD

And I won't lie, that moment meant a lot to me.

Because for the longest time, this whole thing was just: "One guy with a laptop and too many ideas." The ideas part hasn't changed, though, coz the number of wild things I think of is crazy.

Even now, most people still know the public-facing studio as: NFORSHIFU234 Dev. Which was still quite the goal.

But behind it is now an actual registered company with an actual vision attached to it.

You can check out projects that have been accomplished by NFORSHIFU234 Dev. From clients' projects, to Open-Source solutions from the NFORSHIFU234 Dev Lab, to In-house applications like WishIT and HealthHub, it is quite beautiful.

WishIT Actually Became Real

Another thing I'm super grateful for is launching WishIT.

For those who don't know, WishIT is basically a platform/web app for sharing memories, celebrations, stories and moments digitally.

Birthdays.
Memorials.
Weddings.
Special moments.
If you can celebrate it, WishIT should be your go-to place.

Seeing an idea move from: "random thought in my head that refused to leave" to "actual working product people can use" with over 100 users as of writing this blog

will never stop feeling magical to me.

You can check it out at WishIT Website

Final Year Project Wahala

This year, I also defended my final year project: HealthHub

And it was also published.

The paper: "HealthHub: A Hybrid Rule-Based Expert System for Symptom Triage with Multilingual Support for Equitable Medical Care Access in Nigeria"

was published here: HealthHub IJCA Paper

This project honestly stressed me out more than I can explain 💀. I had to learn Mobile Dev. Thanks to YouTube, AI tools and assistance, I managed to scale through.

But seeing it go from concept to defence to publication is like one of those moments where I had to pause and really think about how far things have come for myself and what the future holds.

Oh, and I Dropped a Book

Yeah. An actual book.

"The Year I Turned 20" is my memoir — and honestly, it might be the most personal thing I've ever put out.

It covers the year everything started colliding at once. School, building, identity, pressure, faith, money stress, the whole thing. The messy middle that most people don't talk about.

If you've ever felt like you're doing too much and not enough at the same time — this one's for you.

You can grab a copy here: IAMNOTSHIFU Memoir

But Let's Go Back In Time

Because none of this started with "I want to become a software engineer."

Not even close, omo

Back in 2018, I was in secondary school in Cameroon, trying to start a clothing brand.

Long story short, I had been kicked out of another brand I was involved in before then. Would talk about it later. But:

That whole experience got me so annoyed that I said to myself: "Fine. I'll build my own thing."

And that thing became:

In Bronx

Now obviously, once you start a brand, in the long run, the next thing you want is: "We need a website," because we are in the "digital era".

Now the problem was…

I could not afford a developer 💀. Because where I wan see money take dey hire professionals and then services like Wix, and all those website builders were giving me something that was everywhere. like it was similar to other people's sites, and I didn't like being "with everybody". And also, I knew eventually I wasn't going to manage the site myself because I wanted to be "free". But I needed to know every detail about the operation before handing over. If you get my pov.

So instead of giving up, I decided to learn HTML, CSS and JavaScript myself. As per ei no go bad make I do am myself.

At the time, I genuinely thought: "I'll just learn enough to build one website and move on." pere. Nothing more, Nothing Less

That is what brought about NFSFU-ECOMM, a lightweight, open-source e-commerce website application designed specifically for small startups. Built with PHP, it allows users to quickly install and manage online sales without worrying about performance or data-syncing issues.

But LOL.

Yeah… That did not happen.

One thing led to another. I started becoming curious about how systems worked. Then backend systems. Then APIs. Then client work. Then automation. Then came React. Then products. Then company structure.

And now here we are.

Still building. Still learning. Still trying to figure things out in real time. Omo.

Now, Why I Started "Keeping Up with IAMNOTSHIFU"

I've always documented things privately. I literally have paper archives of almost all my early design projects.

Random notes. Ideas. Screenshots. Voice notes. Project progress. Late-night thoughts. Failures nobody sees.

I started the process earlier in 2023, but school dragged me and had other plans with me, which I shared in my new book/memoir, "The Year I Turned 20".

But recently I started feeling like: Why did I stop hiding the process?

Everybody still posts the success story after everything works, especially on LinkedIn (no shades thrown). But yk, LinkedIn, especially Nigerian Networks, it is mostly about wins and portraying the most irrelevant things into long epistles that could fit a single tweet on X, which could easily demotivate you or derail you from the onset before you start. I will share my experience in another blog post.

Very few people document the middle.

The confusion. The rebuilding. The pressure. The small wins. The identity crisis. The "what am I even doing with my life" moments.

So I decided to start: Keeping Up with IAMNOTSHIFU (NotebookLM Edition)

This is not supposed to be a polished master shifu guru podcast.

It's literally just me — documenting the progression in real time. With a little help from AI (NotebookLM, specifically) turning my raw notes and thoughts into something actually listenable.

Growth. Experiments. Products. Mindset shifts. Wins. Mistakes. Everything.

Episodes coming up will cover things like:

How I went from "one guy with a laptop" to running an actual registered company
The real story behind building and launching WishIT
What nobody tells you about final year projects in Nigerian universities
And a lot of other things I've been sitting on for years

Episode 0 is the beginning before the beginning. The overview. Go listen first, then come back for everything else.

And trust me… There are A LOT of stories coming shaaa

For now, though, genuinely: I want to say thank you to everybody supporting the journey.

Whether you've been here since the In Bronx days, the coding days, the random logo era, the YouTube era, or you're just discovering me now…

I appreciate y'all fr ❤️

Let's just hope we grow together, and I can reach and impact the people who need to be impacted.

You Can Watch or listen to the Podcast via any of the available platforms below:

One Love, Nyuiring-yoh