In 2018, Uke Enun used his final-year tuition at the University of Calabar in southern Nigeria on the Internet. It brought him nothing.
He had set up an e-commerce store selling print-on-demand merchandise, t-shirts, hoodies, the kind of side hustle that made sense at the time, and poured money into ads. People clicked, added items to their carts, and then they left.
The payment methods weren’t compatible with foreign cards, and the abandoned carts piled up. “I spent that money, lost that money,” Enun says. “And then I abandoned it for a minute.”
That failure planted a question he couldn’t shake: why is it so hard to sell across borders from Africa? Two years later, when COVID sent the world online, the question came back harder.
If work could happen digitally, surely trade could too. And if businesses in the US were global from day one, able to sell to anyone, anywhere, without fuss, what was stopping African businesses from doing the same?
GoNomads, a business-to-business (B2B) market-entry consultancy that Enun would spend the next four years building, is his answer to that question. It helps African businesses expand into new markets digitally by handling everything from licences and banking setups to payment processing and legal structures.
The pitch sounds simple, yet the problem it solves is not.
Day 1: The year of research and the team that found each other
Enun spent the whole of 2020 asking questions. What stops African businesses from trading internationally? What are the real blockers – technical, legal, commercial? He mapped the problem before he touched the solution.
By the end of that year, he had the outline of something. In early 2021, he and a small team began testing ideas. The first version failed, and they went back to the drawing board. By September 2021, they relaunched. This time, it moved.
Before GoNomads, Enun had a brief stint at Selar, an e-commerce startup that helps creators sell products, which taught him something important: what an organised team looks like from the inside.
“Coming into an organisation and seeing different people pulling their weight in different departments,” he says, “that was essentially free education.”
His co-founders came from his life. Esther Airemionkhale, who would lead operations, had just left a job and was in a gap year when Enun approached her. “There’s no downside, at least. Let’s do this.” She said yes.
Liberty Oyugboh, who became Chief Technical Officer (CTO), had been giving Enun unsolicited feedback on the idea online for months, investing time nobody had paid him for.
At a tech conference they both attended, they slipped out of the opening address and spent the rest of the day deep in conversation. They agreed to meet the following week to build the minimum viable product (MVP). Seven days later, they had something new.
“I value time the most,” Enun says. “When someone gives you their time for free, that’s the signal.”
Day 500: The yeses that turned into nos, and the month everything changed
The months after the relaunch were a lesson in how B2B sales actually work—slowly, and with a particular kind of false hope.
GoNomads used a mix of influencer marketing and Facebook ads to drive leads. A YouTuber friend made a video about the product. People clicked through, filled in forms, and booked demos. They said all the right things. Then they disappeared.
“They would give you all the green lights,” Enun recalls, “and then the deal just falls through.”
It took two months after the September 2021 relaunch to close the very first paying customer. When that deal finally came through, GoNomads over-delivered. That customer sent referrals. More customers followed, slowly. The team made a critical mistake in those early days, assuming the problem was pricing. They tested installment plans and ended up with a pile of unpaid invoices instead.
“What we learned over time was that the stronger the brand, the more we’d be able to attract the business.”
Part of what gave GoNomads early credibility with clients was the company’s ability to attach its name to established players. In 2023, GoNomads announced a partnership with Payoneer, the Nasdaq-listed financial technology platform used by over 5 million businesses across 190 countries.
The integration meant GoNomads’ clients could create and verify Payoneer accounts directly through the GoNomads platform, giving them access to local receiving accounts in nine currencies, a universally accepted Mastercard, and the ability to receive payments from over 3,000 global marketplaces.
For a startup whose entire pitch was about making African businesses globally competitive, having Payoneer in the stack was a trust signal.
Payroll, meanwhile, was a knife-edge exercise. From the moment GoNomads made its first hire, a customer support person in early 2022, recruited through a referral, interviewed more on vibes than structure—whatever revenue came in went straight out to keep the team. Net zero, month after month.
“We just saw the revenue as funds to be able to make payroll,” Enun says.
There was one month, around June 2022, when they couldn’t hit 100%. They made a partial payment and asked the team for three months to sort it out. They sorted it in one month. GoNomads has not missed a full payroll month in over four years of operation, according to Enun.
“That’s a badge of honor,” he says. “We do everything in our power to live by it.”
The GoNomads team was also running two companies at the same time. Alongside GoNomads, the team had launched a fintech tool for freelancers to receive cross-border payments. It was a reasonable idea. But they weren’t experienced enough to execute on two fronts at once. After six months, they shut it down, redirected those customers into GoNomads, and focused.
The month they made that call, August 2023, turned out to be their best month ever. Deals came in from everywhere, triple or quadruple the typical month, according to Enun
“We couldn’t even entirely explain the growth,” Enun says. But he didn’t spend time trying to, instead he took it as a signal: more was possible.
“Every milestone is a new floor,” he says. “Not a ceiling.”
From that point, the strategy sharpened. More specialists, fewer generalists. YouTube ads. Webinars. Community partnerships. The logic was to reach people where they’re already looking for solutions, and the leads that come in are already half-convinced. It worked: their churn rate reduced.
Day 1000 – What four years taught him about Africa’s globalisation gap
GoNomads’ clients are now spread across more than 40 countries. But Enun is clear-eyed about how far the broader ecosystem still has to go.
“There are a lot of shadow bans that businesses are not even aware of,” Enun says. Systems that quietly block cross-border transactions. Payment setups that fail without explanation. Structures that exclude without notice. Most businesses never find out what’s stopping them—they just know something isn’t working, and they give up.
What African founders often miss, he argues, is that going global doesn’t mean selling the same product in a new market. It means adapting. A cake baker doesn’t need to figure out international shipping. She could package her knowledge as a digital course and sell it to someone in London for $20.
“If you have 20 customers buying from you at $20, that’s $400 without you having to bake a single cake,” he says.
The mindset shift is the hardest part. “People here can’t picture selling to someone who doesn’t look like them,” he says. “They see the global market as this pedestal that’s so high, so difficult to reach. But businesses from other parts of the world come here, learn our context, and sell to us. We can do the same.”
In May 2025, GoNomads relaunched the product it’d killed in 2022. The new version, GoFlex, is an automated billing platform for freelancers and service-based businesses that handlescontracting, invoicing, and delivery handoff. Three years wiser, they launched it properly.
For GoNomads, the next chapter is two things: structured education around globalisation to position GoNomads as the authority for African businesses going global, and expanding beyond Africa to serve businesses in the Middle East and Asia looking to cross into new markets too.
“Cross-border trade doesn’t only happen in Africa,” Enun says. “It happens everywhere.”
The question he set out to answer in 2020 remains unanswered. But GoNomads is several years deeper into the work of answering it.
“You don’t need to know everything to start,” he says. “You just need to know enough to begin. Everything else, you learn on the way.”
