How Bolaji Yusuf is building world class tech products through WebuildX

Bolaji Yusuf’s story started in a small cybercafé in Lagos. He was the kind of teenager who would stay past closing hours, clicking through the internet and figuring out how things worked online. That curiosity turned into a quiet obsession with creation, from graphic design to music production, and eventually, web design. 

He built his first websites using WordPress for small clients who couldn’t afford agencies, and that hands-on work taught him about structure, speed, and problem-solving. When clients started asking for more complex systems, he realised he needed to go deeper. So, he taught himself backend engineering and later, cloud infrastructure. What began as trial and error became a pattern: see a problem, learn the skill to fix it, then move on to a harder one. 

That mindset would later become the backbone of his career, and of the products he helped build across fintech, AI, and blockchain.

Learning to build from scratch

Yusuf’s technical journey started with a music blog. He wanted to turn it into a mobile app, but a few YouTube searches showed how far he was from that goal. The framework he needed, Ionic, depended on Angular. Angular depended on JavaScript. JavaScript depended on HTML. So he stripped everything down to the basics and worked his way up, learning HTML, then CSS, and eventually JavaScript. Layer by layer, he built the foundation he needed.

Back in school, an ICT course required students to build a project. Bolaji created Pro Connect, a platform linking people with local artisans for repairs and home services. The demo drew interest and plenty of questions, yet no one followed up afterwards. Even so, the project proved to him that he could take an idea from nothing to a working product.

Not long after, a student organisation with over 10,000 users needed an edtech platform. They hired Bolaji for ₦20,000, and that was his first real contract. The platform launched successfully, but the moment real traffic hit, it began to crash. Senior engineers scrambled to fix it, but Bolaji wanted to understand the root cause of the crash.

He dived into cloud engineering and DevOps, learning how to deploy properly, monitor usage, and keep systems running under pressure. AWS became his training ground. He spent hours building and tearing down environments on his laptop until he could handle the kind of load that had once overwhelmed him.

That hunger paid off.

At a tech event in 2020, he met the founder of a startup called Bytes, who needed someone who understood infrastructure well enough to build a stable foundation for the product. Bolaji took the contract. Eight months later, the system was running smoothly, and the company had raised $300,000. It was the first time he saw his work change the trajectory of a business, and it pushed him further down the path he had been carving for years.

Building Fintech backbones

Bolaji’s biggest test came when he joined IpayBTC, a Nigerian Bitcoin exchange struggling with slow transactions and scaling issues. Users were frustrated by the lag between sending and receiving funds. Bolaji led a full rebuild of the platform’s infrastructure, integrating the Lightning Network, a protocol that enables instant Bitcoin payments.

What once took minutes became near-instant. Within months, the platform processed over $2 million in transaction volume and served more than 10,000 users. For Bolaji, this was proof that blockchain could solve real financial problems in African markets, where speed and reliability build or break user trust.

From there, he worked on multiple fintech products that powered digital payments, lending, and crypto infrastructure. Some ran on traditional payment rails; others used decentralised networks. The systems he built moved money across borders, enabled lending at scale, and secured transactions for thousands of users.

Yusuf believes technical excellence means knowing when to simplify. Not every system needs to be a web of microservices. Sometimes, one well-built monolith does the job better. “Technology should serve the product,” he says. “Not the other way around.”

Building teams that build right

As his technical range grew, so did his leadership responsibilities. At Lightforth, Yusuf became CTO, managing a team of over thirty engineers, designers, and QA specialists. The team built AI-powered products under tight deadlines, and the key to success wasn’t just technical skill; it was structure.

He introduced a pod system: small, cross-functional teams that could ship fast and iterate quickly. Each pod owned a product, and each engineer understood the business context. “Good engineers write good code,” Bolaji says. “Great engineers understand the product.”

For Yusuf, engineering has never been just about writing code. It’s about structure, process, and the people who execute them. It’s about knowing that good code in isolation means nothing if the system around it can’t scale, if the team doesn’t understand why they’re building, or if the platform collapses the moment real pressure arrives. That’s why the pod system worked. Each engineer didn’t just write features; they owned outcomes.

Building for founders

Today, Bolaji leads WebuildX, a product engineering company that helps founders design, build, and scale software. The team works across several industries, yet fintech and blockchain remain central to their work because those sectors demand the kind of precision and reliability he has spent years mastering.

But his broader vision stretches past financial systems. Bolaji wants Africa’s tech infrastructure to reach a point where building stable, world-class products feels routine rather than exceptional. That ambition shapes how WebuildX operates. The focus is not only on writing code or shipping features. It is on assembling the right team, setting the right processes, and creating an environment where execution is consistent.

At WebuildX, that approach applies whether the company is working on a payments product, a blockchain platform, an edtech tool, or a logistics system. The industry may change, but the standard stays the same. 

The goal is to build products that people can trust, products that can grow without falling apart, and products that reflect the level of engineering Africa deserves.