How Philip Okugbe learned to build software solutions for the world

“If the guys from Europe and America are building products for the world, why not me?”

On the surface, that’s a simple question, but it’s one that has defined much of Philip Okugbe’s career as an entrepreneur.

While many founders begin by building products for their immediate markets, Okugbe was quick to adopt a more global outlook.

His most recent startup, Docmost, has been downloaded more than four million times and is used by governments, public institutions and private organisations around the world. Its users include the Australian government, Bechtle, one of Europe’s leading IT service providers, and the German Red Cross.

For Okugbe, Docmost is the latest chapter in a journey that began on a feature phone more than a decade ago and has been shaped as much by products that failed as by those that succeeded.

Learning by building

Okugbe does not have a traditional software engineering background. His journey into technology began in 2012 when his elder brother introduced him to Wapka, a website builder that allowed users to create websites from their mobile phones.

Without access to a laptop, he relied on a feature phone to learn the basics of web development. Before long, he was building websites, themes and simple applications entirely from the device. The internet also brought him community. 

Alongside a group of Nigerian teenagers who were equally curious about technology, he spent hours learning, experimenting and exchanging ideas about websites and blogs. The environment encouraged constant experimentation and, before long, evolved into entrepreneurship.

His first startup was Cheapy, a classifieds marketplace built for the Nigerian market. He spent a year working on it before eventually shutting it down. A web hosting company followed soon after, but that, too, failed to gain enough traction.

Those early ventures taught him an important lesson. Many of the startups he and his peers were building were inspired by products that had already found success in Europe and the United States. But he increasingly realised that the economic conditions that allowed those businesses to thrive did not always exist in Nigeria.

Rather than continue forcing ideas into a market where they struggled to fit, he began thinking differently.

After shutting down his web hosting company, he took a break from launching new products and instead focused on becoming a better engineer. He spent time improving his programming skills. By 2018, he was ready to build again. 

Solving problems without borders

In 2018, Twitter users who came across videos on the platform had no easy way to download them. It was a simple inconvenience, but one experienced by millions of people regardless of where they lived.

That was the perfect opportunity for Okugbe, who built Getvideobot, a Twitter bot that allowed users to download videos directly from the platform.

The bot launched in January 2019 and quickly gained traction. Over the next four years, more than a million videos were downloaded through the service, while its accompanying website attracted over two million monthly page views at its peak. The Twitter account itself eventually grew to more than 700,000 followers.

Its success inspired him to build additional automation tools, including another Twitter bot that converted Twitter threads into audio for users who preferred listening instead of reading.

Beyond validating his belief that software built from Nigeria could serve users anywhere in the world, Getvideobot also taught him one of the most important lessons of his entrepreneurial journey: distribution matters as much as the product itself.

Without a marketing budget, he manually searched Twitter for posts from users asking how to download videos and replied to them with links to his bot.

Every reply introduced the product to a few more people, who in turn recommended it to others. What started as manual outreach gradually snowballed into hundreds of thousands of followers.

He carried that lesson into his next venture. In 2020, he launched RapidSave (formerly Redditsave), a tool that allowed users to download videos from Reddit. Like Getvideobot, it solved a problem that was not tied to any one country or market.

Over the next five years, more than 40 million people used the platform. At its peak, RapidSave generated more than $10,000 in monthly revenue.

Building enterprise-scale software

In 2021, while looking for his next idea, Okugbe noticed another problem. Companies and individuals that wanted to use open-source wiki software often struggled with the technical requirements, deployment and maintenance. 

To simplify the process, he launched Hostwiki, a managed hosting service that handled the technical complexity for customers for a fee. 

“Working on that, I realised that the product I was helping people build was not getting maintained,” he says.

Instead of continuing to build a business around software he couldn’t improve himself, he decided to create a better alternative. That decision became the foundation for Docmost.

Docmost demanded patience. Existing wiki platforms had already established themselves in the market, meaning users would only switch if the new product matched the features they already relied on while offering a better overall experience.

He spent the next 12 months building exactly that. When Docmost launched in June 2024, he returned to the distribution principles he had refined over the years.

Rather than hoping users would discover the product on their own, he introduced it directly to developer communities on Hacker News and Reddit, where early adopters regularly discuss new software.

Users appreciated that Docmost arrived with many of the features they expected from mature wiki software rather than requiring months of updates before it became usable. As more people adopted the platform, recommendations began spreading organically across Reddit and other developer communities. Within a short time, the project had crossed 2,000 GitHub stars.

Today, Docmost has more than 21,000 GitHub stars, over four million downloads and is used by governments, public institutions and private companies around the world.

The product’s success, however, was never meant to end with an active open-source community. Many open-source projects rely on donations from users to sustain development, but Okugbe knew he wanted to build a business around Docmost. 

Instead of asking the community for financial support, he focused on building enough value that organisations would eventually be willing to pay for commercial features and services.

That commercial journey began in 2025 when Docmost was formally registered as a business, allowing him to begin developing its commercial offering.

For Okugbe, monetisation has never been something to think about after launch. Rather, it is something that should influence how a product is built from the very beginning.

In his early years, he admits he built products partly because that was what many independent developers were doing. Today, he spends considerably more time understanding problems before writing code.

Sometimes an idea comes from using an existing product and believing it can be made significantly better. Other times, it comes from researching a problem until a gap in the market becomes obvious. Either way, the goal remains building something that people genuinely need.

What AI can’t do for builders

AI tools have made building software significantly easier than it was when Okugbe started learning on a feature phone more than a decade ago. Today, anyone with an idea can generate code, design interfaces and launch prototypes in a fraction of the time it once took.

But while the barriers to building have fallen, Okugbe believes the harder part of entrepreneurship remains unchanged.

“With AI, there’s a difference between building a product and taking it to market,” he says. “That requires discipline and tenacity.”

In his view, AI has created a generation of builders who can create products quickly but often stop there. Many never spend enough time understanding their market, talking to users or figuring out how to turn a useful product into a sustainable business.

More than a decade after he first discovered web development through a mobile website builder, Okugbe still sees himself as someone learning through the act of building. The tools have changed, the products have become more sophisticated and the audiences have grown from local users to millions around the world, but the underlying philosophy remains consistent.