NaijaBased crosses 2,000 businesses — and we're just getting started

What started as two city hubs in Akure and Ibadan has grown into a national platform connecting thousands of Nigerian businesses with their communities. Here's what we've learned.

From two cities to the whole country

When we launched AkureBased.fun and IbadanBased.fun in 2023, the goal was simple: give local businesses a place to be found online. No complicated dashboards, no expensive listing fees. Just a clean directory where a business owner in Akure could say we exist, here is what we do, here is how to reach us.

We didn't expect what happened next.

Within weeks, businesses from cities we hadn't even targeted started reaching out. Owerri. Abuja. Enugu. Lagos. The message was always the same — when are you coming to our city?

The decision to go national

Rather than building city by city — which would have taken years — we made a decision in early 2024 to merge everything into one platform: NaijaBased.fun.

The architecture had to change completely. Instead of separate codebases per city, we built a category, city, and state-based system where every business listing sits under the right geographic and sector hierarchy. A catering company in Port Harcourt appears under Nigeria, then Rivers State, then Port Harcourt, then Catering Services.

That structure does two things. It makes discovery natural for users. And it makes every single listing page discoverable through search — which means organic traffic, not paid ads.

What 2,000 businesses looks like

Two thousand sounds like a number. But each one is a real business owner who took twenty minutes out of their day to fill in a form and trust us with their brand. Caterers, accountants, construction firms, event planners, tailors, gym owners, real estate agents.

The sectors that surprised us most were the informal ones — the tailors, the food vendors, the small logistics operators. These are businesses that have never had an online presence and may never have been able to afford one. NaijaBased gave them one for free.

What's next

Two thousand is not the ceiling. It's barely the beginning.

We're working on claimed listings with business dashboards, verified reviews, and premium features for businesses that want more visibility. We're also building deeper integration with GymProHub — so that every gym on NaijaBased can, with one click, activate their full CRM and membership management system.

If your business isn't listed yet, visit naijabased.fun and get on the map.