How Coachli is building the infrastructure behind Africa's growing creator economy

For years, African creators have had a problem that Western tools could not solve. A course creator in Lagos cannot easily accept payments from a student in Kenya, let alone from other parts of the world. A finance coach in South Africa cannot run subscriptions without stitching together five different tools. An Anambra-based tutor cannot host live classes with multiple attendees without technical issues. And most critically, international payment processors were designed for businesses with US and UK bank accounts, not African creators.

Millions of Africans have valuable expertise, from coaching and training to consulting, course creation, and freelance services. They have audiences on LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, X, and TikTok, but they lack the infrastructure to monetise that expertise at scale.

Western platforms like Teachable, Kajabi, Skool, and ConvertKit are built for creators in markets where payment infrastructure is mature, banking is accessible, and the default currency is Dollars or Euros/Pounds. They work beautifully in those settings, but they assume things about your market that are not true if you are building in Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, or Kigali. Moreover, African creators and freelancers selling to a global audience have always felt left out or unprioritised by the biggest payment platforms like PayPal, Stripe, Payoneer, and the rest.

Coachli was born from this gap.

The early days were about solving one problem at a time. A coach needed to take bookings, so a booking system was built. An online tutor needed to get paid, so Paystack was integrated. A creator needed to sell their digital products, so the feature was built to allow them to add their Ebooks, Audiobooks, templates, etc. With each addition, it became clear that creators were not just looking for features but for an entire operating system for their business that did not require jumping from one app to another.

"The MVP was incredibly simple, but our users showed us what they actually needed, and it turned out they needed far more than we initially planned for", said Sharon Onyinye, CEO of Coachli. It started as a simple solution to help African coaches get bookings and get paid. Three years later, it has become the all-in-one platform for an entire economy of creators, coaches, and freelancers who are turning their expertise into sustainable income across the continent.

The company has now facilitated over ₦1 billion in payouts to more than 23,000 creators across Africa. That number is evidence that knowledge is becoming currency.

"When we started, we were solving for one thing. We just wanted to make it easy for coaches to take bookings and get paid," said Sharon Onyinye, founder and CEO of Coachli, in an interview. "But as we watched how creators were using our platform, we realised we were not just building a booking tool but infrastructure for an entire category of businesses that did not have it."

That infrastructure now includes digital product hosting, 1:1 sessions, live classes with up to 1000 attendees, email automations, services listing, calendar integrations, invoicing, payment links, subscriptions, and integrations with Stripe, Paystack, and Flutterwave, covering both international and regional payment methods that most Western platforms ignore.

Freelancers have it even better because they can now list their services on Coachli, whether it is Design, Content writing, Typesetting, Ghostwriting, Digital marketing, UI/UX, Video Editing, Motion Graphics, Web Development, Social Media Management — whatever area of Freelance.

With Coachli, you don’t need to go through the typical hassle of opening a foreign bank account, getting a virtual card or paying card maintenance fees, monthly fees, etc. Neither do they get cheated out of their hard-earned money through exorbitant platform fees. Coachli is absolutely free to use, and the platform only makes money when you do. As a freelancer, your clients pay for your services in their local currency, while you receive your money in your own local currency.

None of these problems Coachli is solving is new, nor is their business model novel. However, the infrastructure to solve these problems at scale on African terms, with African payment methods, African currencies, and African pricing power, did not exist until now.

Coachli is now at an interesting point where the infrastructure is in place, the payment rails are built, and the user base is growing. The question now is what comes next.

"We have built the foundation," Onyinye said. "Now we are thinking about how to help creators go deeper, not just use Coachli to run their business, but use it to scale beyond what they thought was possible. We want them to be able to integrate Coachli with the tools they already use, like TikTok, Meta, Telegram, Google Meet, Zoom, and the rest. We’re looking at deeper integrations with social platforms, better tools for audience building and, of course, monetisation. 

Our goal is to give our users clearer pathways to go from side income to primary income, and our motivation from Day 1 is still the same. We’re building the infrastructure for African creators, coaches and freelancers, built on African terms, designed for African economics.”

Coachli's evolution reflects a broader pattern emerging across Africa's tech sector, which is that most successful startups are not copying Silicon Valley models but are solving for African realities.

Paystack solved for African payment processing. Flutterwave solved for cross-border African payments. Andela solved for African talent at global scale. And Coachli is solving for African creators' access to business infrastructure. The approach is similar: identify the gap that existing solutions did not see or ignored, and build for African economies first, then watch what emerges.

In Coachli's case, what emerged is a go-to platform for all Africans seeking to monetise their knowledge, skills and expertise. They have built something crucial for the creator economy, and that economy is still in its early stages. With over ₦1 billion processed and over 23,000 users already building on the platform, Coachli has proven its thesis that African creators will build sustainable businesses if given the tools to do so. So if you are a creator reading this and you want to monetise your knowledge, Coachli might just be the right platform for you. Sign up for free today at www.coachli.co

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