We taught you how to sell. Now we're building the machine that sells.

For the past five years, our founder, Joel Amawhe, has been teaching Nigerian business owners how to sell. First as Joel On Demand, then as Sell & Shine Academy, and since 2024 under Bizthom. More than 13,000 people have been through SWOF and EVAA, and SWOF students alone have reported an estimated ₦20 billion in sales.

We're proud of that. But over the years, one thing kept bothering us. Students would learn the strategies, get fired up, then go back to their businesses and hit a wall. Not because they hadn't learned, but because the tools they sold with weren't built for how Nigerians buy.

Customers here want to negotiate. They trust what other buyers say more than any website. They'd rather send a WhatsApp message than fill in a form, and they'll ask "how much?" and vanish. Most commerce tools were designed for a different kind of shopper, and our students were paying for that in lost sales.

At some point, teaching more stopped being the answer.

A new direction

In October, we made a decision. Joel's courses moved back under his own name at joelamawhe.com, where existing students keep full access. He told that story himself in the first Commando Dispatch. Bizthom became something else: a technology company building commerce software for African merchants.

What we're building is simple to describe and hard to do well: tools that help sellers turn interest into payment. A website designed around how Nigerians actually buy, ways to close sales in the conversations where they really happen, and the tools to run everything behind the sale in one place. Everything we've taught for five years, built into software that does the work.

Starting today: private beta

Tonight, on the last day of the year, we're showing the earliest version of Bizthom to a small group of our students and inviting them in as our first testers. They'll set up real stores, sell real products, and tell us everything that breaks or confuses them, so we can fix it before anyone else sees it.

It's early, and it's far from finished. But it's the most important thing we've ever built, and we'd rather build it with the people we've taught than for them.

If you'd like to be among the next to try Bizthom, join the waitlist at bizthom.com.

Here's to 2026.

The Bizthom Team