Victor Dickson Is Building a Better Way for African Businesses to Sell Online

Nigerian businesses have already figured out how to get online.

For many of them, the storefront is Instagram. The sales conversation happens on WhatsApp. A customer sees a product, sends a message, asks for the price, confirms availability, makes a payment and waits for delivery.

It is fast. It is accessible. And it has opened the door to entrepreneurship for people who may never have had the resources to build a conventional retail business.

But there is a problem.

The tools that help a business attract customers are not necessarily the tools that help it manage those customers.

As orders increase, conversations become harder to track. Questions are repeated. Payments have to be confirmed manually. Inventory becomes difficult to monitor. Follow-ups are missed. A business owner who started with a handful of customers can eventually find themselves spending most of the day inside WhatsApp, trying to keep the business moving.

This is the gap Victor Dickson set out to address.

The founder of MYSHOPLET is building technology for a generation of African businesses that did not necessarily begin with websites, physical stores or sophisticated business-management systems. They began with social media, messaging apps and a phone.

His question is not whether these businesses should be selling through WhatsApp and Instagram.

They already are.

The question is what infrastructure they need to grow.

That question sits at the centre of MYSHOPLET.

The platform provides businesses with tools for creating online storefronts and managing elements of their operations, including orders, payments, inventory and delivery. Its approach is particularly focused on social commerce, where the customer journey often begins and ends within platforms such as WhatsApp and Instagram.

The idea came from observing the practical difficulties sellers were encountering.

A business owner could have customers but still lose sales because a message went unanswered. They could generate revenue but struggle to know exactly how much they were making. They could have products available but lose track of their inventory.

The problem, in other words, was no longer simply getting customers.

It was managing the business that came after getting them.

That distinction is central to Dickson’s thinking.

Rather than treating social media as merely a marketing channel, MYSHOPLET is built around the reality that, for many small businesses, social platforms have already become part of their commerce infrastructure.

The next question is how technology can make that infrastructure work better.

Artificial intelligence has become an increasingly important part of that answer.

MYSHOPLET’s AI Sales Agent is designed to handle customer enquiries, provide product information and assist with the purchasing process, including through WhatsApp. Instead of requiring the business owner to personally respond to every routine question, the system can handle parts of that interaction.

For a small business, that is not simply a technology upgrade.

It can mean the difference between a business that depends entirely on the availability of its owner and one that can continue responding to customers when the owner is busy, or asleep.

This focus on practical problems is particularly interesting when considered alongside Dickson’s own journey into technology.

He did not begin his professional life as a conventional software engineer.

From 2017 to 2022, he studied Industrial Chemistry at the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, where he earned his bachelor’s degree. In 2018, he also completed an HTML Fundamentals course through SoloLearn.

His formal education was in chemistry. His career, however, increasingly moved toward software development, product building and technology entrepreneurship.

Today, in addition to founding MYSHOPLET, Dickson serves as Chief Technology Officer at FavGrab, giving him experience across technology, consumer services, food and logistics.

That transition, from Industrial Chemistry into technology, is one of the less obvious parts of his story, and one that reflects a broader reality of the technology ecosystem: some builders arrive through conventional computer science pathways, while others acquire their technical skills while pursuing problems they have become determined to solve.

Dickson’s evolution into technology has ultimately been accompanied by a willingness to build things himself.

That has meant experiencing the less glamorous side of entrepreneurship too.

In the early stages of MYSHOPLET, Dickson took on many of the responsibilities required to move a young technology company forward, from product development and engineering to customer conversations, meetings and growth.

He has described periods when work stretched into the early hours of the morning, including nights when he worked until around 4 a.m. and was back up again a few hours later.

He has also shared the kinds of setbacks that are almost invisible from the outside.

During development, an outdated version of code was pushed to a shared repository, resulting in the loss of significant frontend work shortly before launch.

For a small team, losing days of development at such a critical point can be more than a technical inconvenience. It can affect timelines, morale and the confidence that comes with knowing a product is almost ready.

But the incident also became part of the learning process of building the company.

There is another part of the story that is even less visible: how the founder finances the journey.

Dickson has publicly described MYSHOPLET as a bootstrapped startup and recently shared that he is looking for a software development role to help generate income while continuing to fund the company.

That admission offers a different perspective on what entrepreneurship can look like.

There is a tendency to associate technology startups with funding rounds, accelerators and rapid expansion. But many founders begin much closer to the ground, building with limited resources and making difficult decisions about how to sustain both themselves and the companies they are trying to grow.

Dickson is navigating that reality while continuing to build.

Even his job search became a problem he approached through technology. He built a tool to help identify and rank engineering opportunities based on his experience, turning a personal challenge into another opportunity to experiment with software.

There is a consistency to that instinct.

When he encounters a problem, he looks for a system that can solve it.

That mindset has shaped both his work and his ambitions.

Through MYSHOPLET, Dickson is not simply trying to create another platform where businesses can display products online. He is trying to address what happens after a business begins attracting customers.

That matters because the barriers facing many small businesses are no longer purely about access to the internet.

They are increasingly about what comes next.

Can the owner respond quickly enough? Can orders be organised? Can inventory be tracked? Can customer relationships be managed? Can the business continue functioning when the owner is unavailable? And, eventually, can the business grow without every process depending on one person?

These are operational questions, but they are also growth questions.

A business that cannot manage its increasing volume of customers eventually reaches a ceiling.

This is where Dickson sees the larger opportunity.

Africa’s digital commerce story is often framed around getting more businesses online. But the next challenge is helping the businesses that are already online become more efficient, more organised and more capable of scaling.

Technology built for that reality could become increasingly important.

Dickson’s ambition reflects that broader opportunity. He has described his goal as helping shape the future of commerce in Africa, and MYSHOPLET represents his attempt to contribute to that future by building for the entrepreneurs already creating it.

His own path, from Industrial Chemistry to software development, from early web-development training to building a commerce technology company, has been anything but conventional.

But perhaps unconventional paths are increasingly becoming normal in a technology ecosystem that is still being built.

There is still a long way to go.

Dickson is building while bootstrapping, learning while scaling and figuring out, like many founders, how to turn a promising idea into a sustainable company.

But perhaps that is what makes the journey worth watching.

He is not building for a hypothetical African entrepreneur.

He is building for the thousands already selling from their phones, answering customers in their DMs and trying to turn small businesses into something bigger.

That is the future of commerce Dickson wants to help build.