Habari. I’m Julius.
I’m a photographer, a builder of software, and an early-morning runner, based in Tanzania.
The camera came first
Long before I wrote any software, I was the person at the back of the room with a camera, waiting for the moment people forget they are being photographed. That is still my favourite moment. It has taken me across Africa documenting work for teams at the European Union, the African Wildlife Foundation, the World Bank and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — and also to weddings, send-offs and small family shops that never make the news. Different budgets, same job: pay attention, and tell the truth kindly.
Then I started building the tools I wished existed
Somewhere along the way I got tired of watching good people lose whole days to bad systems — a shop owner copying receipts into a notebook at midnight, a creator handing a third of every sale to a platform that did nothing for them. So I started building. I am not interested in software that impresses other developers. I want software my aunt can use, on the phone she already owns, with two bars of signal.
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Nyota ✨
A storefront you actually own. Sell courses, e-books, podcasts or templates — your customer pays with M-Pesa, Airtel Money, Mixx or a card and receives the file immediately. No monthly fee, no commission, no account to create.
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Stoki 📦
Stock and sales, minus the expensive POS machine. Know what you have, what sold, and what is quietly disappearing — from the phone already in your pocket.
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Karani 🧾
Every business has a silent thief: paperwork. Scan a receipt, Karani verifies it with TRA and files it, so nothing you paid for goes unclaimed.
Try Karani
Business, the honest version
I have learned more from the things that did not work than from the ones that did — and I try to talk about both. That is part of why Money Mindset exists: monthly conversations about money, the kind we usually only have in whispers. Building a business here is not a stage talk. It is pricing your work fairly, filing by the 20th, staying patient through a slow month, and choosing customers you would actually want to meet again.
Nobody builds alone
The best things I have made started as a conversation with someone else — over coffee, in a WhatsApp group, at the end of a morning run. So I keep the door open. I share what I learn while I am still learning it, I answer messages from people I have never met, and I would rather teach someone to build the thing than sell them the thing. You do not need to be technical, funded, fluent in English, or “ready”. Curiosity is the whole entry requirement.
Let’s make something together
If any of this sounds like your kind of thing, I would love to hear from you. Here is how it usually starts:
- You have something worth documenting — a project, an event, a day that matters. Let’s shoot it.
- You are drowning in a manual process. Let’s automate the boring part.
- You are building something and want a second pair of eyes — or a co-conspirator.
- You just want to talk shop — cameras, code, business, running. Coffee is on me.
No pitch deck needed. Say hello, tell me what you are working on, and we will figure out the rest together.