Vestafi turns 1 year: What we saw.

Today, the 20th of June, Vestafi turns one. And for this letter, I do not want to talk to you in numbers. I have done that before. Today I simply want to tell you the story of how Vestafi came to be, because the story is something that still surprises me alot. .

It started with a problem I lived inside of for fifteen years. The first time I arrived in Kampala city, I had nowhere to sleep. I was a young man arriving to apply to university, and back then you had to physically travel to Kampala city, hand in your results slip, line up at different universities of choice and wait. This meant that, this process required you to have a place to sleep. During this fateful period, I found a single night at a hostel through my uncle, but the rule was you could only stay one night. Which meant the second night, I had to figure it out all over again.

That feeling never really left me. Over the years I came face to face with the lack of accommodation again and again, and I kept asking myself how I could permanently solve it, first for myself, but then I began to notice I was not alone. This is not a Kampala problem. It is a human one. In the wealthiest cities in the world, a person can lose a job today and be homeless tomorrow. Accommodation is one of the most universal struggles we have, and yet we throw the word housing around so loosely that we stop seeing the people standing underneath it.

Years later, I finally bought a small apartment of my own. And almost immediately I felt something other than relief. I felt the weight of how expensive it was, and I thought, how many people could ever afford this? Over coffee one day, I asked a friend, who would later become my co-founder, a simple question. Could she afford an apartment right now? She said no. As we sipped coffee and chatted over this and that, we kept bouncing back to the question of accommodation. Why was it so difficult to permanently solve the accommodation problem for oneself. 

To be clear, accommodation in itself should not be used interchangeably with ‘housing’. 

What if you did not have to wait? What if you could co-own a fraction of an apartment, enjoy the benefits instantly, all while building your portfolio towards 100% ownership of the same property?

At that time there were companies letting people pay for apartments in installments, but they made you wait years before you could enjoy any of the benefits. You paid and paid, and the reward always lived somewhere far in the future. We decided to do the opposite. With Vestafi, the moment you begin, you begin to belong. You start small, you build your portfolio over time, and you enjoy the benefits from day one, not someday.

I will be honest about what it cost to get here. We did not launch with glamour. There was no Vestafi for the first several months, only people, a conviction and an excel sheet. We launched on a Zoom call, and I sat there in a white long sleeved shirt and a red necktie explaining this idea to more than a hundred people, praying they would see what I saw. Some did. Some of our very first users came from that call. But most people did not get it right away, and that broke my heart a little each time, because I could see it so clearly in my own head.

So we did the hard, unglamorous work. Hundreds upon hundreds of calls. If I was not on a call with a customer, I was on a call with a developer, or a regulator, or someone trying to understand whether we were legitimate. Day after day, back to back, until I was so exhausted I almost could not continue. There were stretches where things were genuinely not good and I had to make choices that frightened me. As the excel sheet bulged into unmanageable columns and rows, so did the strong need to build a more robust self-serving platform for our members. 

And then, around nine months in, Vestafi began to see daylight. More apartments listed. More people joining. And somewhere in there, the explaining got easier, because we finally understood our own dream well enough to hand it to someone else in plain words.

So here is where I stand today, one year in. I am one hundred percent certain of where this is going. The team is more alive and more pumped than they have ever been, and the society we are building is leaning forward together, eyes fixed on a future we can already feel. We are setting out to make Vestafi the yardstick, the benchmark for how Africa invests in property. Not a small ambition. The right one.

If you are reading this, it means the gospel of Vestafi has reached you. I believe that if you are not yet one of us, one day you will be. Because this was never really about apartments. It was always about belonging, about the door that should have been open the first night I had nowhere to sleep.

Thank you for paying attention. Thank you for being part of this.

With everything,

Hakiza Ronald