Why we built Tesha: a WhatsApp-first marketplace for Zimbabwe

The problem: finding local services in Zimbabwe is broken

If you've tried to book a cleaner, plumber, gardener, electrician or maid in Harare, you know the routine. You ask the family WhatsApp group. Someone forwards a number that's two suburbs away, charges twice the going rate and may or may not reply. Service-provider classifieds went stale years ago. InDrive and Bolt have made transport easy, but home services have stayed offline.

Providers have the same problem in reverse: skilled tradespeople in Harare, Bulawayo and Mutare have nowhere to advertise except word of mouth. They lose hours sitting between jobs because they don't have a steady stream of clients. The good ones get fully booked through their network and the rest go invisible.

Why WhatsApp (and why a separate app is the wrong answer)

Every Zimbabwean with a phone has WhatsApp. It's where you talk to family, run businesses, share school notices and trade information. The numbers back it up: WhatsApp accounts for around 44% of all mobile internet traffic in Zimbabwe — the highest share on the continent — and mobile is how 98% of Zimbabweans get online in the first place.

Part of that is cultural. But a big part of it is economics. A full data bundle in Zimbabwe is expensive enough that millions of households simply don't buy one. What they buy instead is a WhatsApp-only bundle — Econet, NetOne and Telecel all sell them at a fraction of the price of general data. A monthly WhatsApp bundle on Econet runs around US$3 for 500MB and a few voice minutes; a comparable general-data bundle costs several times more. NetOne and Telecel offer the same kind of social-media SKUs aimed at the same reality.

The upshot: for a meaningful slice of the country, WhatsApp isn't just the most-used app — it's the only app their network plan reliably covers. Asking those users to download a new app to book a plumber doesn't just ask them to reroute a daily habit. It asks them to spend money on data they don't currently have. WhatsApp, by contrast, is already paid for.

That's not the only reason we built on WhatsApp. It also already solves the things service apps usually struggle with: identity (you have a phone number), trust (you can see the chat history), file sharing (photos of the broken thing), and reachability (notifications that actually arrive). But the data-cost reality is the answer to "why didn't you just build an app?" — it's why we never seriously considered it.

Chat naturally — no menus, no buttons, no friction

Many "WhatsApp businesses" hide a clunky menu system behind the chat — type 1 for cleaning, 2 for plumbing, send your name, send your phone number. We didn't want any of that. Tesha is powered by an AI assistant that understands plain language. You can write:

"I need someone to clean my house tomorrow at 2pm in Avondale"

or

"Geyser is leaking, hot water gone, can someone come this evening — Mount Pleasant"

or even a smart re-booking like "book the cleaner I had last Tuesday for the same time next week" — and the assistant figures out what you need, asks any follow-up questions in plain English, and matches you with available providers. No menu trees, no dropdowns, no five-step wizards. The same chat works for clients booking jobs and providers managing them.

English, Shona, Ndebele — chat in the language you think in

Most apps in Zimbabwe operate in English by default, which means a lot of people are filling out forms in their second or third language. Tesha understands Shona and Ndebele as well as English. You can write "ndinoda mubatsiri wekuchenesa imba" or "ngifuna umuntu wokucleana indlu" and the assistant responds in the same language. For booking a household service, that lower-friction path matters: it's the difference between sending a request now or putting it off.

More languages are on the roadmap as we expand to other parts of southern Africa.

Vetting and ratings: keeping providers reliable

Marketplaces only work if the providers are trustworthy. Every provider on Tesha goes through ID verification, basic background checks, and rating-based oversight after every job. Providers with consistently low ratings drop out of matches; the ones with strong feedback rise to the top. We don't bury bad ratings — they're part of the visible profile when you book.

Clients pay providers directly, so we never sit between you and your money. Tesha is free for clients. Providers run on a credit system: 100 free credits when they sign up (valid 3 months), and after that $1 buys 20 credits, which is what they spend to accept jobs.

What's coming next

Tesha is moving fast. A few of the features we're building right now:

• Voice-first booking: send a WhatsApp voice note in any language and the assistant transcribes, understands, and books — useful when typing isn't practical (driving, cooking, eyes on a kid).
• Audio responses: the assistant replies with voice notes when you do, so the conversation feels natural rather than transactional.
• Provider tooling: smarter scheduling, calendar sync, automated reminders, in-chat job summaries.
• Expansion across the SADC region.

How to start

If you've got something around the house that needs sorting, send a WhatsApp message to +263 77 186 0190 with what you need. The assistant takes it from there. If you're a service provider, the same number works — say "I want to register as a provider" and you'll get the 100-free-credits onboarding straight away.

We're a Harare-based team building for Zimbabwe first. Feedback (especially the angry kind) lands directly in the founders' WhatsApp.