It has been 14 years since Mark Essien launched his first startup, Hotels.ng. He is, by all accounts, an OG tech bro in Nigeria, having raised $1.2 million for the company at the time.
Hotels.ng has not just survived; it has thrived over the years, recording about 20,000 orders a month.
“Hotels.ng is doing great. I would consider it a stable, profitable business. It helped me understand the African travel space and build the required relationships,” Essien says.
This keen understanding of the African travel space is why his new startup, Tripdesk — an AI-driven travel management platform — has already generated $2.3 million in revenue just four months after launch.
Interestingly, about 30% of this revenue is profit.
For a product that has made that much money almost immediately after launch, it was surprisingly easy to build.
“There’s nothing technically crazy about it. It is a simple piece of software.”
After 14 years of building Hotels.ng, it is not surprising that Essien has executed the launch of Tripdesk so well that it is already profitable. However, another factor has been key to the success of the new product.
The talent pipeline that built Tripdesk
HNG is Essien’s secret weapon: a pipeline of trained individuals who can ship products quickly.
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“I doubt that there are many people who have more access to Nigerian talent than me,” he says.
Founded by Mark Essien in 2016, HNG is a fast-paced, three-month remote bootcamp designed to train, test, and recruit top-tier software developers, designers, and product managers across Africa and beyond.
According to Essien, HNG has given him access to exceptionally talented people over the years, many of whom he can reach immediately. “When there’s something new to be built, I can build an army in a week.”
Tripdesk, however, took longer than a week to build. It took about a year—not because of a lack of talent, but because of the bureaucracies that come with shipping new products when investors are involved.
“I had to carry the old investors along,” Essien says.
Another reason was the volume of customer feedback, which took time to gather and led to multiple iterations of the product.
Still, having a talent pipeline at your fingertips comes in handy. A similar approach was used by Amadou Daffé, the founder of Gebeya Dala, one of the more interesting AI startups of 2025. The company, which initially started as something comparable to Andela, gave Daffé access to some of the best talent on the continent.
“If you have invested in training people for the past eight years, you can always tap into that pool when it has solidified, and that’s what I did. The amount of talent in Nigeria is insane. There are so many good people—comparable to world-class talent—who are underpriced. I’m lucky that our programme has evolved in a way that makes it easy for us to assemble a team.”
Essien is deeply thankful for HNG and believes companies should invest in building their own talent pipelines and even monetising them. HNG, for example, is a profitable venture, making about ₦15 million every month and costing roughly ₦2 million to run.
Understanding Tripdesk
Tripdesk was not created because Essien was looking for another shiny product to build. Instead, it emerged from a need that Hotels.ng’s VIP customers were consistently demanding.
For years, Hotels.ng ran a VIP unit that served large enterprise clients. What these companies needed was not just accommodation, but a way to manage the entire travel process.
Essien describes it as “bespoke travel arrangements.”
Requests had to pass through multiple approval layers—line managers, controllers, and finance teams—before a single trip could happen. Invoices had to be split across hotels, meals, transport, and reimbursements. In some cases, employees travelled first and submitted receipts later, creating even more administrative friction.
“For one person to travel from Lagos to Abeokuta, have a meal, have a drink, and come back, the administrative headache is insane,” Essien says.
At a certain scale, these processes begin to break down. Finance teams struggle to reconcile expenses across departments and locations, while approvals slow to a crawl.
Tripdesk was built to sit where Hotels.ng could. Instead of forcing organisations to adapt to a rigid product, Tripdesk reflects their internal workflows. An employee makes a travel request. A manager approves it. A controller signs off on the budget.
Expenses are tracked, policies are enforced, invoices are generated, and reimbursements are handled in one place.
The “AI” in Tripdesk works quietly in the background. Rather than generating content or running complex models, it acts as a decision assistant. The system interprets company policies, departmental rules, and contextual information, presenting approvers with everything they need to make a decision instantly. What once took twenty minutes of cross-checking documents can now be done in seconds.
By pulling these fragmented processes into a single platform, Tripdesk reduces friction for employees and restores control for finance teams. The product makes money by charging monthly subscription fees and service charges on the bookings.
Interesting growth trajectory
While Tripdesk has already generated $2.3 million in revenue, it serves only between twenty and thirty customers. According to Essien, a single customer represents a significant jump in revenue for the company.
Tripdesk serves organisations with up to 4,000 employees spread across different regions. However, the downside of a business that generates most of its revenue from a small number of clients is that losing even one can have a material impact.
Essien agrees, but says Tripdesk’s customers value the product so highly that churn is unlikely anytime soon.
“One of our customers wanted us to join them across five countries in West Africa because we were only operating in their Nigerian unit,” he says.
Essien is already thinking of Tripdesk as a pan-African product, and expansion plans may not be far off. Not only are customers asking for it, but the nature of the business means the pool of potential clients is relatively small, and competition could eventually intensify.
Still, Essien is not particularly worried. “Enterprise sales is very difficult,” he says. Rather than warning competitors off entirely, he offers a piece of advice: avoid the telcos.
“Everybody sees the telcos, and everybody knows the telcos. But they have people on the inside who are already solving most of their problems.”
Instead, he suggests targeting large companies that operate quietly and sit further down the value chain. While Tripdesk’s potential customer base may be small, it exists, and with Hotels.ng acting as a funnel for these clients, any competitor would need similar leverage to seriously challenge Essien’s new enterprise.
