About

I’m Uche Nnamani, founder and CEO of Fitness Space and co-founder of AERA.

I’m a former Law student and alumnus of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where I studied Law before leaving to pursue entrepreneurship. I live in Enugu, Nigeria, and when I’m not building, you’ll often find me running. I run marathons.

I build around problems, not products.

My approach is simple: get close to the problem, find the people experiencing it, build the cheapest useful experiment, watch what they actually do, learn, and only then decide what technology needs to exist.

Fitness Space began with WhatsApp groups and has grown into AI-powered technology for healthier living. Today, it has more than 1,000 users across Nigeria, the UK, Canada, the USA, Ukraine and Rwanda, and has been accepted into Microsoft for Startups.

At AERA, we apply much of the same thinking to company building. We work with promising African founders from idea and validation through product, traction and scale. Today, 10 founders building with AERA have products accepted into Microsoft for Startups.

How I think

I believe the first version of something has one job: teach you something.

Sometimes that means starting with WhatsApp instead of an app. Sometimes it means doing things manually before automating them. I would rather discover that an assumption is wrong in a week than spend six months turning it into beautiful software.

I also believe consistency is a cheat code. Companies, fitness, running, learning. Big outcomes are often small actions repeated for an unreasonable amount of time.

Running reinforces that for me. A marathon is 42.2 kilometres, but you don’t run all 42.2 at once. You run the kilometre you’re in, then the next one. I think building companies works much the same way.

Outside building

Books are cheat codes. Someone can spend twenty years learning something and compress those lessons into a few hundred pages. I get to borrow those years.

I love Kanye West, and I’m fascinated by people who refuse to stay inside the boundaries of one creative discipline.

I think rappers are poets.

And for me, 2Pac is the greatest rapper of all time. He died young, but decades later the work is still alive. I find something profound in that.

People die. Work can outlive them.

Maybe that’s part of why I build. And why I write.

I write about products, founders, behaviour, technology, community and the things I’m learning while building.

Not because I have everything figured out.

Writing is one of the ways I figure it out.