It started with a business idea that had nothing to do with international trade. I was looking into starting an inventory storage and FBA prep business, so naturally I went where e-commerce people go to talk about their problems: Reddit and Facebook groups. I was there to learn the industry. What I found was something else entirely.
Post after post, the same themes kept appearing. Sellers who had placed orders with suppliers overseas and received nothing. Manufacturers who had spent weeks corresponding with a buyer who turned out not to know what they actually needed. Shipments turned away at ports, products rejected by Amazon and Walmart because of missing documentation that nobody had told the seller about. Suppliers in different time zones struggling to communicate with buyers who expected instant replies. Buyers who couldn't tell a legitimate factory from a broker pretending to be one.
It was chaos. And honestly, I love chaos. I also love a good spreadsheet. So I started taking notes.
The problem on both sides
What struck me wasn't that the problems existed. It was that they were so preventable. The information was out there. The solutions existed. But there was no trusted layer connecting the two sides of the transaction. Buyers couldn't verify suppliers. Suppliers couldn't filter serious buyers from time-wasters. And neither side had clear guidance on what compliance, documentation, and platform requirements actually looked like in practice.
I kept thinking about the suppliers specifically. Small manufacturers in India, Kenya, Vietnam, trying to reach the US and EU markets, capable of producing genuinely good products, but without the infrastructure or connections to get in front of the right buyers. And on the other side, e-sellers and small businesses wanting to source from these regions but having no reliable way to know who to trust.
The platforms that existed either listed everyone with no real verification, or charged so much that only large established players could participate. Neither side of the market was being served well. And nobody was trying to fix it without taking advantage of one side or the other.
The decision to build
I decided I wanted to build something that didn't take advantage of either side. Something that helped manufacturers and distributors in emerging markets reach serious buyers without having to fight through noise and fraud. And something that gave buyers a way to source with confidence, knowing the suppliers they were talking to had actually been checked by someone who had been there in person.
The on-the-ground piece was the key insight. Remote verification is easy to fake. Certifications can be purchased. Websites can be built overnight. But if you actually visit a facility, talk to the people running it, and look at how they operate, that's much harder to fake. So I reached out to friends living in Kenya and India and asked if they'd help me build a small local team. I started putting feelers out in Vietnam. And we started working.
Those first few weeks
Those early weeks were genuinely exciting. We were like kids in a candy store. I was researching, documenting, building out the compliance rules engine, drafting what the verification process should look like. I was sending everything to my partners and getting feedback from the ground team about cultural adjustments, about how things actually work versus how they look on paper, about what manufacturers in each country actually needed to feel respected in this process.
Things slowed down for a while. Life happens, family engagements, the kind of things that remind you that a startup is just one part of a real life. But we kept working. Slower sometimes, but always forward.
What we want Dyraja to be
We're still early. The platform is in beta, the waitlist is open, and we're building. But the thing I want most hasn't changed since those first Reddit posts: I want Dyraja to genuinely help people. Manufacturers who deserve a real shot at global markets. Buyers who deserve to source without being scammed or blindsided. Both sides deserve a platform that treats them like partners, not just users to extract value from.
We also have big plans for where this goes. The compliance tool is just the start. The verification process is just the start. We're building toward something that makes cross-border trade between emerging markets and the West more trustworthy, more transparent, and more accessible to people who have been locked out of it.
That's why we built Dyraja. And that's why we're still building it.