Case studyBuilding in Accra, Ghana
Menuraq
An operating system for food businesses. The menu, the order, the kitchen, the counter and the books — one system, not five products.
Built offline-first because the network here gives out, priced in the currency the market uses, and paid the way businesses actually get paid. One person built all of it.
Menuraq, as it stands todayLive capture
- Role
- Founder · Lead engineer · Designer
- Since
- 2024
- Stage
- Two years in, built solo
- Market
- Food businesses in West Africa
- Capital
- $0 outside capital
- Built on
- TypeScript · Postgres · Offline-first
The problem
A food business runs on its menu. Then the menu is asked to become a website, then an ordering app, then a kitchen screen, then a till, then a ledger.
This market sells each of those as a separate product — separate logins, separate databases, and a reconciliation step the owner does by hand at the end of the week. Meanwhile the network drops and the power cuts, and software that assumes a perfect connection simply stops being software and becomes another thing that doesn't work.
The product
One system, six business types
The menu engine
Items, prices, rules and templates — the single layer that ordering, the kitchen, the counter and the ledger all read from.
Ordering & POS
Counter, kitchen display, delivery, tabs. Writes land locally and reconcile the moment the network returns.
Operations
Bookings, inventory, staff shifts, night audit. The housekeeping a venue needs the same system to remember.
Money
Invoices, deposits and payment tracking. The system tracks the money honestly instead of pretending to bank it.
Growth
Loyalty, promotions, reviews and feedback — collected where the owner actually counts them.
Shaped to the venue
Six business types and nine operating modes, so a caterer hears 'event' and a hotel hears 'folio', not each other's words.
Every surface reads the same items, prices and rules. Nothing is reconciled twice, because nothing ever lived in two places.
How it works
Four decisions the whole thing rests on
What I'm building now
The daily work is the unglamorous part: multi-branch operations, sync that survives a dead network, and payments that track the money without pretending to bank it. The system stops being something I explain and starts being something a business opens every morning.
Technology
Built lean, on boring infrastructure
No outside capital means every choice earns its keep. Postgres as the single source of truth. Row-level security as the boundary between tenants. Idempotent writes so a retry is a no-op, not a double charge.
- TypeScript
- Python
- Next.js
- PostgreSQL
- Supabase
- Row-level security
- Offline-first sync
- Idempotent writes
- Multi-tenant architecture
- Mobile money payments
Vision
Most food businesses in this market run on paper, WhatsApp and memory. The vision is boring in the best way: a system that always works, knows its own numbers, and can be trusted with the money.
Shipped in Menuraq — every surface built by one person