How We Got Here

Before you start: try this one in dark mode. It just feels right.

Hey, welcome.

My name is Laughter, and let me tell you a quick story.

Where it started

In 2020, De-Virtuosphere was building digital business cards, QR codes and catalogues.

That was where we started.

By 2022, we had begun paying more attention to education. One of the first things we built was an attendance system, and my dad’s school was the first place we tried it.

At the time, it was just attendance.

But getting inside a school changed the way we saw the problem.

Attendance led us to identity. Identity led us to student records. Then came teachers, classes, parents, payments, academics and everything else that has to work for a school to run properly.

That first system eventually grew into cards schools now use for identity and attendance.

So far, we have produced more than 2,000 of them.

And what started with my dad’s school did not stay there.

Today, Virtuo is powering four schools.

Then the pieces started connecting

Around the same time, we were also building for higher institutions.

We got the opportunity to process student fees, which took us deeper into payments and student operations.

Across the institutions we have worked with, we have now processed more than ₦50 million across over 21,000 successful transactions.

For a while, we still saw these as separate things.

Attendance was one product. Payments were another. Student management was another.

Then something became obvious:

They were all parts of the same institution.

A student should not become a different record when you move from attendance to payments or academics. Teachers, parents and administrators should not all be working with different versions of the same information.

That thinking became Virtuo — one system built around how the institution actually works.

Then we tried the same thinking somewhere else

Hospitality.

Instead of building only a reservation tool, we approached it the same way we had approached schools:

Understand how the facility actually runs, then build around those operations.

We shipped the system into a live hospitality facility, where it became part of the day-to-day operation.

More than 200 reservations have already gone through it.

And just like with the schools, it did not stop with the first facility.

The same hospitality system has now moved into another facility.

That mattered to us because we were beginning to see the same thing happen twice.

Something we first learnt by working closely with one institution could become a product that worked for the next one.

We were no longer just learning how to build school software or hotel software.

We were learning how to understand an organisation, find where things were disconnected and build systems that could be used by other organisations facing the same problems.

And the problems kept leading us forward

Once we got closer to how these institutions worked, other problems became harder to ignore.

Schools and hotels both have buildings, assets, repairs and maintenance to deal with. One of the schools we work with raised that need with us too.

So we started building around facilities management.

Then came examinations.

One of our schools needed to prepare for the move towards computer-based examinations. But we did not think something as important as an examination should become unusable simply because the internet became unreliable.

So we built the examination system to work offline and synchronise when connectivity becomes available again.

And just like attendance, school management and hospitality, the solution does not have to remain with the institution where the problem first appeared.

That became how we build

Over time, we realised there was a pattern in almost everything we were doing.

We get close enough to an institution to understand the problem properly.

We solve it.

Then we make the solution repeatable.

What started in one school is now powering four.

What we learnt from one hospitality facility is already being used in the next.

And every new institution should benefit from what we learnt from the ones before it.

That is the point.

For the first few years, we were building the pieces separately.

Now we can see that they belong together.

Now we can see the pattern

Education is still where we have gone deepest, and there is still a lot more we want to build around how schools actually operate.

But the goal is not to solve these problems for one institution at a time.

A school should be able to plug into what we have already built.

A hospitality facility should be able to do the same.

And the next institution should not have to start from zero.

That is probably the clearest way to explain what De-Virtuosphere is becoming.

We learn from real institutions.

We build around how they actually work.

Then we turn what we have learnt into systems the next institution can use too.

It took us a few years to see the pattern.

Now we do.

If you run a school, hotel or institution and part of your operation still feels too manual, disconnected or harder than it should be, talk to us.

We’ll understand how you work, see what already fits and, where necessary, learn from the problem with you.

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Yours in writing,
Oginni Laughter
Founder, De-Virtuosphere