How Mark Essien Turned a Four-Month-Old Product Into a $2.3 Million Business
Fourteen years after launching hotels, Mark Essien is no longer proving that he can build startups in Nigeria. That question was settled long ago. What his latest venture proves instead is how experience, distribution, and deep domain insight can compress the path from idea to profitability.
Essien’s newest company, Tripdesk, an AI-powered corporate travel management platform, crossed $2.3 million in revenue just four months after launch, with roughly 30% of that figure already in profit. The kicker? The product serves fewer than 30 customers.
From Startup Builder to Infrastructure Player
Essien entered Nigeria’s tech scene long before tech bro became a label. When he founded Hotels.ng, the company went on to raise $1.2 million at a time when venture funding in Nigeria was still rare. Today, hotels.ng processes roughly 20,000 bookings every month, quietly operating as a stable, profitable business.
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.
That understanding of how travel actually works in African enterprises became the foundation for Tripdesk.
Why Tripdesk Took Off So Fast
Tripdesk was not built to chase a trend or capitalise on AI hype. It was created to solve a long-standing operational problem Essien had already seen at scale.
For years, Hotels.ng ran a VIP unit serving large corporate clients. These companies were not just booking hotel rooms; they were struggling to manage approvals, reimbursements, policies, and expense tracking across departments and locations.
What looked like a travel problem was really an administrative nightmare.
At a certain scale, everything starts breaking, Essien explains. Finance teams lose visibility, approvals slow down, and expense reconciliation becomes chaotic.
Tripdesk was designed to sit exactly where Hotels.ng could not.
A Product Shaped by Real Enterprise Pain
Corporate travel, especially in Africa, is rarely straightforward. A single trip may require multiple layers of approval, split invoices, advance payments, reimbursements, and post-trip audits.
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.
Tripdesk mirrors how companies already operate instead of forcing them into rigid workflows. An employee submits a travel request. A manager approves it. Controllers and finance teams sign off. Policies are enforced automatically, expenses are tracked in real time, and invoices are generated without manual intervention.
The platform centralises what was previously fragmented across emails, spreadsheets, receipts, and internal memos.
The Quiet Role of AI
Despite being described as AI-driven, Tripdesk does not rely on flashy generative features. The intelligence runs quietly in the background.
Rather than creating content, the system acts as a decision-support layer. It interprets company policies, departmental rules, and contextual data, surfacing the right information to approvers instantly. Tasks that once required twenty minutes of document cross-checking can now be completed in seconds.
The value is not novelty. It is speed, consistency, and control.
A Built-In Talent Engine
Tripdesk’s rapid execution was not accidental. One of Essien’s biggest advantages is HNG, the talent pipeline he has been building for nearly a decade.
Founded in 2016 as the Hotels.ng Internship, HNG is a high-intensity, three-month remote programme that trains and filters software developers, designers, and product managers across Africa.
I doubt that there are many people who have more access to Nigerian talent than me, Essien says. When there’s something new to be built, I can build an army in a week.
While Tripdesk took close to a year to fully develop, largely due to investor coordination and extensive customer feedback, the availability of skilled talent significantly reduced execution friction.
Essien is not alone in this thinking. Amadou Daffé, founder of Gebeya Dala, has taken a similar approach, using years of talent development as a strategic advantage.
If you have invested in training people for the past eight years, you can always tap into that pool when it has solidified, Daffé says. The amount of talent in Nigeria is insane.
For Essien, HNG is more than a talent source it is a business in its own right, generating about ₦15 million in monthly revenue while costing roughly ₦2 million to operate.
High Revenue, Small Customer Base
Tripdesk’s revenue profile is unusual but intentional. With only 20 to 30 customers, the company has already crossed the $2.3 million mark. Each new customer represents a meaningful jump in revenue because Tripdesk serves large organisations with up to 4,000 employees across multiple regions.
The obvious risk is concentration. Losing a single client could materially impact revenue. Essien acknowledges this but believes the product’s value makes churn unlikely.
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.
Thinking Pan-African, Selling Carefully
Tripdesk is already being positioned as a pan-African product. Expansion pressure is coming directly from customers, not marketing campaigns.
Still, Essien is realistic about the nature of enterprise software. The total addressable market is smaller, and competition can intensify quickly.
Enterprise sales is very difficult, he notes.
His advice to founders eyeing similar opportunities is blunt: avoid 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 recommends targeting large but quieter companies deeper in the value chain organisations with real operational pain and fewer internal solutions.
Why Tripdesk Will Be Hard to Displace
Beyond the product itself, Tripdesk benefits from a structural advantage: hotels.ng acts as a funnel. Years of enterprise relationships give Essien direct access to the exact customers Tripdesk is built for.
Any competitor would need not just a comparable product but also similar distribution, trust, and domain credibility to compete seriously.
Four months in, Tripdesk is not just a promising startup. It is a case study in how experience, patience, and infrastructure, not hype, turn software into a durable business.
