If you’ve been following along, you know the story. I wrote about why I was building Coziza back in early 2025, and then about why we were changing course later that year. This is the final chapter. Coziza is shut down.
Coziza was a two-sided marketplace. On one side, landlords with properties. On the other, tenants looking for homes. In the middle, agents who controlled access to most of the supply. Classic chicken-and-egg problem: tenants won’t come without listings, and landlords and agents won’t list without tenants.
Most agents were resistant to working with us. They had their own way of doing things, and the concessions we asked for — better photos, no viewing fees, shared commission — didn’t make sense to them when we couldn’t yet prove the demand side. I wrote about this in the previous post.
So we decided to solve the supply problem ourselves. We’d find landlords directly, go out and capture all the photos, do all the legwork to build the listing inventory from scratch. That was a Herculean task. We were essentially running two businesses at once: a marketplace and a brokerage.
We ran out of steam. We ran out of money. We ran out of time. Coziza was bootstrapped with my own resources, and I couldn’t raise additional capital from anyone. At some point you have to be honest with yourself about what’s working and what isn’t. This wasn’t working.
If I were starting over, I’d niche down way more. Even though we were focused on Accra, that wasn’t narrow enough. Accra is a massive city with dozens of distinct neighborhoods, each with its own rental dynamics. We spread ourselves too thin across all of them.
If I did it again, I’d pick a very narrow niche and build features specifically for that audience. Housing for nurses at specific hospitals. Apartments for companies relocating employees to certain areas of Accra. Short-term rentals for diaspora visitors. Something tight enough that you can understand every customer personally and serve them extremely well.
I’d also start from a premium market. B2B is great because companies have budgets and urgency. Diaspora is great because they’re used to higher standards and willing to pay for convenience. Premium markets give you margin to actually deliver quality service while you figure things out.
And critically: you need a concrete way to get in front of your ideal customer to generate leads. If you can’t answer the question “how do I reach my first 100 customers?” with something specific and repeatable, the niche doesn’t matter. Without a lead generation strategy, everything else is academic.
Real estate has an extra dimension that most other markets don’t: location.
If someone wants a 2020 RAV4 with 100,000 miles in good condition, it doesn’t really matter where the car is coming from. If it meets the criteria and the price is right, they’ll buy it. You can ship a car.
You can’t ship a house. Even the perfect apartment at the perfect price gets rejected if it’s not in the right neighborhood. Too far from work. Wrong side of town. Bad traffic corridor. Not close enough to a good school. That extra dimension of location makes the matching problem significantly harder than most other marketplaces. Every listing has this invisible constraint that’s deeply personal to each buyer or renter, and it dramatically shrinks your effective inventory for any given customer.
This is something I underestimated going in. I knew location mattered, obviously. But I didn’t fully appreciate how much it fragments your market and complicates the supply problem.
During our property visits across Accra, we captured a lot of aerial drone footage. Neighborhoods, streets, landmarks, the texture of different parts of the city from above. Most of it was shot as part of the listing process, but the aerial footage stands on its own.
I’m only releasing the fraction that doesn’t infringe on anyone’s privacy. No interior shots, no serious close-ups of people’s homes. I’ve been careful about what’s included. It was a lot of work to capture all of this, and it shouldn’t go to waste sitting on a hard drive.
The footage is free for anyone to use for non-commercial purposes under CC BY-NC 4.0. If you want to use it commercially, reach out and we can work out a license agreement. And if you end up using any of the photos for something interesting, I’d genuinely love to see it — share it with me.
If you’re an entrepreneur working on something — especially if it’s a marketplace, especially if it’s in Africa — and you want to talk through what you’re building, I’m always happy to chat. I’ve made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot from them, and I’d rather those lessons be useful to someone else than just sit in my head.
You can reach me at seth@micahking.dev.