Loccode was supposed to die quietly. That’s the version of events Obinna Onyejeli isn’t shy about telling. Two years ago, Maiaddy introduced a proprietary system giving every street in Nigeria a unique, machine-readable identifier. The original plan was to distribute it nationwide through a partnership with the Nigerian Postal Service.
That partnership never materialised; despite what Onyejeli has previously described as sustained outreach to the agency, Maiaddy didn’t have a backup plan sitting in a drawer. It had a decision to make.
“More than showing promise, it worked as envisioned,” Onyejeli told Technext when asked what convinced him to build a business layer on top of Loccode rather than leaving it as a standalone addressing system.
“But it faced certain death if we stayed the course with our initial distribution strategy, which was via a partnership with NIPOST. Since it did not materialise, we either had to let a good thing die or build out the layers on which people and businesses can benefit from Loccodes. We chose the latter. Maiaddy Business, just like Maimaps before it, is one of the ways Nigerians can derive utility with loccodes.”
The company has quietly turned a government snub into a full stack.
First, by creating an addressing system, the Maimaps navigation app, developer APIs, and now Maiaddy Business are all owned and controlled by the Aba-based location technology company. It is either the most efficient path to fixing Nigeria’s address problem or a striking amount of digital infrastructure sitting in private hands because a public partner passed on it.
Today, Maiaddy Business went live across web and mobile.
Businesses can now submit their details, hours, contact information, and location to a single dashboard tied to the wider Maiaddy ecosystem and have that information verified once, rather than chasing five different directories that never quite agree with each other.
Maiaddy Business beyond a listing page
Where Maiaddy Business tries to separate itself from Google Business Profile, the obvious and free incumbent, is scope. Onyejeli insists this was never meant to be just a listing product.
“Unlike other similar products, the vision for Maiaddy Business goes way beyond mere business listings or business profile creation,” he said. “Five years from now, a shop owner in Aba will have access to business tools available via the Maiaddy Business platform. These tools will include productivity tools, accounting tools and tax compliance tools.
For a typical bank in Lagos, available tools will include HR tools, more capable productivity tools and very advanced analytics. Businesses of all stages and levels will find utility beyond mere listings.”
Listing itself stays free. Monetisation, Onyejeli says, will come later from third-party tools plugged into the platform, with those partners setting their own pricing.
As for why a business owner should bother with another platform when Google Business Profile already does listings for free, Onyejeli didn’t dodge the comparison; he leaned into it. “Since we are the proprietary owners of the loccode system, it’s fair to say loccodes are a core differentiator for us anywhere it shows up,” he said, before dropping what he called a preview of a feature still coming.
“Over time, our users who have opted for spatial marketing on the Maiaddy app will be prompted about businesses near them. E.g., being at a location long enough may trigger a notification about a bolé seller nearby whom you can then find on Maimaps. This is free to the seller if they’re registered on Maiaddy Business.”
A queue Maiaddy is still working through
The platform launches today with applications open, but approvals have not started. Onyejeli was direct about the gap between interest and confirmed listings when asked whether any enterprise or institutional client is already using the platform.
“We haven’t approved any applications yet, so they’re all pending,” he said. “We probably bit more than we can chew, but that feels like a good problem to have. Approvals begin this August, though.”
Read generously; that is a company managing a bigger applicant queue than its verification pipeline can currently clear, not a company launching to silence. Read cautiously; it means the platform’s actual utility, verified listings customers can rely on, does not exist yet and will only become visible once approvals start landing later this month.
The harder question is verification itself.
A platform built on business identity lives or dies on whether people can trust the listings, and Onyejeli knows it. His answer on fraud prevention was as confident as everything else he said. “We’ve made the process easy on the eye by design, but behind the great UX is a very meticulous verification process that begins after a request is submitted to us,” he said.
“We still keep tabs on listings even after approvals and retain the ability to trigger a re-verification process. Generally, there are seven steps to submit a business, and each step includes basic questions that can be filled by anyone for any business, but without getting into the small details, I can assure you that King Mansa Musa will not be able to claim the UBA group lol.”
On data, Onyejeli points to the company’s privacy policy, specifically the sections governing use, sharing and anonymised aggregation, as the basis for a no-sale commitment on personal data, with sharing limited to legal or regulatory requirements such as payments.
“Our users are very protected under our Privacy Policy, especially under sections 4 (How We Use Information), 6 (How We Share Information) and 7 (Aggregated and Anonymised Data), where we make it clear and unambiguous that we do not sell personal data and for the most part will only share user data where required by law or regulation for specific things such as payments,” he assured.
Maiaddy Business is chasing a real problem. Inconsistent listings, outdated hours, and addresses that lead customers nowhere – this is a genuine headache for Nigerian SMEs, and it’s not going away on its own.
What’s less certain is whether Loccodes, a proximity notification feature and the promised add-on features, are enough to pull businesses away from a free Google alternative they already know how to use.
The founder is confident, and the next few weeks of approvals will say more about Maiaddy Business than anything said in this interview.
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