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Scaling to 100K Users: Architecture Lessons from Building Nigeria's Social Commerce Platform

Michael Onoja on November 28, 2025

How We Scaled Nigeria's Social Commerce Platform to 100K Users (And The Architecture That Almost Broke) I still remember the night our server cras...
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Federico Sosa

Thanks for the explanations, this is a learning experience.

I'd just say that the architectural decisions are not because in Node you have to build "everything from scratch" but it seems to me rather a more general expertise of your team (or yourself in Laravel).

There are equivalents in Node, for instance you can use Prisma in Node which is similar to Eloquent ORM

prisma.io/docs/getting-started/pri...

Same for authentication, queues, broadcasting, if you know the right tools you don't need to build anything from scratch.

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Michael Onoja

Great point, Federico. You are right, it's less about Node limitations and more about our team's Laravel expertise.

We chose speed over learning curve. For a startup, leveraging what we knew deeply meant we could build faster and debug more confidently.

Prisma looks interesting, thanks for the recommendation.

Appreciate the thoughtful engagement.

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Rowland

This is both inspiring and educational. Thank you. I'd like to reach out and learn more about your platform. I've sent a follow on X as Rolex.devv

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Michael Onoja

Thanks, Rowland. Just followed you back on X as @onoja55.

Would love to connect - always happy to chat about the tech stack, scaling challenges, or the Nigerian market. Feel free to DM or email me.

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Caramelo da TI

Tks for sharing!

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Michael Onoja

Appreciate it, Caramelo! Glad you found it worth sharing.

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Home Renovations & Remodeling

Good!

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Michael Onoja

Thanks. Appreciate you reading it

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leob • Edited

Brilliant, great write-up ... good and smart architectural choices - Laravel, MySQL, Redis - hosting on a VPS, rather than suffering the complexity of AWS - "KISS" principle! :-)

And solving real problems for real users, instead of just riding the latest tech "hype" bandwagon - very thoughtful, very inspiring - bookmarked this!

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Michael Onoja

Really appreciate that @leob, thank you.🙌
You totally got the vibe. Keep it simple, solve real problems, and don’t overcomplicate things.

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leob • Edited

Thanks, inspiring story - great vision and great execution beat the "tech hype" anytime!

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Michael Onoja

Many thanks.