Kim Tran has been working in influencer marketing across Francophone Africa for close to a decade. She knows the agencies, the pricing cycles, the clients. So when she launched Trenderz in Abidjan in 2024, she was building on familiar ground. By mid-2025, she had decided to tear it all down.
The original Trenderz was a hybrid agency and SaaS subscription model built for the tourism and leisure sector. The idea was to connect hotels, restaurants, spas, and activity venues with the right content creators, and to give them a platform to manage those campaigns. After a year and a half of operations, it became clear that the model needed to change.
The new Trenderz is a booking and attribution infrastructure platform. It tracks a creator's recommendation from the first click all the way through to a confirmed reservation and a fixed commission payout. The agency layer is gone. The model is now transactional, data-driven, and already live across five African markets.
Lina Kacyem, investment manager at Launch Africa Ventures, sat down with Kim Tran to talk through the pivot, what three months in 500 Global's Creator Ventures program taught her, and why she believes Africa's recommendation economy is a hundred times bigger than the influencer market alone. That last point is the one worth sitting with.
Originally published by TechCabal.