Hi, I'm Sprime_
(aka Osioke Onoarue Oarue-Itseuwa)

whoami

• Product strategy — turning a fuzzy problem into a shipped thing, then paying attention to what happens next.
• Community & systems design — I've grown real communities and watched closely why some of them create fast learning and others don't. I favour organic, pull-based, community-led growth over expensive, short-term paid growth — it's cheaper to run and tends to hold up longer.
• Applied field research — I trust what people do over what they say they do, and I pay close attention to what people's emotions give away, since that often tells me more about someone's real needs than their words do. Some of my best product decisions came from watching and reading people closely, not just asking.
• AI-assisted building — research, design, then code with AI, each stage checked and corrected by me before the next.

projects

• LORE (2026–present): an organisational knowledge-transfer platform — capturing what an experienced person actually knows, from what they do rather than how they'd explain it, and turning it into training for whoever replaces them. Built and tested with real users on Firebase and vanilla JavaScript. An early version paused after user research showed the HR workflow I'd assumed didn't match how these teams actually work; now back in active development, treated more as a research question than a startup to raise money for — most people and companies don't yet see this as something worth commercial investment, and I'd rather work out whether the underlying idea holds up properly first.
• Growth Clinic & Community Staples (2019–2025): a talent incubator and its sister publication, both built on the same idea — that communities can be deliberately engineered to turn ordinary people into skilled ones. Wound down at the end of 2025. The model had drifted from what actually worked at Devcenter (placing people in real paid work) toward selling training directly to individuals, and I can trace exactly where that started.
• Job Hunter Assistant, formerly JobRelay (Apr–Dec 2025): a browser extension and a companion web app at jobhunterui.github.io that made job hunting less repetitive — saving listings, generating AI-assisted, role-tailored CVs and cover letters, and tracking applications. Real people used it. Sunsetted once it became clear that growing it past a small user base would take a lot more marketing and growth work than the product itself was worth to me.
• Frintern (2018): a web app matching people to tech skills they're naturally good at, and helping them learn those skills. In a 2018 pilot, participants learned a skill and applied it in 2–3 hours, down from a 20-hour baseline. Now sunsetted — I left it in my co-founder Jide Owosakin's hands to go rework the same underlying idea into what became Growth Clinic; I didn't have the technical ability I have now to keep building it myself, back before AI-assisted coding existed.

A few more — including Disease Info, Shop (built for my mum's store), a gameshow app built for a streamer, a self-improvement RPG, and a manga tracker I use myself — plus my full work history, live on the /work page.

experience

A lot of these roles are short because of fit, not commitment — how I think and work doesn't sit neatly inside how most companies here operate, and it took a while to find somewhere that did. Discourse (CDCK Inc., the company behind the open-source Discourse forum software used by thousands of organisations worldwide) was that place, and I stayed three years. I left in 2022 to commit fully to Growth Clinic, which I'd already been running part-time alongside the job. It didn't work out, and closing it sent me back into a full-time search — which is what built Job Hunter Assistant, which in turn led to LORE, which I'm treating less as a product to commercialise and more as an open research question. A short version of a few roles is below; the fuller list is on the /work page.

• Discourse (2019–2022) — Community Advocate & Product R&D Lead for a platform serving over 50,000 community members; shipped a Salesforce integration plugin and a points-based gamification system.
• RelianceHMO (2019) — Team Lead, Products & Online Retail; delivered 15% month-on-month growth in retail insurance sales and led a full redesign of the company site off the back of a customer journey audit.
• Devcenter (2016–2017) — grew a Lagos developer community from 100 to over 2,500 members in a year, and conceived and led development of Gigson.co, a freelance marketplace that became the company's main revenue product.

outside of work

Most of what I like outside work comes down to the same thing: figuring out how something works by getting inside it. I never did well in a classroom — structured, one-way learning didn't click for me — so I found my own way in, by working with and helping people, which turned out to teach me just as much about myself. That's probably the earliest form of "community" I ever took part in, before I had a word for it.

That same curiosity is why I like chess (analysis with a board), games and digital worlds (systems with room to explore inside them), and film, cartoons, and web comics (worlds bigger than the one I'm standing in). For a while I documented what I found — street photography, a digital museum called Gani Nigeria — but these days I'm more reserved about sharing publicly; it's gotten harder to reach the specific people I'd actually want to connect with through it, from where I am now.

contact

Do you have something you'd like us to work on? Send me a DM, or take a look at my full work history — I'm also on LinkedIn if that's easier.