I write a blog. I've written one for a while now. And every so often the actual bottleneck isn't the writing — it's staring at a blank page trying to remember what's happening in African fintech this week, or whether that funding round I half-remember reading about actually closed, or which regulator said what. Some mornings I'd spend forty minutes just catching up before I'd typed a single sentence of the post I actually wanted to write.
So I built the thing I actually needed: an app that does that forty minutes of catching-up for me, automatically, every morning, before I sit down to write.
That's Pulse.
The actual problem
The problem was never "I don't have opinions." I have plenty. The problem was the raw material — a reliable, curated, already-read feed of what's happening in tech, fintech, and business, with African coverage that isn't an afterthought, sitting in one place, updated by the time I wake up.
The news apps I already had didn't solve this. General news apps bury African fintech under everything else. Fintech-specific newsletters land once a week, not once a day. And just scrolling Twitter/X for "what's going on" is a great way to lose an hour and still miss the story that mattered, because the algorithm is optimizing for engagement, not for "what would Victor want to know before he writes."
The thing I actually wanted was closer to a research assistant than a news app: something that goes and reads the sources, picks the stories worth knowing, writes an honest summary instead of just re-hosting a headline, and — critically — shows me exactly where it got the information so I can go deeper myself if a story is worth a full blog post.
The idea: let Claude do the research
I already use Claude Code every day for actual engineering work, and one thing that's obvious once you've used it for a while is that it's genuinely good at open-ended research — reading multiple sources, cross-referencing them, and writing something original rather than paraphrasing one article. That's a different skill from "summarize this one link," and it's the one a research assistant actually needs.
So the idea was simple to state and took real engineering to get right: a scheduled task that runs every morning, goes and researches what's currently happening in tech, fintech, and business — with a deliberate, non-negotiable slice of that being African coverage — and publishes it to a page before I ever open my laptop.
Not a headline aggregator. Not an RSS reader with a fresh coat of paint. An actual research pass, done daily, with the sourcing kept intact so nothing pretends to be more authoritative than it is.
Why "African fintech specifically" mattered
This is the part that made the project worth building rather than just using an existing app. General-purpose news APIs are genuinely bad at African tech and business coverage — I found this out directly while building the ingestion pipeline. Pull from the standard sources and you get world-politics-and-sports out of Africa, not "a Zimbabwean startup raised a seed round" or "the SECZ opened a tokenization sandbox." The stories I actually care about — the ones relevant to founders and operators building on this continent — simply don't surface through the generic pipes.
That meant the African coverage couldn't be a filter applied after the fact. It had to be a first-class, deliberately-worked-for slice of every single day's research — going directly to the outlets that actually cover this beat, not waiting for it to show up in a general feed. That's a harder problem than "call an API and get JSON back," and it's the reason a scheduled research routine, not a scraper, was the right shape for this.
What it turned into
What started as "I need a research assistant so I stop running out of blog ideas" turned into a real product: a page that updates itself every morning with tech, fintech, and business stories, split deliberately between African and international coverage, each one with an original summary and a set of reference links so a reader — or future-blog-post-writing me — can go straight to the primary sources.
I'm going to write about exactly how it's built — the stack, the hosting, the scheduled ingestion pipeline, the data model — in the next post, because there's a real architecture story here that's worth telling on its own. But the "why" matters first: this wasn't built as a side-project flex. It was built because I had a specific, recurring, mildly annoying problem — running out of ideas, losing time to catch-up reading — and the tools to actually solve it, properly, finally existed.
If you've ever opened a blank page and lost the first half hour just trying to remember what's going on in your industry, that's the itch Pulse scratches. Go take a look: pulsenews.buzz.
