YEA • Yoga Experience Africa

Before YEA, yoga teachers and studios across Africa were running their businesses manually, coordinating class bookings over WhatsApp, tracking students and schedules in spreadsheets, and collecting payment in cash or ad hoc mobile transfers.

That created friction on both sides. Teachers had no way to be discovered beyond word of mouth, no reliable record of who'd booked or paid for a class, and admin overhead that ate into the time they could actually spend teaching. Students had no central place to find instructors, compare class times, or pay online booking a class meant messaging someone directly and hoping for a reply.

There was no platform tying any of it together: no shared calendar, no online payments, no way for the market to grow past personal networks.

We built YEA end-to-end as a two-sided platform: a public booking marketplace for students, a management dashboard for teachers and studios, and an admin backoffice for platform oversight.

Core features shipped include teacher and studio profiles with class, retreat, and event listings; an online booking and checkout flow with Paystack for payments; timezone-aware scheduling so recurring classes display correctly for both hosts and students across different countries; and an admin dashboard covering events, studios, payouts, and users.

As real usage grew, we invested in re-architecting the backend — moving from the original Laravel/MySQL stack to a NestJS + PostgreSQL (Prisma) API to give the platform a stronger foundation for reliability and future features, without disrupting the live product for existing teachers and students.