Kenya has never had a locally made social media platform in its lifetime. For that reason, young men in technology led by Chris decided to launch one unique social community for Kenya – ChatKE.
Though, the platform looks simple, it took Chris and fellow developers a whole half year i.e six months to construct it to its current state.
Looking at the platform, it is simple and easier to use and navigate, especially, with it’s smart front page chatbox customized as “Share Something….jibambe” that blends well with the swahili culture in Kenya.
The aim was to make sure the platform is not only easy to use but to also make it easily consumable by the Kenyan population – urban to rural, young to the old generation.
And after months of hardwork and no sleep, #ChatKE was finally launched in mid September 2025. By that time, most of its features were responding to users well. Only one or two features weren’t complete. But guess what? A normal user couldn’t notice. Only Chris and fellow developers knew what wasn’t perfect.
In a recent interview, Chris revealed not having had a sleep a full year drawing and developing this concept into a fully acceptable social platform. He shared that he had to burn midnight oil for all that period working, testing and implementing each feature at a time on ChatKE until something worked.
He wrapped up saying, whatever is inside ChatKE is not easy to try and steal. Its backend is restricted and fully secured from external penetration. Trying to break into it through the backdoor will require a larger amount of resources.
It’s now months since going live to the public and the user numbers have continued to surge. In these first two months alone, users jumped from 1 to 6,800 – a number that keeps riding by day.
The first ever post on the platform is a brief success punchline that was drafted by Chris, “Who said we can’t win”. This was his(Chris) first post early in the morning at around 4:30AM. He hadn’t slept the whole 24 hours. He was trying to setup up the platform, an exercise that lasted all those hours until 4:30AM when he smelt victory!
His second brief post was on day two when he had just fixed another stubborn feature after hours of research and development. He would post, “Celebrating every feature. We are building one feature at a time”.
Today, ChatKE which is now focused on dealing with fixing small bugs and growth, is almost rivaling big tech social media platforms like Facebook and X. Its local touch is what keeps driving numbers high. Its Customer help Center is also the best. Questions and inquiries are resolved in a record time.
By 2026 June, Chris says the platform should be having over 25K users and fully gone commercial.
The owner of ChatKE also built another career platform which is also popular across Africa. Infact, he built the two – ChatKE and the other one at the same time – concurrently.
You can sign up free on ChatKE and join your friends today. It’s enjoyable.