Inside SPOILS, the Startup the is confident that Nigerians Will Compete for the Internet’s Attention Instead of Just Scrolling Through It
There is only one thing that Nigerian tech products still ask for from users: attention. Open the app, scroll the feed, tap the ad, come back tomorrow. It is the one thing that leads to engagement, then conversion, then top of mind
SPOILS is testing whether people will do more than that, whether they’ll actually go looking for something, work through a puzzle, and compete against strangers to win it.
The Lagos-built site turns the internet into a treasure map. Hunters, what the platform calls its users get a clue, chase it across websites, social pages, videos or wherever it leads, solve a challenge, and race rivals to the prize. It’s a game format built entirely out of things the internet already is: search, social, video, community, just pointed at a goal instead of an infinite scroll.
The Pitch: Competition as a Layer, Not a Feature
What makes SPOILS worth a #BuiltForAfrica look isn’t the treasure-hunt gimmick, gamified engagement has been tried before, in Nigeria and everywhere else. It’s the infrastructure ambition sitting underneath it. The team isn’t just building hunts; it’s building the tooling for anyone, a brand running a product launch, a community running a member competition, an event organiser building hype before doors open, a creator rewarding an audience, to spin up their own hunt on SPOILS’ rails.
That’s the real motivation for the product: not “we made a fun game” but “we want to be the infrastructure behind skill-based digital competition. ” The repositioning is ambitious, moving from content-creator to platform-owner, and it’s the kind of claim this publication treats with the skepticism it deserves until the tooling actually ships and gets used by someone other than the founding team.
The Numbers, As They Actually Stand
SPOILS started building in March 2026. Since then, the traction is real but early, and the team, to its credit, isn’t dressing it up as more than it is:
– 160+ registered users
– A 50+ member active community
– One community partnership
– 7+ digital treasure hunts run
– Over ₦90,000 paid out in prizes
– Early revenue generated, alongside a few initial partners
At this moment it is not about getting every Tom, Dick and Harry on the platform. It’s the footprint of a team that has deliberately kept the user base small while it figures out what actually works.
That restraint is noteworthy because it’s rarer than it should be in a market that often rewards noise over evidence. All of the growth so far has come organically, through word of mouth and referrals, with no paid acquisition in the mix. That’s a meaningful signal at this stage, it means the early hunters who showed up, did so because someone told them it was worth their time, not because an ad told them so.
What Building in Public Actually Taught Them
The most credible part of the story SPOILS tells about itself is the admission that version one was a learning exercise, not a scale exercise. Running real hunts with real people surfaced the actual friction points: where hunters get stuck, what keeps them coming back, what has to work behind the scenes for a live competition to hold together without falling apart mid-hunt.
That’s the difference between a team performing “we’re building” and a team that has actually shipped something imperfect and paid attention to where it broke. The result is a rebuild, not a patch, of the product, with a stronger mobile-first experience and better infrastructure for running competitions in real time. For a hunt format where speed and timing matter, that infrastructure layer isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s the whole product.
Where You May Be Skeptical
The vision SPOILS is reaching for is a version of the internet where people “hunt, compete, discover and win” instead of just consuming, is a big claim for a team currently at 160 registered users and a single external community partnership. The gap between “infrastructure for the internet” and “infrastructure for our 50-person local estate youths hangout community.” is the gap most platform ambitions die in, and it’s worth watching closely rather than taking at face value.
How they implement the self-serve tooling feature, the one that allows brands, creators and event organisers to build their own hunts without the SPOILS team doing it for them, is the part that will actually determine whether this becomes infrastructure or stays a nice hunt-of-the-month series run by its founders.
That tooling doesn’t exist yet in any tested form; it’s what’s “currently being built,” which is a very different claim from “currently in the hands of a paying brand.”
Why We at Techies Node think SPOILS has potential.
Ibadan and Lagos-adjacent builders don’t need another platform announcing it will “disrupt engagement.” What’s notable about SPOILS isn’t the size of its ambition, it’s the shape of its evidence so far: small, organic, paid out in real money, and honestly reported as small. That’s a rarer posture in this ecosystem than the traction numbers themselves.
Whether SPOILS becomes infrastructure or stays a well-run hunt series depends entirely on whether the self-serve version works for someone who isn’t already in the room. Techiesnode will be watching for that, not the next round of clues, but the first hunt SPOILS didn’t have to build itself.
