He repaired 4,000 phones in a market stall. Now 860,000 buyers wait for his verdict before they spend

Kwame Mensah’s first review was filmed on the phone he was reviewing, propped against the phone he was repairing. It was seven minutes long, had no music, and opened with the back cover already off. Two hundred people watched it. Sixty of them asked where to buy the phone.

Three years later, his channel is the closest thing West Africa has to a consumer watchdog for budget phones, and manufacturers who once ignored his emails now ship him units two weeks before launch.

The stall

Mensah grew up in Kumasi and moved to Accra at nineteen to work for an uncle who repaired phones at Circle market. The stall was two metres wide. In six years he estimates he opened four thousand devices. “You learn which ones are built and which ones are assembled,” he says. “From the outside they look the same.”

The knowledge had no outlet until a customer asked him to recommend a phone for her son and he found himself explaining, for twenty minutes, why the cheaper of two models would last longer. She suggested he film it.

The format

Every review starts with the phone open on the bench. Battery, board, the quality of the seals, the screws that strip on the second repair. Only then does he turn it on. “A review that starts with the box is a review of the box,” he says.

A review that starts with the box is a review of the box.

The approach found an audience that the international reviewers were not serving: buyers for whom a phone is a year’s savings, and for whom a failed battery is a disaster rather than an inconvenience. His comments filled with repair questions, and he answered every one.

Growing without leaving

Mensah did not move to a studio for two years. The stall was the set, and customers walked through the frame. “People trusted it because it looked like where they buy phones,” he says. When the channel passed half a million subscribers he rented the room above the stall and built a bench with a ring light. The market is still audible in every video.

The business

Manufacturers began to send review units in the second year. He accepts them on one condition, printed under every video: the phone is opened on camera and returned. He does not take payment for reviews. Income comes from a repair-parts shop he runs with two former colleagues, an affiliate programme with two retailers he has vetted, and a paid course for repair technicians that has enrolled nine hundred students.

Nobody in the market cares about benchmarks. They care whether it survives a year.

What didn’t work

An attempt to review flagship phones in 2024 lasted four videos. “My audience could not buy them and I could not open them without voiding a warranty I could not afford,” he says. He went back to phones under 200 dollars and the channel grew faster.

What’s next

A repair school in the market where he started, with ten students at a time, training on real customer phones. “The stall taught me everything. I want it to teach someone else.”