I do not use many fintech apps, but I have them. That is not a flex. It is how a lot of Nigerians actually behave around money products: we download, we watch, we wait to see if anybody will disappear with our funds. Founders who skip that part of the job, who raise money, sign a celebrity, and talk about world-class developers, still miss the thing that decides whether the product lives. You have to know how to gain customer trust.
It is not juju. It is not rocket science. Paystack, PiggyVest, and Eden Life have been doing the unglamorous version of this for years: showing up, answering people, and treating customers like they matter. If a startup will not implement those things, it will fail. That is not hate. I do not know those founders personally. I just know what it feels like when a product earns your money, and what it feels like when it only talks about itself.
I went into tech for the money, and I am not sorry about that
I am one of the very few people who will say this out loud: I went into tech for the money. When I was still active on Twitter, people found that odd. They wanted the passion speech. I am the firstborn. I lost my mum almost ten years ago. In a family like that in Lagos, you do not have the luxury of putting passion ahead of income. Money comes first. Then you can talk about love for the work.
I got into tech more than ten years ago, starting in a cybercafe, and I have built products for a lot of companies since then. The turnaround that still sits at the centre of my career was not a fancy client. It was the EFCC tweeting about me.
Trust is the real product, even when you are the product
Around 2018 or 2019 I went to Plateau State for NYSC. I was already making it, quietly, in Lagos, but I wanted to take the posting. I thought I could work remotely. Most clients did not see it that way. They would ask me to come to the office. I would tell them I was serving in Plateau. They would say, okay, we will get back to you. They did not get back to me. I lost the clients, went broke, got depressed, and got very close to giving up.
I gave myself five years. In those five years I would make sure people knew me on Twitter, LinkedIn, everywhere, so they would give me work and start to trust me. I posted what I did, almost every day. One day in 2019 the EFCC posted that they had caught some Yahoo boys. I dropped my work under the tweet and commented: every time na yahoo boy una dey catch. We wey dey do legit sef, una nor dey even reason us.
"You cannot have a product, be doing big boy, and be packing investor money. You have to know how to gain customer trust."
The handler asked me to DM. They asked for all my projects. They ran a background check to confirm I had actually done the work. I waited about a month. Then they said I had passed, and they were going to drop the truth about me. Boom. They tweeted. My father's friend's son saw it first and called. People started reaching out, including people who had blocked me on Twitter. That post did not make me a better developer overnight. It made people willing to trust me with their jobs. That is the same lesson, just from the other side of the table.
How PiggyVest won me over, ₦50,000 at a time
I knew PiggyVest from launch, but the trust was not there. Omo, make I put my money, dey save my money, and one day you just pack off and japa? The first time I tried to use it, they asked for my BVN. I remember telling a friend, make this people no go sweep all my money o.
Gradually I started putting money in: ₦50,000, then ₦100,000, then ₦300,000. For the first week I would wake up and check the app. The money was still there. That went on for about five months. Every time I opened it, my money was waiting. That is when I told myself, these people nor fit run.
They also did something I still want to thank them for in person. The founders come out. They talk to people. They let you know, I am a co-founder of PiggyVest. You can put a face to the people holding your money, and that feeling matters. I started putting millions in. That is how they helped me buy a car. I had been trying to save the same money in GTBank, but anytime something came up I would just withdraw it. It is not only the car. There are several things I have used PiggyVest to save for and actually buy.
Customer service is the moment people decide whether to stay
The first time I tried to withdraw a really large amount, I got scared. Smaller withdrawals of around ₦1 million used to drop immediately. This one did not. I made the request around 1am. I could not sleep. My body was hot. We are talking ₦12 million or ₦13 million. In the morning I chatted them, several messages. Within thirty minutes a support person replied, laughed with the situation, and explained that a withdrawal that size would take about 24 hours because they had to check and approve it properly. I comot mind and went back to work. Later that day the money landed. That is how you gain customer trust: good customer service, at the exact moment the customer is most afraid.
When Abeg hosted Big Brother Naija, I was not fully convinced about them. Then I read that PiggyVest owned part of the business, and I told a friend, be like this product don get future o. That is what trust compounds into. People do not only buy your product. They borrow your reputation for the next thing you touch.
Stop hiding behind a world-class product
Invest in customer service. Invest in showing the people who already use the product that you care. Signing a celebrity will not save a company that cannot answer a frightened customer at 1am. A standard product and a strong engineering team are not the whole job. If you enjoy a service, say so in public. And if you are building one, come out from behind the investor announcements and talk to the people whose money is inside the app. That is the work.