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Victoria Fakiya \u2013 Senior Writer<\/p>\n
Techpoint Digest<\/p>\n
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At the same time, I knew people who had some money to invest but didn\u2019t know where to put it. Many were afraid of losing their savings to scams because they simply didn\u2019t know which investment opportunities they could trust.<\/p>\n
I met my co-founder at KNUST, and I had already been working with her for years; we looked like two sides of the same problem and asked ourselves a simple question: what if we could connect these two groups? That answer became Growly, a fintech startup.<\/p>\n
We didn\u2019t have investors waiting for us, nor did we have a roadmap. Most of what we had was Google. I still remember sitting outside with my co-founder one evening, literally searching, \u201cHow do you find investors?\u201d on Google. We had no idea where to begin, but we decided to begin anyway.<\/p>\n
So, we started by designing the user experience. Over the following months, after countless iterations and personal lessons, we met another co-founder who became our CTO. Together, we built the product and launched it.<\/p>\n
Within the first week, nearly a thousand people had signed up. A little over two months later, Growly had grown to around 17,000 daily active users. We were generating revenue, speaking directly with customers, and learning that people don\u2019t care about the features you think are exciting. They care about solutions to their problems.<\/p>\n
It also taught us how to stretch every naira. At that time, we had raised only about $4,000 to $5,000. Every decision mattered. We handled marketing and operations ourselves and built skills across different parts of the business because we couldn\u2019t afford to outsource them.<\/p>\n
Just as things were beginning to come together, Nigeria introduced new regulations requiring digital lenders to obtain a banking licence or meet a minimum share capital requirement far beyond what a startup like ours could afford.<\/p>\n
For a company that had been built on just a few thousand dollars in funding, it wasn\u2019t even a realistic target. We explored partnerships and considered alternatives, but eventually we had to make the hardest decision any founder can make: we shut down Growly. <\/p>\n
It was devastating, though. This wasn\u2019t just another project. We\u2019d invested years into it. We\u2019d poured our time, energy, and resources into building something people genuinely found useful, only to watch circumstances beyond our control bring it to an end.<\/p>\n
But after everything we\u2019d experienced, it was clear that we loved building. And if one company couldn\u2019t continue, we\u2019d simply have to find another problem worth solving.<\/p>\n
At the time, cryptocurrency<\/a> was gaining momentum across Africa. People were buying and selling digital assets, but I noticed that most products only focused on trading or swapping crypto. Very few gave Africans access to decentralised finance (DeFi) products like lending and staking, and that became our next opportunity.<\/p>\n We built Hivestak, a platform that connected African users to global DeFi protocols through smart contracts and backend infrastructure. The goal wasn\u2019t simply to help people trade crypto, but to give them access to financial tools that weren\u2019t easily available due to geographical restrictions.<\/p>\n Although the market was completely different from fintech lending, everything we had learned from Growly followed us. We already knew how to build secure systems, we understood payments, and we had become intentional about speaking with users before building features. We had also learned how to operate with limited resources, so we built almost everything ourselves.<\/p>\n The process was smoother than our first startup. Again, users responded positively, and we felt that we were solving a meaningful problem.<\/p>\n But, yet again, regulation caught up with us. As Nigeria\u2019s position on cryptocurrency evolved, new licensing requirements were introduced for businesses operating in the space. Once more, we found ourselves facing regulatory barriers beyond the reach of a bootstrapped startup.<\/p>\n For the second time, we had to shut down a company. The first time it happened, I wondered whether we had failed. The second time, the thoughts became even louder. You naturally start having doubts, like maybe you\u2019re the problem, or that every company you build is destined to end this way, or maybe you\u2019re just fooling yourself.<\/p>\n But what those experiences also forced me to do was work on things most people don\u2019t think about until they\u2019re tested: self-confidence, consistency, and self-worth. I learned to keep moving even when reality doesn\u2019t immediately reward your efforts.<\/p>\n Looking back, I don\u2019t think those companies were failures. They became training grounds. Every startup taught us something new about technology, customers, resilience, and ourselves.<\/p>\n Building for the third time<\/p>\n After Hivestak, neither of us wanted to rush into another startup. We needed time to recover. Instead, we focused on building products for other founders and companies. We took on contracts, worked with businesses in our network, and even helped oversee technology infrastructure for a company in the UK.<\/p>\n Stepping away from building our own products gave us perspective. It also gave us time to observe another shift happening around us.<\/p>\n Content creation was becoming one of the continent\u2019s biggest industries. Businesses were investing more in social media. Creators<\/a> were turning their content into careers. Brands were spending heavily on digital marketing. Everyone was posting. Yet very few people actually knew what would work.<\/p>\n Then we built CloutEye<\/a>. Instead of relying on guesswork, the platform analyses social media data to help users understand what is gaining traction before it becomes a trend. It shows what competitors are doing, which hashtags and keywords drive engagement, which posting patterns work, and even details like caption lengths that perform best within a particular niche.<\/p>\n Much of that information would normally require expensive experiments or countless hours of manual research, but we\u2019re making it accessible.<\/p>\n