Where This Started
I want to be honest about what I was doing before this. I was a software consultant making decent money — ₦800,000 to ₦1,200,000 per month depending on the project. But consulting has a ceiling and I hated the inconsistency. A slow month felt existential. A big project ending always meant another 3 weeks of anxiety about what came next.
I decided to build a SaaS product in early 2023. Not because I had a brilliant idea. Because I was tired of trading time for money.
The First Idea (That Failed)
My first product was a social media analytics tool for Nigerian brands. I built it over four months. I added features I thought would be useful. I launched on Product Hunt.
12 paying customers in the first 3 months. 7 cancelled before month 2. I had 5 paying customers at ₦15,000/month = ₦75,000 MRR. This wasn't going anywhere.
I did 15 customer interviews with people who had signed up and then churned. The common thread: the data I was showing them didn't connect to anything actionable in their workflow. They couldn't point to a decision they'd made differently because of my product.
I killed it after 5 months.
The Pivot That Worked
The customer interviews for my failed product kept surfacing one consistent complaint: managing client approvals for social media content was chaotic. Clients approved over WhatsApp, emails, phone calls. Nothing was tracked. Revision cycles were informal. "I thought we agreed on this version" was a daily crisis.
This was a painful, specific problem that content agencies and marketing teams experienced daily. I hadn't seen a good solution specifically designed for the African market's realities (WhatsApp-heavy communication, client relationships that were informal, teams where WhatsApp was the primary tool).
I built a simple approval workflow tool: content creators upload posts, clients get a link to review and approve, everything is tracked, comments stay in one place. No WhatsApp chaos.
The First Sales (Ugly and Uncomfortable)
I am not a natural salesperson. I find cold outreach uncomfortable. I hate rejection. These are the wrong personality traits for an early-stage founder.
I did it anyway because I had no choice.
I messaged 50 marketing agencies on LinkedIn over two weeks. Personal messages, not spam. I referenced something specific about each agency. 11 replied. 6 agreed to a call. 4 started free trials. 2 converted to paying customers at ₦30,000/month.
That was my first ₦60,000 MRR. It felt tiny. It felt important.
The thing that surprised me: the sales conversations were easier than I expected once I stopped pitching and started asking questions. The agencies knew their problem better than I did. My job was to let them describe it and then show them how my product addressed it.
The First 6 Months of Reality
| Month | Customers | MRR | What Happened |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | ₦60,000 | First sales, learning the product needs |
| 2 | 5 | ₦150,000 | Word-of-mouth from first 2 customers |
| 3 | 6 | ₦180,000 | Added a feature 3 customers requested |
| 4 | 7 | ₦210,000 | One big agency signed (₦60,000/month) |
| 5 | 9 | ₦300,000 | My first real customer success story |
| 6 | 10 | ₦340,000 | Hit 6-month slump, almost quit |
Month 6 was the hardest. I had gone from adding 2–3 customers per month to adding 1. Nothing had changed. I was doing the same things. The growth just... stopped.
I later understood this as normal — the early "low-hanging fruit" of your network and initial outreach exhausts itself and you need to build new acquisition channels. It felt like failure at the time.
What Fixed the Slump: Content
On advice from a founder friend, I started writing about the specific problems content agencies face. Not marketing content for my product — genuinely useful content about the workflow problems I'd learned from 50+ customer conversations.
I published 2 posts per week on LinkedIn for 3 months.
Month 7: 3 inbound leads from LinkedIn
Month 8: 7 inbound leads from LinkedIn, 4 converted
Month 9: 12 inbound leads, 6 converted
The content worked because it positioned me as someone who deeply understood the problem, not just someone with a solution to sell. Prospects came to me having already read my posts. The sales conversations were shorter because I'd already established credibility.
The Number That Changed Everything
At ₦2,400,000 MRR (roughly $1,500 USD/month at the exchange rate at the time), I quit consulting completely.
This was terrifying. Consulting was safe. The SaaS was still unpredictable. But staying in consulting meant I wasn't giving the product the attention it needed to grow beyond a side project.
Cutting the safety net forced focus. In the 6 months after I quit consulting, I grew from ₦2.4M to ₦8M MRR.
Where I Am Now
Two years into this, I have:
- 87 paying customers
- ₦18,500,000 MRR (approximately $11,000 at current rates)
- One part-time contractor (customer success)
- No external funding
This is roughly $130,000 ARR. Not life-changing by Silicon Valley standards. Life-changing by my standards — I make more than I ever did consulting, I work on something I own, and the revenue compounds rather than resetting every project.
What I Would Tell Someone Starting Today
1. The first idea probably won't work. Build it anyway, learn from the customers, find the real problem.
2. Sales is a skill, not a personality type. I thought I was too introverted to sell. I was wrong. Selling is listening and then showing how your product addresses what you heard.
3. Organic content compounds. Every LinkedIn post I published 18 months ago is still generating inbound leads. Paid acquisition stops the moment you stop paying. Content doesn't.
4. Quit the safety net when you're scared. I waited until I felt "safe" to quit consulting. Looking back, I should have done it earlier. The urgency of no backup income focuses you in a way that's difficult to replicate with a cushion.
5. Talk to churned customers more than retained ones. Churned customers tell you the truth. Retained customers are polite.
