From Abubakar’s Huawei to a Billboard in VI

I generally do not talk a lot about the work I have done. I probably should talk about them more.

This is not false modesty. I have done some pretty consequential things. Early in my career, I walked into a factory and overheard a conversation that led to a single-handed halt of a major consumer campaign for one of Nigeria’s largest food and beverage companies: a campaign that had already been paid for across BRT buses, billboards, and multiple platforms. A few Twitter searches, several screenshots, and one emergency meeting with C-suite executives later, the campaign was suspended and the product was sent back to the laboratory for further development. The product never returned to market. I tell that story in full on my Medium.

I have designed billboards in French and Turkish, languages I do not speak or understand. When my colleagues were (rightly) excited over yet another app interface, I was designing the software interface for an underwater robot. My work has been seen in 14 countries and counting but I rarely talk about any of it.

This is the story of yet another consequential thing I have done and decided to talk about. My name is Obasa Olorunfemi, and this is my story.

The first message came in on 21 July 2022.

A man named Abubakar wrote: “I am trying to download but is not working on Huawei.”

That was day one. That was the launch.

Before Abubakar’s email, there was a plan.

The plan was to launch a gold retail platform — Nigeria’s first — not with a press conference, not with a paid campaign, not with a budget of any kind the launch the idea that a Nigerian or well anyone, residing in Nigeria or anywhere in the world should be able to buy 99.9% gold or silver simply via an app and not have to worry about authenticity, storage or liquidity. The plan was five consecutive days of Twitter Spaces. A different conversation each day. A different angle on why gold matters, why this product existed, and why Nigeria needed it. Five days. Five conversations. Zero budget.

Feyi Fawehinmi one of Nigeria’s most incisive economic writers, was in attendance. So was Omilola Oshikoya, one of the country’s most respected voices on personal finance and wealth. Not because they were paid to be there. Because the idea was compelling enough to draw them in.

That was how we launched. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, while we held the Twitter (now X) spaces, Abubakar downloaded the app on his Huawei, tried to buy his first gold and found that it wasn’t working. So he wrote in. And I answered.

For the four years that followed, I was the person who answered.

I want to be clear about what I did and what I did not do.

I was not the founder. I did not build the product. I did not source the gold, design the economics, or raise the capital. That vision belonged to someone else, and it was a vision worth believing in.

What I did was well, a lot of the everything else.

I managed the customer experience end to end, somewhere between nine and thirteen thousand emails, hundreds of support, sales and clarity calls, and more direct messages than I stopped counting long ago. Every deposit that did not reflect. Every withdrawal that stalled. Every new user who did not understand how vaulting worked or what the marketplace was for. Every frustrated message that needed someone to actually listen, respond, and resolve.

I built and designed the help centre from nothing, wrote every FAQ. Created every how-to guide so that users could help themselves before they ever needed to write in. I managed the brand across every touchpoint: brand guidelines, flyers, social media banners, event materials, announcements, reports, billboard artwork. Consistent, every time.

I ran the social media. Wrote the content.

I maintained the some of the digital infrastructure: domains, websites and every website refresh, staff email accounts, passwords and credentials for every digital asset the organisation owned. When a new staff member joined, I created their email. When they left, I removed it. When a domain was about to expire, I renewed it.

I tested the app on TestFlight and translated recurring customer complaints into product feedback and routed it to the engineering team because the people closest to the customers always know what needs fixing before anyone else does.

Most of this work was invisible. None of it was optional.

I will be honest about something else.

Showing up for four years was not always easy but I kept going anyway, because I believed in what this platform could become because 13,000 people trusting a product with their savings is not a small thing. Because Abubakar deserved someone who actually answered. That belief cost me something. But it also taught me something I could not have learned any other way:

Trust is not built by the product alone. It is built by every interaction a customer has with the brand, every email they receive, every page they read, every message they send into what they hope is not a void. The invisible work is what makes the visible growth possible.

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The launch that started with five days of Twitter Spaces and zero budget eventually put a billboard in Victoria Island.

A message came in recently. It was from a stranger who had seen the platform on that billboard in VI. They went home, searched online, found the website, and wrote in.

They said: “I did not know that you had gone this far.”

Neither did I, when Abubakar first wrote in.

Between his Huawei and that billboard — 13,000 users. Thousands of emails. A brand built piece by piece, one design, one post, one response, one day at a time.

I am proud of what this platform has become.

I am proud of the part I played in building it.

If you are building something that deserves to be held together properly, from the launch strategy to the last email, let’s chat.