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ICYMI: In my last issue, I shared some noteworthy Children’s Day messaging from Nigerian brands.

Today is for Funnel Vision, where I write a case study on a campaign, project, or product by speaking with the marketing professional behind them.

In this issue, I look into Bumpa’s growth story with Precious O’Dahunsi, Product Growth Manager at Bumpa.

What To Expect:

• Bumpa’s early days

• Product marketing at Bumpa

• Feature adoption tactics

• Improving user onboarding & activation

• Working with engineers as a non-technical person

The first time I encountered Precious O’Dahunsi, she was teaching a free product marketing webinar for Treford. I was a content marketer; she was a product marketer who’d transitioned from content marketing. After her class, I decided to transition into product marketing too.

3 years later, my career path has mirrored Precious’ eerily. She went from content marketer to product marketer to product manager to product growth manager. I followed almost the exact trajectory.

But my career growth happened across different companies; Precious had grown within the same company she was growing. Precious O’Dahunsi was Bumpa’s first full-time marketing hire; today, she leads a product growth team to solve activation, retention, monetisation, and growth problems for Bumpa.

If I were to scour the earth, I would not find a person more qualified to tell Bumpa’s growth story than Precious. So, I reached out and we spent 2 hours breaking down Bumpa’s growth playbook.

Bumpa’s Early Marketing

At least 32% of e-commerce in Sub-Saharan Africa takes place through social platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram1. But these platforms weren’t built for e-commerce, which means they don’t truly enable success. That’s where products like Bumpa come in.

In Bumpa’s early days, customers would often mistake Bumpa for a marketplace—one that could help them find new customers. This is because before Bumpa, their only experience was on social platforms with in-built distribution. But Bumpa is not a marketplace. It doesn’t connect you to new customers; it only enables you to manage their experiences and your operations better.

This distinction is critical, because it was one of the early problems Precious had to battle in Bumpa. She was marketing to people whose previous experiences were with distribution channels.

“When we first started, some people came with the notion that we’re a marketplace like Jumia. Then, I used to liken Bumpa to Instagram cos that’s what they could relate to. You don’t join Instagram and expect to automatically get followers. You have to create content, push ads, and engage with people. So, [I said] Bumpa is a tool that’ll work amazingly for you if you put in the work. But you can’t sit down and expect it to bring sales.”

Bumpa never directly positioned as a marketplace, but people misinterpreted their messaging to mean so. For example, Bumpa used to use the tagline “The easiest way to sell online,” which people misinterpreted to mean that Bumpa would help increase sales (presumably by exposing them to more users).

“We didn’t position as a marketplace, but people interpreted it that way because of a preconceived understanding of certain words. Copy like ‘make sales everywhere’ or ‘the easiest way to sell online’ used to attract a certain kind of user. It attracted lazy users and brought unique retention problems.”

After this, Precious learnt to steer clear of any messaging that could be misinterpreted.

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She might not have realised it at the time, but this was product marketing work. Even though she was a content marketer at the time, Precious unofficially laid the groundwork for Bumpa’s messaging.

A year later, Precious had to fight for this messaging, and she learned an important lesson about documentation. Because she had never documented this insight, a new growth marketer joined the company and advised a switch in messaging.

“It’s because there was no documentation saying ‘don’t do this, don’t do that.’ We didn’t have it [the messaging insight] documented, but it was commonly understood [in the early days].”

Because the initial experiment wasn’t documented, the marketing team had to try the flawed messaging again, only to come to the same conclusion as before. After this experience, Precious became more gung-ho about documentation and cross-team communication.

“After that discussion, I realised we needed to document more to ensure whoever comes after us follows these guidelines. I was already in the product team at this time, so I set up a weekly sync conversation between myself and the marketing team.”

In engineering, there is a term for a senior-level technical expert who plays a critical role in setting technical direction, solving complex engineering problems, and often mentoring other engineers. This person is typically a long-timer who can explain why core systems are the way they are and who protects the long-term health of the codebase.

As Precious speaks, I can’t help but wonder if this concept also applies to marketing. And if product marketers are, in some ways, the “principal marketers” in organisations. Certainly, the term “Principal Marketer” would be an apt description of what Precious’ role has evolved to become, even as she pivoted from marketing to product.

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I have started this story from the middle. But to understand why Precious often acts as a principal marketer, I need to start at the beginning.

Day 1-7 At Bumpa

In ideal scenarios, a new hire would spend the first week familiarising themselves with their new role & organisation. But when Precious officially joined Bumpa, she was already familiar with it, having done some contract work for them previously, including writing scripts for paid ads.

And so, when Precious began executing on her first day, it made perfect sense. Bumpa wasn’t new to her; she wasn’t new to it. And she’d worked with Bumpa’s CEO months beforehand, writing for his other project, Consonance Club.

On Precious’s first day, she created the Gift From Bumpa brand persona and wrote their first set of articles.

Gift From Bumpa - Defining Bumpa’s Brand Persona

By the end of Week 1, Precious had built the groundwork for Bumpa’s brand persona. She tells me the story of how the name came to be.

“They wanted to create an official email for me and there was already a Precious in the company. I knew that this email would be used to send out marketing content for the company and become part of the brand. So I first thought it should be a “B” name, like Bimbo, Bolanle, Bernice. But I decided to use my name; or one of my names that I hadn’t really used.”

When Precious chose the name “Gift from Bumpa,” she did not realise that it would provide an unexpected advantage for their emails. Bumpa’s newsletter got great open rates because customers would read “Gift from Bumpa” and think that they had received a gift from the Bumpa team.

Apart from choosing the name, Gift defined Bumpa’s brand persona. She wanted a consistent persona that people could relate to. Something that was casual without being too informal. Unconsciously, she built the persona to reflect her own voice. Finally, she coined Bumpa’s “your business best friend” tagline.

All of her work paid off. Customers began to get attached to the brand. In fact, a customer once wrote to “Gift from Bumpa” that her emails were uplifting.

“I mean, I put my personality into the newsletter, but I had no idea that for some people, it was uplifting. It was heartwarming and part of the excitement. I no longer write the weekly newsletters, but I still remember that.”

Day 8-31

Precious’ first few days were off to such a strong start, so I ask what the first month was like. She tells me that it wasn’t always execution; they also talked a lot.

“We used to do a lot of long standups at the time. The entire company could fit into one stand-up then, so we used to do that every single day. Engineering would talk, marketing would talk.”

Email marketing was one of Bumpa’s early acquisition channels. So Precious spent her first month sending cold emails to a list of SMEs across different demographics, with the help of a contract marketer. This was separate from the engagement emails she would send to users.

These cold emails, as well as some community marketing, exposed Bumpa to a new demographic and expanded its user base.

Day 32-365

Three months into the year, Bumpa had seen a 792% increase in its user base. Their efforts were bearing fruits.

There were direct and indirect drivers of this growth. The biggest indirect driver was the personal brands of Precious and of Bumpa’s CEO. They had become marketing channels for Bumpa. It wasn’t planned; they never set posting guidelines. They just loved posting about the product (and what work at Bumpa was like). It didn’t take long for people to associate them with the brand.

Posting on her account wasn’t part of Precious’ job description. But doing things outside her job description wasn’t strange to her. Throughout the year, she handled varied tasks. Whatever needed to get done that she could do.

“I became a UX writer. We made some UX changes and I’d contributed to things like error messages across the app. I also did mini GTMs here and there to launch new products. There was a lot of copywriting for designs going on socials or ads. And then SEO articles to get traffic.”

At this point, Precious’s job title was just “Content Marketer.” But—as is typical with early-stage startups—everyone on the team had to work on the margins. The customer support person was doing a little product work. The product designer was also a product manager. The CTO, an introvert by nature, was conscripted to act in video ads. The CEO had his hands in multiple pies.

But it paid off. By the end of the year, they’d hired 2 new marketing team members, organised a physical event, and even put up a billboard. They’d worked with influencers like KieKie. They were running steady ads on Facebook and Google. They’d grown. Bumpa could no longer fit on a single standup.

Product Marketing at Bumpa

Precious was doing product marketing before she knew what product marketing was. When she was a Content Marketing Manager, she’d defined product messaging and planned GTM. So when I ask her about the difference between content & product marketing, I am not surprised at her answer.

“There’s a funny belief I have that might be peculiar to me and Bumpa. I feel like product marketing is content marketing on steroids. It’s content marketing with ridiculous amounts of data, focus, and technicality. For me, I think everything is content marketing in some regard.”

Precious explains what she means by focus. Content marketers typically have to do marketing for the entire product. They look at the product as a bundle. But with product marketing, the product is a sum of its various functionalities. And sometimes, product marketers focus on one specific functionality at a time.

“Content marketing was very widespread. But with product marketing, the conversation could be ‘this week, we’ve not seen a lot of traction for this new feature we launched.’ And then we identify the problem. What does the usage data say? What are the drop-off points? Maybe based on that, we do a survey. Based on that, we start thinking of solutions. Maybe something on social media, maybe a UI change, and so on.”

Some tasks often overlap between product & content marketing, like how-to articles. When Precious was a content marketer, she had written how-to articles for specific features on Bumpa. But her approach was straightforward. Step 1, 2, 3, CTA. As a product marketer, she faced how-to articles again. But this time, her approach was different. She wrote articles with a deeper understanding of each functionality on its own and as a part of Bumpa.

“For example, if someone wants to learn how to record sales on Bumpa, I’m not going to tell you ‘open your app, do this, do that.’ I’ll also include what other features or functionalities are attached it [that could increase the value to you]. So, in that one article, you’ll learn how recording sales impacts the analytics you have every month on Bumpa. I’ll link it to how recording sales means you get receipts and invoices automatically. I’ll talk about benefits of using it to apply for grants.”

Another difference, says Precious, is that content marketing campaigns were very public-facing while product marketing tasks are often only pushed to users. Rather than working with influencers or pushing ad campaigns, Precious was working on onboarding new users and improving adoption.

Bumpa Wrapped

Precious tells me that one of the product marketing projects she had fun working on was Bumpa Wrapped. The first thing she admits is that it was not an original idea; she was inspired by Spotify Wrapped and wanted to create a version for Bumpa.

At the time, she didn’t have access to a lot of data to make Bumpa’s version as specific as Spotify’s. She had to get creative.

“It was very dramatic. I did 5 persona cards that were similar to report cards. I just used one parameter to divide users into these 5 cards with basic data from the backend.”

She then worked with a designer to put the cards in graphics and add them to their email provider. Two days after Christmas, when everyone else was bonding with family and preparing for the new year, she was on a call with her designer for hours.

Even though it was a basic, bare-bones version, it worked well. Users loved them and shared on social media.

Now, Bumpa collects a lot more data points and shares the Wrapped via an in-app experience rather than email only.

Product Growth Management at Bumpa

Bumpa, like many all-in-one tools, contains multiple products within itself. So it only made sense for them to structure teams across products as they grew. Most of the product teams in Bumpa have product managers, engineers, product designers, and the occasional marketer.

Since Precious had already started doing some product management while she was a product marketer, it made perfect sense for her to join (and lead) a product team as well. But her team doesn’t have a separate product manager and marketer; they just have her. A Product Growth Manager.

Some people call this title a Growth PM -> A product manager who is focused on solving growth problems through product changes and experimentation. This is exactly what Precious does at Bumpa as well.

There is no better way for me to illustrate Product Growth Management at Bumpa than with a story Precious tells me about increasing adoption for Bumpa’s Campaign feature. She had previously shared this story on her Medium, but she does me the favour of telling it in more detail.

“There are some events that have transformed my career. What we call canon events. I’ve had maybe 5 of these in my career. This was one of them.”

Increasing Feature Adoption For Bumpa’s Campaign Feature

We have already established that Bumpa is a multifaceted product with many products within itself. One of those “products” is its Campaign feature. This feature lets business owners send emails & SMS to their customers.

It’s a great way for business owners to, for example, notify their customers about upcoming promotions. But it only had a 5% adoption rate -> only 5% of Bumpa users used it. And so the feature was assigned to Precious’ product team. Their task was to increase adoption.

Precious tells me that no one expected much from the feature—or from the task. Campaigns wasn’t a revenue maker compared to Bumpa’s other offerings. But Precious was determined to prove herself.

If a product marketer were presented with this problem, their approach might be to improve messaging and send more communications to users about the feature. But a Product Growth Manager isn’t limited to comms alone. So, the first thing Precious’ team did was to audit and fix the Campaigns feature.

They added a counter to the SMS, improved its reporting, added a preview feature, and switched providers.

Video snippet from my interview with Precious. She tells me how she and her team increased adoption for Bumpa’s Campaigns feature

Optimising the feature meant that its value to users improved significantly. So Precious decided to increase the pricing.

“We’d kept the SMS price the same since Bumpa first started. So I increased the price and created a tiered system where the price got cheaper the more units you bought. The goal was to encourage more purchases. On the outside, the product looked pretty much the same, but we’d made a lot of internal optimisations to make it a better product.”

After optimising the feature like a Product Growth Manager, Precious communicated it like a Product Marketer. She created workflows that notified users about the feature and nudged them to try it. She updated product articles to link back to the SMS feature. And she instructed customer-facing teams to tell users the feature was much improved.

“If you’ve been using the app for about a month, you enter a workflow system where you get a message like ‘hey did you know you can send an SMS?’ And when I created articles about how to run sales & promo on Bumpa, I’d mention that before you run the sale, you should send SMS or emails letting your customers know in advance. And I linked this back to the Campaign product.”

And it worked. Usage increased by 200%. Feature adoption went from 5% to 20%. Users were buying more SMS & email credits. Revenue from the feature increased by 100% month-on-month. Precious’ team had achieved this within a couple months with zero ad spend. They had exceeded expectations.

But then came a problem. They had gotten more attention, but it came at a cost. Users were sending messages to more customers than the team expected. Thousands of messages were getting sent out by users. They hadn’t planned on this much success. And so, the system got overwhelmed, and it began bleeding out of the Campaign feature and extending to the entire app.

The issues got to such a point that management decided to disable SMS temporarily. All of Precious’ team’s hard work was gone. Naturally, Precious says she felt “righteous anger.”

But after going through the 5 stages of grief, she understood the decision. Despite the increase in adoption, Campaigns still wasn’t Bumpa’s top feature or revenue driver. It wasn’t the core thing users came to Bumpa for, yet it was negatively impacting the experience with more important features. Precious and her team went back to the drawing board to question where they went wrong.

“I asked my technical lead: Did we overlook something? Why did this happen? Why do bad things happen to good people? He told me different jargon to reassure me. A month later, he sent me a tweet from a US PM who said we can try to retrace steps after things happen, but we have to also accept that some things just happen and there’s nothing you can do about it. If you build something to cater to 100,000 people and you get 1 million people, there’s no way you won’t have issues. And in the early stage, you won’t necessarily see what the infrastructure is like to cater to edge cases.”

Despite it all, Precious is proud of the work her team did. It was one of the successes that was fully theirs. From ideation to optimisation to finding 3rd-party SMS providers and creating pricing systems for more revenue.

Today, the Campaigns feature is slowly being rolled back into Bumpa. Emails have been reactivated; SMS is set to come back in a few weeks.

Solving Onboarding Problems at Bumpa

The Campaigns feature isn’t the only thing Precious’ team worked on. One of their other major problems to solve was onboarding. To understand the onboarding problem, Precious explains that there are various contexts I need to understand.

The first context is that success for a Bumpa merchant could mean different things. For some, success is recording sales digitally so they don’t lose paper records. For some, it’s analytics, so they can see revenue, profit, and sales metrics easily. For others, it’s issuing invoices and receipts. But the most common use case for Bumpa users is to first get out a live e-commerce website. Because of this, having a live website is a key activation metric.

The second thing Precious explains to me is that Bumpa used to create websites for users by default. By this definition, one could say Bumpa’s activation was practically 100%. But that’s an incorrect definition, and Precious proves it by telling me customer stories.

“There were some people who were even on paid plans who said they didn’t know they had a website. Mind you, the website was right there in the app UI. It’s the first thing you see on the page; it’s in the email workflows. It wasn’t necessarily bad communication on our end, people can just be like that.”

The final thing you need to know is that Bumpa used to have reverse trials; where users were automatically placed on free trials upon sign up.

All of this background context is important, because Precious’ solution to Bumpa’s onboarding problem might seem antithetical or even counter-intuitive. But they all make perfect sense when you understand why.

There were 4 things Precious and her team did to improve onboarding completion at Bumpa. The first was the most obvious. The first solution to most onboarding completion problems is to reduce the length of the onboarding process. Precious and her team did this.

The second solution was almost as obvious as the 2nd. Precious’ team split user journeys based on their reason for signing up. They recognised that the website feature was the major value for most users, so that was a central track. But once they entered the product and had their website, onboarding became split into different tracks.

Now, for the antithetical solutions. We’ve established that website creation used to be automatic. From the outside looking in, that might seem like a perfectly seamless solution. But Precious knew better.

In 2011, researchers at Harvard coined a term called the IKEA Effect. It’s an aptly named cognitive bias where people place more value on things they invested effort into creating.

Precious’ 3rd solution was to force users to take certain actions before they could access their website. The IKEA Effect in action.

“Now, when you sign up, you have to do 4 things before we release your website. For example, you can’t see your website till you’ve added at least one product to your catalogue. You also need to add payment details so there’s no ‘where’s my money’ issues.”

Precious tells me this is an example of good friction. When most people hear about product friction, they assume it’s all bad. But some friction is good. Good friction refers to obstacles or resistance intentionally built in to increase perceived value, engagement, or long-term outcomes.

“People have to have the idea that they’re creating something [the website] by themselves. For those who didn’t know they had websites, it’s because they were never involved in making it. But now you have to make a bit of investment before you unlock it. So even though some people–who were not serious in the first place–dropped off and didn’t finish launching their websites, awareness for the feature skyrocketed.”

Precious is irrefutably right. This was good friction.

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The final change that Precious’ team made was on the reverse trial. They reversed the reverse trial, going back to regular opt-in free trials. Precious explains why.

“One peculiarity with B2B SaaS is that people can create an account but not need you at the time. In e-commerce, it’s even worse. Users may have goods from China they’re waiting for. Or they may be waiting for edited product photographs. There are so many variables for businesses. So it was just a hunch at the time. I said ‘if we give these people free trial at a time when they don’t need the paid features yet, then it’s wasted on them’. They won’t see the value we’re trying to get them to see.”

If there were any doubt that Precious was right, the results cleared it up. When they started, onboarding completion was about 27%. When they were done, it had grown to 50%. More than that, they drastically reduced support queries about payment methods. Precious says she also no longer hears stories about users who don’t know they have websites.

Working with Engineers as a Non-Technical Person

It’s never easy to manage a team of people whose expertise you have limited knowledge of. Precious had started her career in content marketing, and now she was leading a team made up mostly of engineers. There was no way I’d let her off the call without asking her how she managed this.

Precious affirms that it’s not an easy thing, but shares the thinking frameworks & structures that help her make it seem so frictionless.

The first is that she tends to think in first principles and processes.

“If I’m not technical and I want to build a product, what do I do? I’ll explain the idea. What’s it supposed to solve? What is it going to do? It will probably not have the jargon, but I just need to explain exactly what I want. I ask about the consequences of doing what I want to do. I ask about the resources we need. I consider if the resources invested will be worth the results.”

The second thing feels like a natural continuation of the first. After Precious has defined her product requirements, her technical lead helps break down the technical requirements, implications, and barriers.

In Bumpa, the technical lead is the most senior engineer within a specific product team. They call out issues and think of technical implications—aka technical debt. All technical leads in Bumpa report to the head of engineering.

Sometimes, if she doesn’t understand what an engineer is saying, she goes to ask her technical lead. “This is what this person is saying. What can be done about it?” This helps her to catch engineers on their BS and keep accurate timelines.

The 3rd thing that helps Precious is that she is not afraid to look stupid to her team. When she doesn’t understand something, she asks her engineers to lay it out for her like she’s 5. Everyone needs help, she reasons. Even her devs.

“Even the engineer might not have all the answers. Sometimes they have to call a senior dev who has worked on a similar product to ask for advice. One time, I was implementing something with an engineer but he was finding it difficult to implement. We brought someone else in for advice and he brought a resource we hadn’t looked at before. We looked at it and were able to implement. So if engineers themselves need help, why won’t I?”

Everyone is learning together on the job, she says. So why should she be afraid to show she’s learning too? She simply asks questions and goes to do her research.

The final thing is that Precious knows her team. She has been with Bumpa for years. Her developers feel like her guys. She refers to them this way on the call. She speaks about them almost like rambunctious siblings who she can call out, fight, and speak freely with.

Long Stay At Bumpa

Precious has been at Bumpa for over 4 years. She was there when they only had about 100 users. She’s there now that they have 100,000 users. And she has played a big part in that growth.

I ask her the secret for her long stay. What does Bumpa do to keep her tied to them?

Two things, she says. The first is that she works with “truly brilliant, amazing people”. One less-discussed HR truth is that top talent prefers to work with top talent. In fact, amazing employees will only really thrive when they work with other brilliant people. This appears to be Bumpa’s secret.

It is also clear that Precious likes her colleagues. In a previous article, Precious has said she doesn’t think of work as family. During her call, she indicates—both directly and indirectly—that she does now, to some extent. Work is still work (your family can’t sack you), but you can build meaningful relationships that extend past work alone.

Precious speaks of her colleagues fondly and says they are bonded, not by work alone, but by the personal milestones they’ve witnessed. Over the past 4 years, she has attended their weddings and naming ceremonies. They’ve shared both joyful and painful moments. When you spend 8 hours a day & 5 days a week for 4 years with a group of people, you are bound to become attached to them.

The second reason for Precious’ long stay is far less emotional. She might love her colleagues, but she loves her career too. So, Bumpa lets her go on what she calls “transfer windows” to aid her career and give her more varied experiences. She is honest with Bumpa’s CEO about moments when her job satisfaction decreases, and they find a workaround to fix things.

A third reason that Precious doesn’t directly tell me, but that I suspect, is that she receives fulfilment from seeing the work of her hands directly improve people’s lives. Throughout our interview, she shares various stories about how Bumpa has impacted customers and the excitement she has felt on receiving feedback. She doesn’t need to tell me; when I search “Bumpa” on Twitter, I see raving reviews.

There you have it. A look at how Bumpa grew to 100,000 users; and how they sustain and expand that growth.

You can find Precious on LinkedIn or Twitter.

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Hi there.

Welcome to the 220 new subscribers who joined Marketing For Geeks since the last issue. Big thanks to everyone who shares MFG with their network.

ICYMI: In my last issue, I wrote about MTN’s PR disaster and how they could have responded instead. It is now my most widely-read post.

Today is for Funnel Vision, where I write a case study on a campaign, project, or product by speaking with the marketing professional behind them.

In this issue, I look into Cenoa’s growth story with Feranmi Ajetomobi, Cenoa’s former Country Manager for Nigeria.

What To Expect:

• Feranmi’s approach to hiring Cenoa’s Nigeria team

• How Cenoa penetrated the Nigerian market

• The reasoning behind Cenoa’s competitive strategy

• Cenoa’s acquisition channels and tactics

In the US and similar markets, comparative marketing isn’t anything new. But in Nigeria, strict advertising codes and cultural beliefs discourage brands from directly comparing themselves against competitors.

So it was a wonderful change of pace when a fintech app, Cenoa, made a tweet directly calling out a competitor’s rates and comparing against theirs. It inspired many hot takes about whether the post was ethical or even legal—I made a thread on this earlier.

Naturally, I wanted to hear from the horse’s mouth. And it was almost serendipitous that Cenoa’s Country Manager was a marketer I’ve respected since our paths first crossed in 2022.

I spoke with Feranmi Ajetomobi, Cenoa’s Country Manager in Nigeria (at the time of our interview), about penetrating the Nigerian market and navigating competition.

Let’s dive in!

Setting up in a new market

One of the first duties of a Country Manager, as Feranmi tells me, is team formation in the country they manage. Cenoa is headquartered in Turkey, so it has central product, engineering, and marketing teams. But when you’re entering a new market, it’s important for certain teams to be localised.

Given Feranmi’s marketing background, you'd think his first hire would be a marketer. It wasn't. It's clear throughout our conversation that Feranmi is both a strategist and executor, which might explain why he didn't need to hire marketers right away. He could do most of the groundwork himself, and he had Cenoa’s global marketing team to support him. I guess in a way, you could say Feranmi was Cenoa’s first marketing hire in Nigeria.

But that’s not the main reason why he didn’t hire a marketer first. Feranmi’s first hire was in the customer support team, and he explains his reasoning to me.

“No matter what, customer experience is the most important thing. If you don't have localised customer experience, you'll have a trust problem. If someone calls your support and hears a foreign voice, they would wonder if you’re a scammer.”

Feranmi believes that Customer Support is not a standalone team, but should instead be a part of the growth team. He learnt this when he worked at Cowrywise, where CS played a key role in conversion.

So when Feranmi wanted to hire someone to lead customer support at Cenoa, he looked out for people who shared his belief in CS as more than picking calls. In other words, customer experience and success, not customer support alone.

He first tried finding this person by making a job post on LinkedIn. But he quickly realised that the kind of person he wanted could only be found via referrals. So he asked for referrals within his circle. And he found exactly who he was looking for.

It's clear that Feranmi is proud of his first customer support hire. He has raved about her in posts before and he does the same on the call.

“We found someone; her name is Judith. She’s amazing. She has worked in CS for companies like QuickBus and Safeboda. But what was really different about her was that she saw the growth component of customer support. She didn’t just see it as ‘pick up calls and resolve customer problems.’ We didn’t play with the work of building an end-to-end system for CS.”

When I check Judith’s LinkedIn profile, I understand what Feranmi means. In her description of her work at various companies, I note key phrases that align with Feranmi’s view of customer success.

Once Feranmi had hired Judith, he could focus on taking the product to market.

Penetrating the Nigerian market

After Feranmi hired Judith, he began searching for partners that could improve Cenoa’s local infrastructure for Nigeria.

Feranmi tells me that Go-To-Market is a two-pronged approach. The prong most people focus on is simply getting the product to the customer. But, as Feranmi explains, Go-To-Market also involves finding partners that help you improve experience for these new customers.

When Cenoa first launched into Nigeria, it could take up to 2 hours for successful deposits and withdrawals. Payment infrastructure looks different in Turkey than it does in Nigeria, so Feranmi had to find a partner to help improve the speed of local transactions.

This is another key job of a Country Manager; to find technical partners to make operations more seamless.

Another job of a Country Manager is to explain the unique context of the new market to the global team. When Cenoa first launched in Nigeria, they were positioned as a dollar savings app, like Piggyvest or Cowrywise.

But Feranmi didn’t think that would work for a number of reasons.

The first was that the savings industry was too competitive for Cenoa’s offering. There were already other dollar savings options with better rates. And there weren’t many Nigerians earning enough to consider saving in dollars, so that positioning significantly reduced their market size.

But the second, and perhaps most important, reason was that savings were simply too high-trust. Nigeria has a trust deficit, and savings require more trust than other financial use cases.

“It is one thing to help people make transactions and receive money. It is another thing to ask them to leave their money with you for a long time. So it was a very tight place for us to be at that point in time.”

Feranmi had first-hand experience with Nigeria’s trust problem. He was part of Cowrywise’s early marketing team and had spent 3 years driving product marketing and storytelling for the fintech.

This meant he knew exactly how long it took Cowrywise to build the trust it has today. And he knew how long it would take Cenoa to build that trust, especially since it wasn’t a locally owned product.

“It took us 3 to 4 years to build that trust as Cowrywise. And now we’re coming as a new entrant in the same market. It would probably take a shorter time than that to build the trust for Cenoa. But we didn’t have the time.

We’re in a fast-paced industry with investors. You look at the numbers and the vision and know you don’t have the time to build the kind of trust you need for savings. If we had the time to spend years experimenting, we could definitely achieve it.”

So, one of the first recommendations that Feranmi made as a Country Manager was for Cenoa to try other use cases around cross-border payments. Management agreed, and thus, Cenoa’s positioning was changed.

Surprisingly, this positioning shift didn’t require heavy product changes. It helped that the team had identified a partner to improve the speed of local transactions, which was more critical now that Cenoa was a payments solution.

But the savings feature didn’t disappear. It simply became a value-add; and is one of Cenoa’s strongest differentiators now that it is in the payments market.

Other payments solutions simply let you send and receive money. But because Cenoa already had savings infrastructure set up, you could earn interest on your dollar balance. No other payments solution in Nigeria offered this benefit.

It needs to be 100% clear. This “simple” positioning shift changed everything for Cenoa. And they didn’t even need to make major product changes for it.

If they had stuck with their dollar savings app positioning, they would have struggled. Because their rates weren’t high enough to make a huge splash compared to other dollar savings apps. But as a global payments app, their savings feature became a major differentiator from competitors.

Cenoa’s comparative advertising

Everything that Feranmi has told me up till now already paints the picture of why comparative advertising was an excellent strategy for Cenoa. I don’t bother asking why he (and the team) decided to do it in the first place. Instead, I ask about the processes that led up to the viral ad we all saw.

The first thing Feranmi makes clear to me is that the comparative strategy was a joint effort between marketing and customer success. The initial competitor research was led by Cenoa’s Global Head of Strategy and a member of the Nigerian CS team. He uses this to illustrate his point about customer success being critical for growth.

“In Nigeria, there are a lot of big names in global payments. So we [the CS team member] tried some of these products and compared them. We looked at everything, from their onboarding to their KYC to their rates.”

This research took months to collate. But at the end of it, Cenoa’s competitive advantage was clear—their fees & rates. Feranmi then used this knowledge to build out a value prop matrix for Cenoa.

“We saw that we had an advantage with our infrastructure that lets us offer lower fees and better exchange rates. We looked at that cost statement and realised this could be our actual value prop statement. So we turned that differentiator into the tangible value in our value prop.”

When new entrants are cheaper than alternatives, it’s typically because they are subsidizing the cost somehow and intend to raise their prices after gaining sufficient trust and market share. Feranmi raises this to make the point that Cenoa’s differentiator isn’t simply that they are cheaper. It is that they have better infrastructure.

“I want to clarify that I don’t believe in subsidizing costs. I’ve never been a fan of it. It’s not a sustainable differentiator. When you want to position as low-cost, it has to be built on your infrastructure. The reason our rates are low is that we’ve spent money to build infrastructure that makes it cheaper for us. It’s not because we’re subsidizing the cost.”

Cenoa’s promise is that for every $1000 you receive, you pay less fees (and therefore get more balance) than with all other options. This promise is plastered across their communications, including their homepage, where they directly compare against various competitors.

The actual value prop statement was coined by Cenoa’s Head of Brand Marketing as a result of the competitor research that had been done. Feranmi then translated that into website copy. Because Cenoa was a challenger brand, it was very important to Feranmi that they took a bold approach to marketing.

It then made perfect sense to Feranmi to include some kind of comparison table or calculator on the website to show exactly how much you get when you use Cenoa vs when you use other platforms.

“I made a very shabby comparison table in Google Sheets. The CEO saw it and agreed that we should try it publicly. They first used it for the Turkey audience as a comparison against Payoneer. They saw results in that, so we did it for more Nigerian competitors like Grey, Cleva, Geegpay, and ChipperCash. And then it really worked.”

The team started seeing messages and posts from people saying they didn’t know they were losing that much with competitors.

And it was all due to the clarity that Cenoa had on its benefit. They weren’t just another dollar app with no differentiator. Feranmi reiterates that this wouldn’t have been possible if they’d stayed a savings app.

“We were offering cheaper rates than everyone in the same market. There were pain points and there was a clear strong advantage. In the past, the global marketing team tried a comparison against Piggyvest, but it didn’t work for 2 reasons. First, there is good love and trust for Piggyvest. But more importantly, we didn’t have a clear advantage over them at that moment.”

Of course, not everyone is lucky to have management that is open to switching its positioning. That’s why many marketers have to lean on storytelling or aggressive marketing as a differentiator. It’s no fault of theirs, Feranmi agrees. Perhaps another reason for Cenoa’s success is a management that listens to data and allows the team to experiment.

Feranmi and I finally get to talking about the ad that prompted this conversation. Many people who saw the ad, including me, assumed that it was Cenoa’s first comparative ad. That isn’t true.

In fact, Cenoa had created multiple posts, both organic and paid, comparing Cenoa to other options. This was simply the one that blew up. There are many possible theories on why this could be. Maybe this one had clearer messaging than others. Maybe $100 was too low for people to take notice. Maybe $12k was too high for people to relate to. Maybe it was just luck—right place, right time.

Feranmi has his own theory.

“At the time, people had a big pain point with Chipper. There was a consensus that Chipper Cash had been taking people’s money. So I think that made people relate with the post strongly.”

I ask Feranmi if he was worried about any ethical or legal backlash from Cenoa’s comparative ads. He isn’t.

“I saw a lot of people talk about ARCON. Regulatory bodies are one thing, for sure. But legal-wise, there isn’t any law being broken. We didn’t make any untrue statements, we did our research, and we presented the facts. I didn’t lose any sleep, to be honest.”

The only thing Feranmi might have worried about is perception, both internally and externally. But neither of these is an issue for him.

Internally, the global team is 100% aligned with Feranmi’s approach and they back it. For marketing to stand out, Feranmi says, you have to have a strong opinion and your team has to be aligned on it.

External perception is a different beast though. But I can tell Feranmi isn’t worried about that either. He speaks with the assured calm of someone who’s managed viral campaigns before. While he was at Cowrywise, they ran a fake email leak for a campaign that mixed reactions. Feranmi has learnt to weigh the positives against the negatives.

“Nigeria is an interesting country. We have this cultural belief that makes us think ads like these are trying to bring others down. But we’re just trying to show you what’s better. Once the truth is very bold, there will always be some sort of reaction. No matter how good it is, there’s going to be negative reactions. You just have to make sure the positive components outshine the negative, which is what happened to us.”

Comparison ads don’t have to be in good faith, but it is interesting that Cenoa’s is. Even while he speaks with me about the differentiators Cenoa uses to stand out from competitors, he mentions the things that some competitors—even Chipper Cash—have over Cenoa.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, for Cenoa), competitors don’t seem to be as aware of their differentiators as Cenoa is. Or they’re simply unwilling to lean into differentiators as Cenoa has, even if it means changing their positioning. Maybe if they did, they might have been able to respond to Cenoa’s comparative ads.

Only one competitor attempted to respond to Cenoa, and it wasn’t a competitor Cenoa even focused on. Another new entrant—far newer than Cenoa even—called Mular attempted to duplicate Cenoa’s strategy by responding with its own comparison.

I ask Feranmi about his thoughts on Mular turning the tables on Cenoa. His initial response is “I really don’t care; I suspected that somebody would try to clap back.”

But then he pauses and explains why he doesn’t care. He is not trying to be dismissive; he is simply confident in the research he’s done and infrastructure that Cenoa has built. Cenoa’s post took months (of research) to create. Mular’s took 5 days.

“Honestly, there’s no competitor that can come near us in terms of fees and rates in the Nigerian market as of today. I didn’t just wake up and make the ad. We started researching since August. We’d been doing this research for months and comparing fees month-on-month to find a stable rate for comparison.”

Feranmi also points out that Mular’s comparison isn’t comparable. Mular is a crypto payments app that doesn’t offer USD accounts, so it’s not a fair analogy to compare themselves with those that do.

I ask Feranmi about the actual numbers from the Chipper comparison ads. He’s proud to tell me about them.

To anyone else, these would be crazy numbers. But to Feranmi, they’re just the tip of the iceberg. There’s more work to be done.

Feranmi (and Cenoa) plans to continue leaning into their competitive advantage. But they don’t intend to keep doing the same comparative ads over and over again. Feranmi has been relatively calm during our conversation, but he becomes a little excitable when he says this. He cannot tell me all of the details because Cenoa hasn’t executed on them yet.

To whet my curiosity, he hints that it involves Cenoa putting its money where its mouth is by giving people back the money they lost with other platforms.

Cenoa’s recent success, especially in reducing CAC, has led to Feranmi’s boss voluntarily doubling his marketing budget. Which means that Feranmi has a bigger budget to experiment with.

Cenoa’s acquisition channels

So far, Cenoa has amassed about 400k users in Nigeria. We already know their recent comparative ads brought a bump in traffic, but the startup was doing fairly well even before that. Feranmi tells me about their chosen channels and the tactics they use to be successful in them.

Feranmi uses organic content marketing to choose the best content for paid channels. In fact, they tested the comparison messaging organically before deciding to put some money behind it for ads.

“If an organic content gets good traction, then we promote it with a little budget so it goes wider. So it has to deliver results first organically before we decide to spend. Of course, there are cases when you’re sure of something and want to go live with it right away. But most of the time, we test the organic impact first.”

Cenoa has also leveraged influencers, especially when they first launched in Nigeria. Many people expect influencers to drive quick conversions, but Feranmi tells me that’s only a secondary benefit at best.

For Feranmi, there are 2 main benefits of using influencers. The first is trust.

“In any new market, the first thing is trust; and that’s why influencers work. People use influencers wrongly when they expect instant conversions. The real impact of influencers at the beginning is trust.”

The 2nd benefit of using influencers, Feranmi explains, is reach. This is especially true for influencers with mass audiences, like skitmakers and celebrities.

“I’ve seen people talk on Twitter about ads not bringing conversion when they use big influencers like Layi Wasabi. But that’s what happens with generalist influencers. Their job is to amplify your message to a wide audience of people. So you use influencers like that to get attention. And then you bring in the niche influencers that can leverage that attention to actually get trust and conversions.”

Anyone who’s ever had to work with niche influencers knows how hard it is to find them in the first place. For this, Feranmi works with an agency, Creative Agora, that he has a longstanding relationship with.

But not everyone can hire an agency. In this case, Feranmi recommends doing the hard work yourself.

“For example, I can go to TikTok or YouTube and search for “How do I open a US dollar account?” And from that search, you’d see a ton of people answering these questions with videos. And you’ll see them with different follower counts or engagement numbers. Find the ones that work for your budget.

When you’ve never done the hard work yourself, you won’t really know what you want. And that means anyone or any tool can feed you a load of bull and you just run with it.

As we get on to the topic of niche influencers, Feranmi tells me about his work with niche communities. For example, Cenoa recently announced a partnership with People In Product, a tech company for—as the name implies—people who work in product.

Feranmi acknowledges that communities are small and might not bring you the same reach as other channels. But he argues that they can help you build ambassadors quicker and cheaper than other channels.

“So you reach out to a community and create an exclusive partnership with them. It shouldn’t be a one-off thing. You do events with them, speak with them, hold them tight, sponsor some of their events. And somehow you unintentionally become the official dollar account of those communities.”

Once again, Feranmi credits his CS Lead, Judith, for taking the lead on some of Cenoa’s strongest community partnerships. There is pride in his eyes when he says:

“For the first time, I’m seeing the kind of work I did at Cowrywise happen even better and at scale.”

Since Feranmi has told me how he hires rockstar CS people, I ask him what he looks out for in marketing hires. He tells me 4 things; boldness, persistence, documentation, and a focus on results.

Feranmi explains the reasoning for some of this criteria. If his marketing hire weren’t persistent, for example, they’d have given up when the first few comparison messages didn’t take off. Instead, they kept tweaking the messaging and trying new things until it finally hit.

“People always say you can’t engineer virality. You can. But for that to happen, you have to have a persistent system. Before that ad went viral, we’d tried similar things a number of times. He [marketing hire] could have dismissed it and said “I’m not doing this again” but he didn’t. And then this particular one went viral.”

And when Feranmi wanted to see the results of the campaign, they didn’t focus on the buzz and virality. They focused on how they affected the bottomline – website visits, sign-ups, transactions, acquisition cost.

When I told members of MFG’s WhatsApp community about the interview, they asked me to help relay some questions to Feranmi. One of the questions was “How does he approach these marketing angles? What’s the thinking process like?”

On the surface, it might seem like a vague question. But sometimes, bold marketing can seem so elusive. It’s hard to find new ideas that work. So I ask Feranmi the question.

“I just sleep actually”

His first response is half-joking, but there’s reason in it. Sometimes, it’s important to take a break and come back at things with a fresh mind. As the song goes, “Overthinking no fit solve problem.”

But Feranmi doesn’t end his response there. He pauses and tells me, in a more serious tone, that he simply looks at patterns. Like a true geek, he spends time studying things that have been done before. And then he reverse-engineers them.

Sometimes, his sources for inspiration are the works of other companies.

“I could go to Dominoes UK on social media and see the kind of things they tweet about. Sometimes, I go to Ads of The World and just watch a ton of ads. Some of these things won’t work in Nigeria. Some will. So I try to apply it to the Nigerian context.”

Sometimes, he looks at patterns in product data instead.

“I like using data to guide my marketing—not just me, the entire team. So if I see payments coming from a particular platform, I’m thinking ‘how can we build a partnership with that platform?’

One time, we found that some of our highest earners were coming from a particular platform. So we put those users in a segment and gave them a referral program. Now, I’m confident that everyone who comes through that referral won’t go below a certain transaction value.”

I ask Feranmi a final question (the question itself is inconsequential) and his last words strike me as the perfect way to end this story. They reflect Feranmi’s (and Cenoa’s) confidence in both their product and their marketing—and why they’re not really worried about competition.

“I have a few exciting rollouts coming soon. When that happens, I know someone will try to replicate it again. But then they’ll see why they can’t replicate it.”

That’s it! An inside look into Cenoa approaches competition in a saturated market. You can find Feranmi on LinkedIn.

📣Tweet about this.

UPDATE: Feranmi has officially left Cenoa at the time of publishing this article, but remains an equity holder.

Want to do more than read MFG?

1. Join MFG’s WhatsApp community to partake in marketing discussions. The community now has 300 people with a mix of beginners, mid-level, and experts.

2. Come play at MFG’s 3rd physical hangout (community members only) on March 29. It’s nothing crazy; a few of us sit somewhere, drink (everyone pays for themself), play games, and rant. Location is Ibadan. Join the community to find out more details.

3. If you’re a founder, book a call to get one-time free product marketing advice for 15 minutes.

4. Contribute guest posts to MFG. Works best if you’re looking to build bylines for your portfolio.

What I’m Reading

• The definitive framework to find your next scalable user acquisition channel — Great post about finding the right acquisition channel(s) for your startup.

• The Ultimate SEO Guide for Early-Stage SaaS — Excellent guide for SEO beginners.

• 50 things we’ve learned about building successful products — 50 lessons from PostHog’s team

• How To Measure Marginal Willingness To Pay —Marginal Willingness To Pay measures how much a customer would spend to change one specific feature of your product.

• Why Is Duolingo So Crazy? — Great case study on Duolingo’s gamification and brand strategies.

Marketing Jobs

• B2B SaaS Content Writer at Scalerrs | Remote, Anywhere in the world

• Writer (HER Vertical) at Zikoko

• Content Writer at Zedcrest | Hybrid, Lagos

• Newsletter Editor at TechCabal

• Social Media Associate at TechCabal

• SEO Specialist at TechCabal

• Product Marketing Manager at Seamfix

• Growth Marketing Associate at The Afara Initiative | Remote, Nigeria

• Growth Marketing Lead at NotchHR | Hybrid, Lagos

• Content Writer at Groove | Remote, Anywhere in the world

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Hi there.

Welcome to the 287 new subscribers who joined Marketing For Geeks since the last issue. Big thanks to everyone who shares MFG with their network. As a reminder, this is what you can expect each week:

• ✅Week 1: A Funnel Vision issue where I share the growth story of a successful African product or project.

• Week 2: Actionable insights from the previous week’s growth story

• Week 3: 1 interesting thing & 3 marketing insights.

• Week 4: 5 standout marketing pieces & hot takes from the internet

ICYMI: In my last issue, I shared some amazing brand manifestos for your swipe file.

Today is for Funnel Vision, where I dive into a specific campaign, project, or product by speaking with the marketing professional behind them.

In this issue, I look into Treford’s partnership framework with Dotun Adefioye, Treford’s Partnerships Manager.

What To Expect:

• Types of partners at Treford

• Pull vs push in partnerships

• Partnership green & red flags

• Treford’s affiliate program

• Partnership during the No-Code Tech Summit

Three years ago, in 2022, I began my product marketing career by taking Treford’s product marketing bootcamp. A year later, I furthered my career by taking their product strategy bootcamp.

I first heard about Treford through a marketing community they had partnered with. Partnerships like that have been the bedrock of Treford’s success.

So, when I decided to do a case study on Treford, I knew I had to focus on their partnership strategy. I spoke with Dotun Adefioye, Partnerships Manager at Treford.

In our ~2-hour long conversation, we discussed what makes a partnership worth it and what red flags Treford looks out for.

Let’s dive in.

Types of Partnerships At Treford

I cannot dive into this article without outlining the types of partnerships that Treford engages in. It’s the foundation of their partnership framework.

1. Hiring Partners:
   Treford considers itself as a resource company. Because of this, they need hiring partners for talent placement. People who take Treford courses likely want to practice the skills they learnt, so they need jobs.

   “What we do at Treford is to fill skill gaps for non-tech verticals. Once you’ve done that, you want a better life and a better-paying job that suits the skill you’ve learnt.”

   For this, Treford has 2 major hiring partners: Propel & Hirefoster. These hiring partners help provide job opportunities for Treford graduates where possible. In some cases, Treford even earns cashback for successful job referrals. A win-win-win.
   

2. Community Partners:
   Community partners are likely the most popular types of partners Treford has. If you belong to any no-code tech community in Nigeria, you’ve likely heard Treford mentioned.
   

   I ask Dotun to name some of Treford’s community partners and the list goes on. Marketing For Geeks is on the list. Dotun tells me that his goal with community partnerships is to create value for the community members, by giving discounted (or even free) access to their courses.
   

3. Learning Partners:
   Learning partners help Treford deliver more value to its students. These partners are products students might use in their chosen learning paths.

   

   For the learning partners, they are introducing their product to the next generation of talents and establishing themselves as a standard tool for that niche.
   For Treford, they are teaching their students how to use valuable tools that will aid them in the real world.
   For the students, they’re getting free access to a tool they would have had to pay for otherwise.
   

   Once again, win-win-win. This is a trend in Treford’s partnership framework. Their most successful partnerships are those that are valuable to all 3 stakeholders: Treford, the students, and the partner.
   

4. Brands:
   Finally, I ask Dotun about brand partnerships, which is the most vague on the list. There are 2 types of brand partners at Treford.
   

   The first are brands looking to use Treford as a CSR initiative. These partners reach out to Treford to sponsor courses for a number of people.

   

   I ask Dotun how Treford chooses who to give these free courses to. It depends, he says. Sometimes, the partners have already selected beneficiaries of this scholarship. In some cases, they leave it to Treford; and Treford gives slots out to their audience.

   “Sometimes, we use it to reward community partners. So, we can say ‘a brand has paid for 10 people to join a particular session. Do you have people from your community who can take advantage of these free slots?’ So, those brand partners come from a place of goodwill.”

   The second type of brand partners are companies looking to upskill a large chunk of their workforce; in other words, B2B deals.

I ask Dotun which of the partnership types is most impactful for Treford. It depends, he says once again.

“It’s not straightforward, because each of these partnerships has impact in their own way. For example, our learning partners are a value-add for us that boosts our external perception.

If we were solely to judge by direct revenue growth, brand partnerships will be the most impactful. But if we were to judge by reach and awareness, community partners will take the cake. Because those are the people who help amplify our message.”

How Treford Approaches Partnership Discussions

Partnership is in itself a marketing form. This means, just like with other marketing channels, there is a pull and a push.

A push happens when you actively look for your audience and push messaging on them. A pull happens when you allow your audience find you by creating content they’ll look for or by positioning in places where they’d find you.

I ask Dotun about how Treford finds potential partners—do they push or do they pull? It’s a bit of both, as Dotun tells me.

“We have a partnership framework for people we’re trying to get in bed with. This includes hiring departments for startups and scaleups, government institutes, corporate bodies, and large-scale communities. So, we reach out to these people. But a lot of organisations also reach out to us.”

Some partners reach out to Treford because their mission or audience aligns with Treford’s. The initial message gives Dotun an initial hint as to whether the partnership is worth pursuing in the first place. If it’s worth entertaining, then Dotun sets up a first call with the potential partner. However, he says, this call isn’t a guarantee that the partnership will hold.

During the call, Dotun asks certain questions to ensure Treford and the potential partner are on the same page. The most important thing to check for, as Dotun tells me, is value. It’s the core of their discussions. Dotun needs to ensure, not just that Treford can provide value to the partner, but that the partner can provide value to Treford.

“We check for value. We don’t want people who just want to leverage the Treford name or who want access to our database of learners. So we ask “what can you offer us?” and “what can we offer you?”

One of the more unconventional approaches that Treford takes is to not sign official contracts or make announcements right away. In fact, Dotun says, there was a partner Treford had for 2 years before ever making an announcement or signing a contract.

“We typically have a probationary period before an official contract is signed. It varies from partner to partner. That period is for us to see how things turn out so we don’t waste each other’s time with the announcement.”

When both parties are satisfied with the viability and success of the partnership, Dotun hands off the partnership to the content team to prepare an official announcement.

“Our content team links up with theirs because the announcement has to be synchronised. The partners may share marketing materials with us and we may share ours with them. My part here is to connect both parties and act as a bridge to ensure they’re clear on everything they need. I sync with the partner to see if they have any dependencies or want us to make any corrections.”

Partnership Green & Red Flags

Dotun mentions that there are certain flags that Treford looks out for during the partnership discussions or probationary period. I ask him to tell me about them.

The biggest red flag, Dotun says, is when a partner only wants to gain value from Treford without having any to offer in return. If a partner only focuses on how Treford can help them without mentioning what they can offer (without being prompted), then it’s likely not a good partnership deal for Treford.

A second red flag is when a partner’s solution isn’t very clear. Dotun tells me a story about a potential partner whose product he could not understand even after 2 calls.

“If I don’t understand your solution or offering, how can I pitch it to stakeholders? For this partner, after 2 calls, I still did not have a grasp on what their product was about. So the conversation died off and we didn’t pick it up.”

A 3rd red flag is when a partner is too hasty to close a deal. That doesn’t give him enough time to do due diligence on the partner, and it can be a sign that the partner has something to hide.

Dotun’s due diligence lets him know if there is enough value for the partnership to be worth it. And the value doesn’t even have to be balanced, as Dotun tells me. As he puts it,

“What we’re getting from you doesn’t have to be equivalent to what we’re giving you. But we have to make it make sense in some way. And if you’re too hasty during this phase, it means you only want to use us.”

But enough about red flags. Let’s talk about the signals that let Dotun know a partnership will likely be great. Treford’s 2 top goals are growth and opportunities for its ecosystem. So, partnership green flags are centered on both goals.

“In terms of growth, will we be able to scale our user base with you? Will we be able to get revenue impact from what we’re dishing out? If we get in bed with you, will our messaging be amplified and by how much?”

For opportunities, Dotun looks out for offers that can create more value for its students and alumni. This is especially true for hiring and learning partners.

“To get opportunities for our ecosystem, we have hiring partners and even workspaces that our students & alumni can take advantage of. Same goes for learning and event partners who can give us free or discounted access to tools and tickets. If those are in place, that’s a green flag for us.”

Managing Partnerships

It is not enough to launch a partnership. Dotun is also in charge of managing relationships with partners and deciding when to invest more in certain partnerships.

Partnerships cost money, so Dotun must infer how much to give and whether it’s a worthy investment.

For example, Treford offers certain discounts to community partners, but some communities get higher discounts than others. Dotun says this is one of the things the probation period advises them on.

“We have a certain percentage discount that we are open to sharing across board with any partners. New partners never get more than that amount. But, depending on the kind of traction we get from the partner, we can increase the amount later on.”

The determining factor in whether a community gets an extended discount is the impact of the partnership on Treford’s numbers. If a partner has provided enough value, then Dotun reaches out to the finance team to see how much higher Treford can go.

“I start the conversation, but I can’t make the decision on my own. Once I’ve deemed that a partner has been beneficial and deserves more, I have a conversation with the community in question. After that, I reach out to finance to see what the financial implications are for us.”

In some cases, the outcome of the conversation isn’t even an increased discount. Treford’s finance team has capped discounts at a certain percentage, so Dotun is not always able to offer a higher discount.

In such instances, rather than a discount, Treford may add a cashback policy for the community partner. In other cases, they give them a one-time full scholarship to bestow on community members of their choosing.

Dotun views this as a reward to acknowledge the success of the partnership and the traction it has brought for Treford.

Not all partnerships are successful, though, so I ask Dotun what happens when a partner doesn’t bring the expected numbers. When this happens, Dotun explains, he revisits the conversations with said partner. In some cases, he may change the offer for the partner to find something that better aligns.

“If a partner isn’t bringing the expected value, it might mean what we’re offering them doesn’t really align with their audience. So we sometimes try to find a new offer that will benefit them more. For example, the live sessions might be too expensive for their audience, so we push self-paced courses instead.”

If, after all odds, a partnership proves completely unsuccessful, Treford may cut it off. In fact, after a review this year, Dotun let go of about 8 partners that hadn’t provided any traction and were unresponsive to his outreach.

Tracking Partnership Success

Of course, I can’t write about Treford’s partnership setup without touching on its impact on Treford’s numbers.

To understand Treford’s numbers, you must first understand its verticals. Treford has 2 of them.

The first is its live learning vertical, which includes bootcamps and masterclasses. The bootcamps are intensive 6-week programs that include class assignments, weekend (online) classes, exams, and case studies. These are Treford’s most expensive offering, starting from N200,000. This also means that it is Treford’s cash cow.

Treford’s live verticals are tracked manually and are more of a service than a product.

“The process for our live sessions is manual. We use forms to track the progress. Once you show interest by filling a form, our team approves the application and moves you to the sales department. You finalise payment with the sales department and get registered for the live sessions.”

Because the process is so manual, Dotun tracks success through partner codes and self-attribution. Each partner is given a distinct coupon code, which their members can submit while filling the application form. This lets the sales team apply discounts before payments.

Apart from codes, the forms also include a “How did you hear about Treford?” question, which lets Dotun know which channel a student came through, even if they didn’t use a coupon code.

The 2nd vertical, which Treford launched officially in October last year, is the self-paced vertical. For this, Treford has built a catalogue of courses on various topics, with some courses free and others paid.

Treford’s self-paced vertical is a product, rather than a service. This means that tracking is done through actual analytics tools. However, this tracking is handled by the product team, even though Dotun often creates reports on the numbers.

When Dotun needs to see the impact of partnerships on self-paced courses, he reaches out to the product team to provide the data he needs. When he needs to see the impact on live sessions, he reaches out to the sales team to see how many leads became paying students.

Treford has trained over 20,000 no-code professionals, with most of its revenue coming through live sessions. In 2024, about 44% of attendees at Treford’s live sessions came directly through partnerships. The success of Treford’s partnership framework is not up for debate.

Treford’s Affiliate Program

Early this year, Dotun contacted me (and other partners) to set up one-on-one calls. When I got on the call, he informed me that Treford was launching an automated affiliate program.

But this isn’t the first time Treford has launched an affiliate program. In fact, over the years, Treford has tested different variants of the program 3 times. Each time, they learnt something new that they improved on in the next version.

As Partnerships Manager, Dotun is in charge of managing the affiliate program. At the time of our initial interview, he told me that his goal was to create a stable structure and automate the program. It appears he has now done so.

The biggest problem with Treford’s previous affiliate program was that it was managed manually, in a similar model to Treford’s community partnerships. Dotun would manually assign codes to potential affiliates, referred students would enter the code when applying, and Dotun would check the code against his database. It was a tenuous process.

Apart from the manual effort of assigning and tracking codes, another stressor for Dotun was maintaining relationships with affiliates.

“The whole system wasn’t automated enough and that was the problem. We had affiliates who’d show interest, but they’d fall off along the line because they didn’t get any reminders. In fact, some people forget that they’re members of the program and they refer people without giving their affiliate code.”

Dotun’s last line rings through, especially for me. As a Treford alumnus, I’ve been a member of their affiliate program in the past. But I’ve never remembered to share my code when I recommend Treford to friends and acquaintances. This time around, Dotun wants to stay top-of-mind for affiliates.

All the earlier versions of Treford’s affiliate program were specifically created for alumni. Former participants in Treford’s programs often refer it to others. So, the previous affiliate programs were created to incentivise alumni to keep doing so.

“A lot of leads for our live sessions come from our alumni acting as ambassadors. People who have gone through our programs share it with others, whether we pay them or not. So we wanted to implement a program where they got a percentage commission back for doing this.”

Now, Treford’s latest iteration is expanding outside its alumni network. Dotun is looking to connect with niche influencers whose audience largely contains Treford’s ICP. I ask Dotun what criteria he intends to judge influencers by, and he says numbers are only a 2nd priority.

“Of course, numbers are important. But because of our niche, we’re more concerned with the topics you speak on and the audience you have. I plan to look for people who are recognised as voices in certain niches—people who would recommend something and their audience trusts them enough to check it out. So I won’t look for people with audiences of 100k people where only about 600 are actually active. I’ll look for people who have 2k followers, but those 2k followers actually trust them and fit our audience.”

No-Code Tech Summit

Treford’s longest-term community partner is the Non-Tech In Tech community, a Slack community of professionals working in no-code verticals in tech startups. In 2022, Treford partnered with Non-Tech In Tech (NTIT) to create a first-of-its-kind summit for no-code professionals in Nigeria. The 2-day event includes a full-day seminar as well as an awards ceremony.

The summit was a hit and has since become an annual hallmark event, holding almost every year since then. I ask Dotun what Treford’s goal is with the event, and he tells me it’s a long-term game.

“The tech industry is very big. And over 60% of the tech industry is made up of no-code tech professionals. But somehow all the flowers of the industry go to the developers. So, we’re trying to get non-technical people their accolades. That’s the idea of the summit; to create a gathering of individuals in these niches and give them recognition.”

But that is not to say that Treford is completely selfless in organising the event. A nice side benefit for them is that they can “preach the gospel of Treford,” as Dotun puts it. During the event, Treford sets up a booth and gives discounted access to attendees. After the event, Treford often records higher website visits. But as Partnerships Manager, that isn’t Dotun’s high point. For him, it’s the new partnerships that appear after the summit.

Events of this size often require a village to organise. So it’s certainly great luck (or strategy) that the summit has joint hosts. Since the summit is jointly hosted, its partnership team is a marriage of sorts, made up of members of both Treford’s and NTIT’s partnership teams.

This joint partnership team is split into 3. There’s a team in charge of identifying potential partners, another in charge of handling conversations and managing relationships with partners, and the last in charge of closing deals and ensuring the partners receive all the terms of their agreement.

Dotun belongs to the sub-team that handles conversations with partners. Because of this, he doesn’t have as much insight into how the team finds event partners. However, he tells me that the No-Code Tech Summit has about a 60% retention rate for sponsors. This means they often have repeat sponsors because they’ve maintained good relationships with them.

Dotun tells me that the biggest issue when finding new partners is finding the details of key individuals to have conversations with. It’s one thing to have a list of potential partners, he says. It’s another to know who to talk to in those organisations. But once they get past that obstacle, the rest of the process feels like Dotun’s day-to-day at Treford.

The Culture at Treford

Because Treford’s live sessions hold during the weekends, a lot of their employees have to give up weekends to manage sessions. Program managers often use their personal phone lines to manage communications with attendees and partners. It’s the kind of environment that one would expect to see described as toxic or overwhelming.

So, while doing preliminary research for this article, it was a shock to me that most of Treford’s employees had been there for years. Treford has a small team that, by all indicators, is closely knit and strangely motivated.

Dotun has spent almost 2 years at Treford, a short term compared to colleagues who have been with Treford for 3-4 years. I already suspect the reason for Treford’s employee retention rate, but I ask Dotun regardless. He confirms my suspicions.

I’ll let Dotun tell it in his own words.

“I’d say it starts from the business model. The company is very people-centered. We put the people first before the business. Of course, the business is a business. Growth is important. Revenue is important. But at the core of it, it’s the people. Treford wants to impact people; including its own employees. Making money is just a side benefit.

There’s this startup mentality you expect, where startups have this immense pressure to deliver in tight deadlines. But at Treford, you’re able to grow into your role and actually learn. We’re supposed to be a resource partner, so even employees are learning while on the job. We’re getting the kind of experience that people pay to get. That learning culture shows in everything that we do.”

Throughout the conversation, it is immensely clear to me that Dotun (and the rest of the Treford team) truly believe in what they’re doing. It’s rare to see a team so aligned in its mission and it’s likely the reason for their success so far.

That alignment extends beyond the team, and it’s embedded in how Treford builds partnerships. Treford’s partnerships are an extension of their core philosophy — people first, numbers second.

And that’s it. A look into how Treford has built the careers of over 20,000 professionals by leveraging strategic partnerships, proving that when partnerships are rooted in shared values, their impact goes far beyond the bottom line.

You can see more of Dotun on LinkedIn.

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Read about the key lessons from Treford’s story.

Coming Up

In the next Funnel Vision issue, I’ll dive into Cenoa’s controversial competitor marketing strategies. I’m looking forward to writing this; I had an enlightening conversation with Feranmi Ajetomobi, Cenoa’s Country Manager, last weekend.

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Welcome to the 142 new subscribers who joined Marketing For Geeks since the last issue. Big thanks to everyone who shares MFG with their network.

Every month, I share 1 interesting thing, 3 actionable marketing insights that have helped me become a better product marketer, and 5 pieces of marketing that caught my eye.

ICYMI: In my last issue, I wrote about why your value prop probably isn't different from competitors (and how to fix that), creating an objection-smasher page, and the 10-step checklist for content marketers in a new role.

Today, we have a Funnel Vision issue, where I do a deep dive into a specific campaign, project, or product by speaking with the marketing professional behind them.

In this issue, I look into HeyFood’s growth story with Courage Afemije, Head of Growth at HeyFood.

What To Expect:

• How HeyFood got to its first users within the student community

• Expanding outside UI’s borders

• Conquering the more remote areas in Ibadan

• How HeyFood approaches expansion

• HeyFood’s strategy now that there’s more competition

• Strategies & tactics that HeyFood gets right

• Mistakes made by the HeyFood team

From University of Ibadan To 5 Cities

When HeyFood was founded in 2021, Jumia Food was the only food delivery app in Ibadan and they were doing a woeful job. Jumia Food only had Chicken Republic & KFC and only delivered within a narrow radius. If people wanted to order from local favourites like Amala Sky, they had to use unreliable errand services that weren’t worth the cost.

A group of friends at the University of Ibadan came together and built a solution – HeyFood. HeyFood rapidly penetrated Ibadan and has now expanded to 5 cities.

So, I spoke with the man who has been with HeyFood since its inception. Courage Afemije is the Head of Growth at HeyFood and he’s managed the product’s growth from its early stage within the UI community to the YC-backed company battling competitors today. 

Let’s get into it, starting with how HeyFood reached its first big milestone.

First 1k Users, The UI Story

HeyFood was started by UI students, so it’s only natural that the student community first drove its growth. Since Courage was friends with HeyFood’s founder, he had a decisive role from the start. 

A large reason for HeyFood’s success was that they were solving a real problem for people. Just like Facebook—another product with early roots in the student community—they were solving problems that they themselves had faced. In fact, Courage became more involved after using the product himself and feeling a burning urge for more people to know about it.

In those first days, they did things that don’t scale—a principle that likely got reinforced after they got into Y Combinator. HeyFood’s initial “riders” were students who’d help pick and deliver orders for customers. The team used these riders to collect feedback about people’s experiences with the product.

Their first vendors were hall cafeterias and student vendors. Those vendors became a marketing channel for them. The team put stickers promoting HeyFood at each store, promising perks like free delivery on the first order. That’s a practice that HeyFood still swears by today.

“A lot of students got to know about HeyFood through that approach. We helped them [vendors] create designs, which they sent to their customers on WhatsApp, telling them they could get free delivery if they ordered through HeyFood next time.”

HeyFood also did some community marketing, getting student influencers and WhatsApp TVs to share posts about HeyFood on their WhatsApp status. They did that consistently and got the UI community to adopt HeyFood widely.

Student communities often have great influence over the city they’re centred in; UI was no different. Before long, word about HeyFood began spreading outside UI.

“One thing I’ve noticed is that the student community in Ibadan shapes the culture in major areas like Bodija and Akobo. That’s because there are people living in those areas that probably graduated from UI, are still students of UI, or know someone in UI. So, if you’re leveraging a student community, it’s easy to reach people like fresh graduates who are entering the working class. We were able to tap into that market early.”

By the time HeyFood reached its first 1k users, they’d gotten enough traction to get into YCombinator, which meant they now had more money to invest in expansion and marketing.

Expansion Outside UI

There was a short period when Courage left HeyFood, but he stayed connected with the team and was in the loop on their activities; so he is able to fill me in. After HeyFood received YC money, they began leveraging paid ads and referrals. 

Working-class people didn’t care as much about the N200-N500 referral reward. However, the referral campaign was more effective within the student community because the rewards mattered more to them. So much so that they began gaming the referrals.

The team had made some mistakes with the program, allowing people to claim referral bonuses without the referred user taking an activation action. This means students were creating duplicate accounts or referring people outside Ibadan just so they could claim the reward.

“You look at referrals from the angle of acquisition cost and lifetime value. You expect to recover the rewards cost and break even when the user comes back to make more orders. But these users would order once and probably go look for another number to register with to get another bonus.”

HeyFood had to pause referrals for a month and go back to the drawing board. Courage sees a positive consequence of the failed referral though. Because so many people were ordering, HeyFood gained more virality and you could see a HeyFood bike in every corner of the UI-Bodija axis. This led to more organic sign-ups from people who’d seen a bike on the road.

Courage believes this is when HeyFood started achieving product-market fit, with people installing the app organically. 

Conquering Ibadan

At this point, HeyFood had gotten traction outside UI, but only in the areas surrounding the university—Agbowo, Bodija, Akobo, Samonda, etc. The question then became how they could fully penetrate Ibadan and reach the less popular areas.

The team decided to try the same tactic they’d used in conquering UI—leveraging vendors as an acquisition channel. 

“People in Bodija, UI, Akobo already knew HeyFood. But those in Challenge and Apete didn’t. We tried to recreate what we did in the first areas we dominated. We went to most of the stores in the area, onboarded them, and got them to agree to put some branding in their store.”

Whenever HeyFood onboarded vendors, they put branding at the store – stickers, tabletop signs, and roll-up banners. The more popular a store was, the more branding they put in it. That way, when people walked in, they got to know about HeyFood. Courage believes that this was HeyFood’s highest-converting channel.

The restaurants were happy because HeyFood was solving a distribution and delivery problem for them, and because the only alternative (Jumia Food) had prioritised large chains over local favourites. Customers were happy because they didn’t have to go to stores in person or source delivery riders themselves. It was a win-win-win.

HeyFood’s hunch was right and before long, they’d conquered all of Ibadan. It was time to think about what city they could conquer next.

Expansion To New Cities

The first thing that Courage tells me about expansion is that marketing is the least of your worries. Operations is the most important factor in expansion success, he says.

“If you’re thinking of expansion in terms of marketing campaigns or growth experiments, you’re wasting your time. The first thing to think about is how to get riders that would deliver the orders. Once customers cannot get their orders, you’re done. That experience has the most influence on whether a user comes back to use the product again or not. And it’s mostly influenced by operational factors than by any other thing.”

In marketplaces, there is often the question of which side comes first – the vendor or the buyers. In HeyFood’s case, it’s neither. The riders are the most important marketplace players.

When HeyFood wants to expand into a new city, the Operations team first has to onboard riders and train them to use the app. While this happens, the Sales team identifies popular restaurants in the city and tries to onboard them. That way, the Operations team can prioritise riders close to those restaurants or mobilise riders towards those areas.

The first city on HeyFood’s radar was Abuja. This was in November 2022, months before Chowdeck stepped into the city. A year later, HeyFood expanded into Abeokuta.

Abeokuta bore a lot of similarities to Ibadan. Both typically overlooked by startups in favour of more urban cities like Abuja and Lagos. Both with no major competition for HeyFood. Both with a fairly large student community.

However, unlike in Ibadan, HeyFood did not choose Abeokuta’s student community as its starting point. In Ibadan, the university is close to the city’s major commercial and residential district (Bodija), so many of the popular restaurants are within the area. But in Abeokuta, the university is more isolated from major areas, like Oke Ilewo.

“We try to approach growth like this – if we did this in this city, is it possible for us to replicate that in this new city? Abeokuta had a student community, but it was not one we could leverage in the same way. FUNAAB is far from the places where the most popular restaurants are.”

So instead, HeyFood relied on their trusty vendor-as-acquisition-channel strategy. They identified hot spots in the city, onboarded them, and then leveraged them.

“If a store does a lot of numbers on-site, they are most likely going to do a lot of orders in the app. That’s our theory and that has been proven. For example, when Item7Go first came to Ibadan, a lot of people were talking about them and they did a lot of orders on-site. So we knew we needed to get them on the platform. That’s the same thing we do in other cities. We focus on bringing the top stores in the city onto the platform. In Abeokuta, that was Halaga and that was the first vendor we chased to get onboard.”

HeyFood used this playbook to penetrate Abeokuta & Abuja, and it is the same strategy they used to expand into 2 more cities — Benin & Port Harcourt.

While HeyFood was expanding to other cities, competitors were eyeing their home city, Ibadan.

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Facing Competition

When HeyFood first launched, they had no real competition to contend with. They were the only option and they’d captured a substantial market share in cities like Ibadan and Abeokuta. By 2022, Glovo had come into Ibadan as a competitor but made little impact against HeyFood. The competitive landscape really changed when Chowdeck announced its entry into Ibadan in 2023.

But, as Courage tells me, the competition has little to do with marketing and everything to do with operations. Like Courage said earlier in our conversation, riders are the bedrock of the food delivery business. So, riders were the first thing that competitors went after.

“Riders are very important in the growth process. When they leave, you feel it, because users get bad experiences and that leads to them churning.  So, the game is crazier now because riders, just like customers, now have options. When a competitor comes in and tells riders they can earn up to 600k per month, there’s a problem. Users start getting their orders late because riders have been taken by competition.”

When competitors start to take away the bedrock of your product, there will naturally be some temptation to compete on price by increasing the amount you pay riders. Courage agrees that this has been a tempting strategy, but it is not without its cons. He takes the time to explain why.

“Most of the payment that customers make on the platform is subsidized. Riders actually get paid more than what customers pay. As competition increases, you could try to match the price you pay riders, but you’d end up spending more than you’re supposed to. And then your burn rate becomes way higher.”

Courage is a little wistful as he says this, and I understand why. When HeyFood started, restaurants (and many riders) had little experience with food delivery platforms and the team had to do a lot of training to get the market to where it is now. HeyFood developed the market themselves, only for competitors to swoop in and have it easier than they did.

But Courage is not discouraged. In fact, I get the sense that the team has a few things in the works to protect and expand their market share. Courage says it has been a challenge to have to deal with strong competitors, but it’s a challenge HeyFood needed to face.

I ask Courage if he thinks that HeyFood’s growth has been limited by its initial focus on Ibadan. Most of Nigeria’s most successful startups had origins in Lagos or moved to Lagos to gain more success. It’s the commercial capital of the country and has undeniable influence. And Courage agrees with me. In fact, he believes it has been a factor in the success of some of HeyFood’s competitors. When you consider that HeyFood entered Ibadan, Abuja, and Abeokuta months before competitors like Chowdeck did, you’d see his point.

“If you own the largest market share in Lagos, you most likely own 50-60% of the Nigerian market. Every other city shares the other 50%. And that’s an advantage for any business coming from Lagos. You’ll see businesses that are only in Lagos doing way more numbers than businesses that are in 5 cities exempting Lagos. 

Besides the number of orders you do, PR also comes from Lagos. The influencers that could sell your brand are in Lagos. You get exposed to a larger audience. So, it makes it easy to enter other cities. When we [HeyFood] wanted to expand to PortHarcourt, we had to work our ass off to get awareness there. But if it’s a brand coming from Lagos [e.g. Chowdeck], there’s a high chance that people in PortHarcourt already know you. All you’ll need to tell them is ‘oh we’re now in your city.’ So that’s the disadvantage we’re at.”

Of course, I ask Courage if HeyFood has plans to expand to Lagos any time soon. While he doesn’t give a direct answer, it is clear that it is a question of when it would happen rather than if it would happen.

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What HeyFood Gets Right

Courage is right that startups in Lagos are likely to gain more brand equity, but brand awareness is one of the many things that HeyFood knows how to do well.

If you’re a long-time subscriber, you might remember Courage from a Twitter space last year where we discussed HeyFood’s virality & growth loops. You can access the transcript of that conversation here.

How HeyFood Engineers Virality

HeyFood creates viral content fairly often, from their social content to their push notifications. 

When I ask how HeyFood manages to do this, Courage’s response shows that it’s an intentional effort. For starters, he doesn’t believe in 1-month or 2-month content calendars because they limit you to generic content for content’s sake. He prefers to create content that’s relevant to current situations and trends.

“There are trends we can leverage. There’s a lot of creativity that will come. There will be things that we draw inspiration from along the line. We might see something and want to replicate it fast. And creating a 2-month calendar will not be effective for that. Because in a week, the content might be outdated or no longer align with what we want to achieve.”

Courage truly believes that content should always be extraordinary, and he has pushed this philosophy to his team. Whenever the team creates content, he pushes for an interesting factor to make it extraordinary.

To help, he asks them to share with 5 people and get their feedback. This also helps test if certain creative content is too obscure or controversial.

“I am always very particular about content. I tell my team to show the content to 5 people and get their feedback before they decide if it’s good enough. For all our content that did really well, we showed it to people before it went out. I want to know people’s genuine reactions when they read the content. And the content has to be simple. It doesn’t make sense when you have to explain content for people to get its meaning. If out of 5 people, 3 people don’t get the meaning, then that is a problem and the content doesn’t work.”

With so much viral content, you’d think social media would be a great conversion channel for HeyFood. But that isn’t the case. I ask Courage what role he thinks virality plays for growth.

“Virality basically helps you build that top-of-mind awareness for your brand. People who might not have known you before could get to know you through your content. But the fact that they know you doesn’t mean they’d automatically go and download your product. It's just one of those touchpoints that you reach users at.”

How HeyFood Manages Rewards & Discounts

I’ve used HeyFood myself since 2021, and my usage increased after they launched their rewards program in 2023. When I first spoke with Courage last year, I asked about the rewards program. I ask Courage about it again, but this time I want to know more about its inspiration.

Like with many growth discussions at HeyFood, the rewards system was the outcome of a casual chat between Courage and his close friend and roommate from 100level. Only, this friend happens to be HeyFood’s founder, Taiwo Akinropo.

At the time, HeyFood ran promo campaigns almost daily. HeyFood’s discount strategy was built to increase user stickiness (i.e. keep users coming back to order). But it was becoming too costly to retain users and they needed to be more strategic. So, Courage was thinking of alternative retention strategies that would cost less.

The inspiration came from Starbucks’ infamous loyalty program. Courage believes in stealing like an artist. He and Taiwo reverse-engineered Starbuck’s loyalty program to figure out what parts they could replicate and what parts couldn’t apply to their use case. He says it’s important to know your capacity as a brand so you don’t set yourself up for failure.

“If Coca Cola implements something and you say you want to steal it, you need to remember that they have the budget to push it. If you’re working with a lean budget and trying to implement the exact same strategy, you’re probably setting yourself up for failure. A lot of times, you have to study how exactly they implemented it and then adapt it to your own circumstance.”

Once they’d studied Starbucks’ reward program, they could create theirs.

“A lot of this initial calculations were between me and Taiwo [HeyFood’s founder]. We sat down and did the maths of how much we were spending before, how much we’re looking to spend now, and the impact that would have on retention. We needed to decide how much we were willing to spend on retention, so we set a cap for how much we could spend per user. We knew we didn’t want to spend above N20 for every N1000 spent so we started from there to figure out a number that made sense. ”

Courage wasn’t joking about the calculations. He spends about 5 minutes explaining the numbers they considered, the worth of a HeyFood star, the dynamism of the rewards, and the different iterations they made before settling on the version they launched. It was enough maths to give me a headache. But Courage says it was worth it. The rewards program significantly reduced the cost they spent on retention and increased the number of orders they got.

To further optimise the program and reduce costs, Courage added an expiry caveat to the rewards, so that users would order more often to accumulate rewards.

“We made claiming the reward a deliberate action. You don’t get your reward automatically; you have to come back into the app to claim it. We also have an expiry feature so you’d use your stars as fast as possible and keep coming back.”

Interestingly, HeyFood’s rewards program doesn’t do much for their power users. Often power users even forget to use promo codes when ordering, Courage says. But other user types value the rewards, so the feature is most impactful for them.

Courage also wanted to encourage people to take other activities within the app, like rating a vendor and sharing a review. So he tied those actions to rewards as well. He says these actions are useful, not just for virality, but for operational success.

“We wanted to increase the number of ratings that users made. Ratings lets us know which riders are performing well or how users perceive specific vendors in the app. Vendors can check their dashboard, see the ratings, and improve their service. We also share these reviews with our success teams so they can help vendors work to improve their service based on user feedback.”

2023 Recap Campaign

Since Spotify launched their first end-of-the-year Wrapped campaign in 2016, many startups have begun creating personalised annual data summaries for users. Apple Music has Replay, Cowrywise has Roundups, Piggyvest has Report Cards, and HeyFood has Recaps.

2023 wasn’t the first year HeyFood would publish a recap feature to mark the year ending, but it was the first year I took notice of it – largely because the team had made some improvements in presentation and visuals.

“The most notable thing was probably the presentation and visuals. We tried to create a deeper emotional connection, and music was a good way to do that. So we took the top Nigerian songs of 2023 and allowed users select their favourites to play in the background while they go through the recap. We also improved the design and added more personalisation and relatable slangs.”

One of the goals of the campaign was to improve brand awareness. So, Courage engineered virality into it by promising rewards to lucky users who shared their recap on social media. 

When I ask Courage about the impact of the feature on orders, he explains to me that it’s difficult to give an accurate number because its release coincides with HeyFood’s top revenue month – December. In other words, there was a spike of growth when the recap was released, but some of it could be attributed to the typical seasonal spike.

Courage’s Biggest Mistake

With so many successful experiments, I am curious to know about the ones that didn’t do so well. I ask Courage about his most regrettable mistake, and he tells me about a failed attempt to leverage low-cost out-of-home advertising.  When Courage tells me the story, his regret is palpable. I empathise with him; it was a brilliant idea ruined in execution. 

Before Courage came back to HeyFood, there was an old strategy that involved putting up billboard ads around Ibadan. But Courage figured that he could save costs and get the same results by placing stickers on public transportation across the city. A brilliant idea.

Courage put in the work and met with the transport chairmans to negotiate. He paid a small sum and they agreed to aid with distribution of the stickers on buses and cabs in their network. Another brilliant idea.

So how did it become “an absolute disaster,” as Courage put it? Well, Courage gave the designs to a printer who printed all the stickers in one go. This was the first mistake. This mistake made it hard to rectify the second mistake:

“By the time the printer brought the work, we realised he printed with a paper sticker. And he’d printed every single thing so we had to work with it that way. We tried to get a refund, but his recuse was that we didn’t specify that he shouldn’t use paper.”

The disadvantage of paper stickers is that they slowly dissolve when it rains. And just their luck, rain fell the same day they put up their stickers. The stickers were supposed to last for months and be seen by hundreds of thousands of people. But the entire work washed down the drain only a few hours after they were put up. 

Like Courage says, it was a great idea with poor execution.

Courage’s Biggest Win

I cannot ask about Courage’s biggest mistake without asking about his biggest personal wins. Courage takes an experiential approach to everything he does, so he says his biggest win is creating an integrated mix where his little experiments add up to the growth he wants.

“I like to experiment with things that don’t scale. These things don’t scale, but they add to the overall growth we’re trying to achieve. One channel could be contributing 10%; another 5%. And it all comes together beautifully to the number we’re aiming for.”

Courage is also proud of all the learning he has done at HeyFood, especially while expanding to new cities. The most challenging expansion was to Abuja, because unlike Ibadan and Abeokuta, the country’s capital was more competitive and running costs were higher. For example, billboards in Abuja cost 3-6 times what they cost in Ibadan. So, Courage had to find low-cost growth opportunities. And he did. HeyFood now boasts 20% week-on-week growth in Abuja because of community marketing tactics that Courage implemented.

“It’s expensive to operate in Abuja. Billboards are more expensive, transportation is more expensive. So we had to look into non-expensive things to achieve our numbers. We started looking for communities to target. And communities can be anything, like student communities or NYSC members. And now, we’re doing at least 20% weekly growth in Abuja, largely due to communities we leveraged.”

Collaboration culture at HeyFood

Because Courage oversees so many growth experiments that require input from multiple teams, I had to ask about how HeyFood encourages collaboration. He reveals that HeyFood’s student origin has had a positive impact on the team culture. Because many members of the founding team (and current team) were friends before working at HeyFood, the team is able to speak and relate freely. Oga-led marketing isn’t a thing at HeyFood.

“Among friends, you’re free to talk about different things without being scared. In this case, it feels like you’re talking to someone who’s been your friend for years, so there’s freedom to say ‘we’re not doing this right, we should do this.’  Even when it comes to discussing finance and salary, everyone is very open.”

Collaboration is extremely important, as Courage tells me. The most important department to collaborate with at HeyFood is the Operations team. As we’ve established, Operations is the bedrock of the food delivery business.

“Operations has to be in the loop on everything. If you want to run a campaign to increase number of orders, Operations must be aware or you set yourself up for failure. Because Operations needs to create the system that ensures the campaign’s success. For example, if we’re giving discounts at a particular store, they need to direct a lot of riders to that store or recruit more riders to match up with the order volume.”

When it comes to collaborating with the tech team, it helps that HeyFood’s founder (and Courage’s close friend) is the head of tech. Since Courage and Taiwo brainstorm together on a lot of experiments, it’s easy to translate rough ideas into technical requirements. 

The more the interview went along, the more obvious the camaraderie between Courage and Taiwo seems to me. HeyFood’s student origins don’t just make a nice story; it’s the driver behind the open culture that encourages Courage and his team to test growth tactics and move quickly.

That’s it! A look into how HeyFood grew from a small campus delivery service to a YC-backed startup with 100k users and 5 cities.

You can see more of Courage on LinkedIn. Courage (and HeyFood) have even more stories to share and are open to speaking engagements. 100% recommend.

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What project, product, or campaign should I focus on next? Feel free to recommend a project you love by leaving a comment.

What I’m Reading

TEMSI Social Media Template — Free social media reporting templates for your next performance update.

Why every app needs a power user strategy — How to nurture your top users and use them to propel growth.

3 mistakes when setting up B2B referrals—and how to avoid them — Super insightful article on how to manage referrals when you’re B2B.

The honest guide to hitting 200K LinkedIn followers 📈 — Amazing guide to creating better LinkedIn content. Applies to company and personal accounts.

Your Pricing Problem is a Positioning Problem — Product-Market Fit is old news. Position-Market Fit is in. Feels like a great segue from the last MFG issue about positioning.

Did you enjoy this issue? Give it a ❤️ and let me know in the comments section.

Even better, share this with someone.

Share

Hi there.

Welcome to the 99 new subscribers who joined Marketing For Geeks since the last issue. Big thanks to everyone who shares MFG with their network.

Every month, I share 1 interesting thing, 3 actionable marketing insights that have helped me become a better product marketer, and 5 pieces of marketing that caught my eye.

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P.S. I’m trying to get to know MFG’s readers more. Could you answer a few questions in this short form if you haven’t yet? Also, if you’d like to join MFG’s WhatsApp community, please fill this form.

ICYMI: In my last issue, I wrote about how to use the 7 principles of persuasion to improve conversion, the 3 types of B2B personas you need to create, and how to use compounding strategies to create MoM growth.

Today, we have a Funnel Vision issue, where I do a deep dive into a specific campaign, project, or product by speaking with the marketing professional behind them.

In this issue, I look into Risevest’s growth marketing strategy with Olamide Adurota, Growth Lead at Rise.

Let's dive in!

How Risevest Manages Full-Funnel Growth Experiments

At the Builder’s Summit last weekend, a speaker asked how many people at the event used Risevest; and hands shot up across the room. In a country whose currency value is constantly crashing, Risevest allows Nigerians to protect against inflation with dollar-denominated investments.

Today, Risevest has over 600,000 users and has paid over $42M out to them. A big part of Risevest’s success is its growth experiments, which are managed by Olamide Adurota, their Growth Lead. I’ve been looking to feature Olamide in Marketing For Geeks since last year, and this was the perfect opportunity.

So, what does Risevest’s growth funnel look like and how do they manage success and failure?

Marketing vs Growth

Marketing can be a dizzying field and it can be tough to decide what buckets certain titles fit under. For Olamide, who has a dual reporting line to the Head of Marketing and Risevest’s CEO, the difference is clear. Marketing is broad and typically relies on efforts within the marketing team alone. But for growth, you have to work with whatever team is needed to achieve your specific goals at the time. Sometimes, that’s the marketing team; sometimes it’s the product team; sometimes it’s the engineering team or the sales team.

This means that Olamide has to work across multiple teams, depending on what solution he’s looking to implement or what problem he’s trying to solve. When he runs TOFU campaigns and needs ad content, he collaborates with the marketing team. When he needs a direct integration for a tool, he works with the engineering team. When he runs an in-app experiment, he and the product manager rub minds. 

Working with so many teams can be difficult, but it’s easier for Olamide because he’s multi-dimensional.

“When you're multidimensional–when you have knowledge of different areas like marketing, product, sales–you can interact seamlessly with different teams. I can also interact with the data team because I also have some foundational knowledge of data. I understand how I want the data infrastructure of the product to be, the tools we need to implement, how we need to pass the data from one to the other, and how data needs to be collected on the app. It’s the same for other teams. That knowledge makes it easier to interact.”

This doesn’t mean the road has been sunny all through. When he first started at Risevest, he had to immerse himself in their technical processes and principles. The Head of Engineering gave him insights into their existing data infrastructure, which he then used to set up the tools he needed and shaped how he made requests going forward.

Olamide doesn’t always directly work with developers. He and the product manager typically collaborate and the product manager then translates his requests to the developers. But sometimes, he joins engineering standups when they need extra context or have specific questions about his requests.

Experimentation at Risevest

Experiments are a big part of Risevest’s culture, and Olamide’s day-to-day involves making and testing hypotheses. Olamide keeps track of his many experiments in a Google Sheet.

One of the experiments Olamide is most proud of is the one he ran for Risevest’s referral program. He made one tweak to the referral landing page, and it resulted in a 10.5% increase in referral conversions, exceeding his initial goal of a 5% increase. The tweak? Customising the referral page with the first name of the referrer.

It’s not all roses though. Some experiments are amazing successes; but others turn out to be failures despite your best wishes.

For example, Olamide discovered a positive relationship between the adoption of Risevest’s auto-invest feature and an increase in Assets Under Management (AUM). So, he launched an experiment to test if an increase in adoption of the feature would lead to an increase in AUM. He created engagement messages to validate his hypothesis and it fell short of his goal. Now, he’s testing the hypothesis again, but with a different solution.

That’s just one of the many times that Olamide has had to pivot quickly from failure. It's the least enjoyable part about his job; that he has to be comfortable with failing.

Video Source: Risevest YouTube

Olamide also takes some comfort in collaborating with the marketing team during their weekly calls. During those calls, he's open about what failed or didn't fail: and the whole team brainstorms on what to do next.

These experiments have yielded great results for the company. By tweaking different ad variants, Olamide and his growth associate were able to reduce Risevest’s Cost Per Acquisition by 73% and achieve a10-20% MoM user growth.

Tracking Success

Data is one of the most important pillars of growth, so it’s only natural that Olamide has clear processes for tracking success with data.

For acquisition, he tracks sign-ups, installs, and Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). Risevest runs acquisition campaigns across multiple channels (Google, Twitter, Meta), so it’s very important that Olamide knows which channels or campaigns are scalable or that draw in the best users.

For activation, he tracks the activation rate and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). It’s important to track CPA separately from CAC, so you know just how much you spend to acquire active users. Risevest had already established their activation metric before Olamide joined in, but he agrees with them about what an active user is. As he explains, activation should be based on the action that gives users value and indicates product usage. For Risevest, that is when users fund their wallets for the first time.

It’s one thing to get a user to fund their wallet; it’s another for them to use it consistently and adopt it. That’s why Olamide monitors product adoption and usage. Certain key actions within a product help signify adoption. In Risevest’s case, those key actions include using the auto-invest feature and creating or funding an investment plan. Tracking these actions means that Olamide can better understand user behaviour and nudge users to get the most value from the product.

You can read more about product adoption in MFG #09:

But perhaps, some of the most important metrics are the revenue metrics. The most important of these is Assets Under Management (AUM) because Risevest is an investment company. He also monitors the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) and the LTV to CAC ratio.

Lifetime Value (LTV) is a tough nut to crack, and there are many different ways of calculating it. Olamide graciously walked me through the formula Risevest uses, which calculates a projected lifetime value as a function of your churn rate and average revenue per user. Here’s the formula:

Finally, Olamide reviews the churn rate. At Risevest, there are two definitions of churn. The first is when a user hasn’t funded their wallet in 60 days. The second is when users withdraw all the money from the platform. This is because as an investment platform, active users are defined by those with Assets Under Management.

He and his team recently ran an RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) analysis to rank customers and predict new user behaviour based on existing user behaviour. 

“We wanted to identify our best users and our worst users. For recency, we looked at users who had funded their wallets in the past 30 days. For frequency, we looked at users who had funded consistently for at least 6 months. For monetary value, we looked at users who had funded a certain minimum amount each month for those 6 months and had a minimum amount in AUM.

The combination of these conditions gives us a list of users we can consider our best users. The next step for us is to look at their data to understand more about them, like what channels they came from. The RMF analysis basically informed the rest of our strategy and experiments. For example, this gives us an idea of what acquisition channels to possibly prioritise that could yield more users like them.”

With so many metrics to track, I had to ask Olamide how exactly he keeps track of them. His major tool is Amplitude, which he uses for product analytics. Amplitude also has a Customer Data Platform (CDP) that lets him connect his data sources together. For example, he passes attribution data from AppsFlyer (a Mobile Measurement Partner) to Amplitude’s CDP, and then to Customer.io (a customer engagement tool). 

He was able to build this data infrastructure with the help of the data team and engineering team. To communicate his needs, he used an event tracking sheet following this template👇🏽

Event Tracking Sheet - Mixpanel

53.9KB ∙ XLSX file

Download

Download

In the sheet, he works backwards from the key metrics he needs to the key events and properties that inform them.

“I already know the different actions that users can take, the important actions I want to look at, and how I want to break down my data. For example, I know I want to view sign-ups by what channel they came from or by their age group. So I make sure to include the user source as a property in my tracking plan”

Having a data team has really helped Olamide do better and quicker work because he can just ask the data team to run queries and return a list of users that fit his criteria.

“It’s a net positive. Without data, you’re sitting in the dark. When I’m trying to make a decision and I need a benchmark, I need historical data to help prepare my mind. Same thing for experiments. If my tools don’t have the answer, I can just go to the data team.”

Funnel Management & User Engagement

Olamide is also responsible for making sure users move along the funnel.

There are two main ways Olamide approaches experiments for this; from a marketing angle or from a product angle. 

Marketing solutions include things like user engagement and communication nudging them to take the next key action. Olamide has created segments in customer.io depending on what stage users are in their journey.

Risevest has different journeys created in customer.io and they use omnichannel engagement. Not all users view emails; not all have push notifications on. So, Olamide pushes messaging across multiple channels. As the saying goes, “There is more than one entrance to the market.”

“We always try different channels because your users aren’t just on one channel. There are users who don’t check their emails, and so you can only reach them via push notification. There are those who don’t even read or allow push notification, so you can reach them via SMS. And all that just increases your chances of success.”

For the second approach—the product approach—Olamide collaborates with the product team. Marketing messages aren’t always the solution to drop-off funnels; in some cases, the drop-off is caused by a product problem.

“Your users could be dropping off because your product is quite complicated and they don’t know what to do next. There are different ways to find out what’s really causing your users to drop off. You can use external tools like Hotjar to view recordings of new users vs returning users. Returning users likely already know what to do on the app; they just do what they need to do and they get out. But for new users, you might notice them browsing around because it’s a new interface and they don’t yet know what to do next.”

Olamide believes onboarding is an important aspect of optimising the funnel, because new users often need guidance on what to do next.

Risevest also uses customer engagement to reactivate churned users. Apart from engaging them with marketing communications, the telesales team reaches out to churned users to understand what went wrong.

What Makes Fintech Marketing & Growth Different?

Olamide has worked across multiple industries, but Risevest is the first fintech product he’s grown. Naturally, I had to ask him if he thought fintech marketing was different from other industries he’d worked in.

There are 2 main differences for Olamide. The first is in the broadness of the market. With verticals like SaaS or Edutech, you have to sell to a specific niche and you can use inbound models like SEO & PLG to draw them out slowly. In fintech though, you have a more mainstream audience and a very large market. This means, Olamide says, that awareness is very important.

“It means you need to make a lot of noise and you need traditional marketing to increase awareness because you’re trying to sell to a broad market.

You need awareness, because that helps with acquisition. It’s easier to acquire users when they’ve already seen or heard about your product.”

Speaking of fintech marketing…

Treford is hosting a full-stack fintech masterclass that covers everything from product management to data tracking and design. You can pay for all 7 classes or choose the one that best suits you.

I’ve taken Treford’s product marketing and product strategy bootcamps in the past; they were excellent.

The good people at Treford have granted a 10% discount to MFG subscribers. There’s limited slots left, and registrations close by June 10.

Get 10% Off

Okay, back to it.

The second thing about fintech, according to Olamide, is that trust is an extremely important currency. Nigerians are distrustful people; especially when it comes to money. 

“There will be concerns about whether you can be trusted or not. You need to be upfront with regulations, endorsements, and certifications. You especially need to communicate with users often. It’s normal for people to be sensitive about their money and where they put it. At Risevest, when there’s a new CBN policy that makes users worried about their money, we send communications explaining the new policy and why it doesn’t affect their normal”

The strategy works. The company has received some public acclaim for being a trusted financial partner, and they’ve grown to become the top dollar investment app in Nigeria.

That’s it! A look into how Risevest handles growth experiments from the scientist who leads them.

📣Tweet about this.

You can see more of Olamide on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Join Olamide on Risevest.

What project, product, or campaign should I focus on next? Feel free to recommend a project you love by leaving a comment.

What I’m Reading

Using content to influence switching costs — I wrote about switching costs in MFG #11. This lovely issue from Akachukwu tackled the same topic, but focusing on how to use content marketing to influence switching costs. It’s a great read.

Stop optimizing for a CAC:LTV ratio of 1:3 — Why the 1:3 CAC to LTV ratio might not be the best benchmark for your business.

Why you (probably) shouldn't create a new category — A lesson in differentiation and positioning for competitive advantage.

Why data-driven product decisions are hard (sometimes impossible) — A dive into the difference between being data-driven vs data-informed vs data-ignorant, and why that matters.

Did you enjoy this issue? Give it a ❤️ and let me know in the comments section.

Even better, share this with someone.

Share

Hi there.

Welcome to the 56 new subscribers who joined Marketing For Geeks since the last issue. Big thanks to everyone who shares MFG with their network.

Every month, I share 1 interesting thing, 3 actionable marketing insights that have helped me become a better product marketer, and 5 pieces of marketing that caught my eye.

P.S. I’m trying to get to know MFG’s readers more. Could you answer a few questions in this short form if you haven’t yet?

Also, if you’d like to join MFG’s WhatsApp community, please fill this form.

Subscribe now

ICYMI: In my last issue, I wrote about when NOT to use comparison pages, how to avoid causing decision paralysis, and how to use the P4 Quadrant in planning product/feature launches.

In today’s issue, I’m doing something a little interesting.

I’m starting a new series, called Funnel Vision, where I do a deep dive with a top marketing or product professional about specific campaigns, projects, or products they’ve worked on. You’ll get a behind-the-scenes look into what it took to launch some of the most successful campaigns and products in Africa.

In this first issue, I’m deep diving into Piggyvest’s content machine, which is led by Daniel Orubo.

Let's dive in!

How Piggyvest Built A Stellar Content Machine

Daniel Orubo has almost a decade of experience in content creation and strategy. Piggyvest is Africa’s largest consumer fintech. What do you get when you cross the two?

Easy. You get Piggyvest, the cool kid on the block, a fintech product that has gained some of the highest earned media of African startups in the last year; with a cult fan base that has gone as far as creating fan art from its content.

In this first issue of Funnel Vision, I deep dive into how Piggyvest earned virality & brand love from its content, with words directly from the horse’s (Daniel’s) mouth. Specifically, Daniel and I spoke about 2 of Piggyvest’s most successful content projects; The Grown Ups comic series, and the Piggyvest Savings Report.

So what went on behind the scenes to result in the amazing content Daniel and his team produced? Like with most stories, we’ll start from the beginning.

The Beginning

I rewrote this section many times because I couldn’t decide what this story's beginning was. At first, I thought it was about the origin of the projects – how Daniel came up with the ideas. But in reality, the beginning of Piggyvest’s content success starts with a strategy document that Daniel shared with the management team right when he was about to get hired in 2021. 

In the doc, Daniel explained why a content department was absolutely necessary for Piggyvest. That document laid the groundwork for all of Piggyvest’s content marketing success; from hiring superstar content creators to getting the freedom to run experiments like Grown Ups.

“I was building this department from scratch. I knew I was going to get in and start asking for things and I knew I'd need to start hiring. So I needed to be able to validate the [proposed] hires by tying them back to the promises I'd made. And the promise for me was to get more users, more brand visibility, more positive social capital, more readers, and more conversions. I think it's very important, as a content leader, to lay that kind of groundwork.”

As it turns out, content was an absolute necessity for Piggyvest, driving both traffic and conversions. But we’ll get to that.

Daniel also made a big bet on himself, by promising to get 50k visitors on Piggyvest’s blog within 3 months of getting hired.

The bet paid off. The blog passed 50k website visitors within just 1 month. That strengthened the foundation for the content team because it proved that content could deliver results. This wasn’t just talk– this was talk and do.

Setting Up For Success

The strategy document was just the building plan; next, Daniel had to begin laying blocks, starting with hiring a superstar team to help drive the results he envisioned.

And he managed to do just that.

“I think I have the best team on the planet. I know people say that all the time, but I genuinely think I do. I work with some of the smartest people I've ever met, and we all align. I'm really proud to have a team that I can trust wholeheartedly to execute because that’s the dream”

His hiring secret? He doesn’t look at CVs.

Daniel says he instead looks out for taste because you can’t teach taste. He asks questions about what kind of content applicants consume—you have to consume high-quality content obsessively to create high-quality content yourself.

Another strategy that helped him in those early days was hiring people who could do multiple things; people who had multiple talents and interests. His work as a content leader was then to give pointed feedback to help them tie their creative outputs to real business goals. 

“In the beginning, there’d be ideas that were very funny but just didn’t serve the company or fit into the conversation. So, I’d say ‘I think this is a great idea. I think this would work in any other context. But for what we’re trying to do, I don’t think it works’.

When you’re coming from the media space, where the main goal is getting people to consume, it can be easy to forget [when it comes to content marketing] that the goal is to get people to know your business and patronise it. You can get carried away by a great viral idea. Then you get 100,000 people to engage with the content, but not a single person converts because it doesn’t tie back to your business.

So, it’s just constantly reminding them that the real star of this show isn’t your great ideas; it’s Piggyvest and its users. And the more I did that, the more the ideas they brought forth were more pointed. And now, they just understand.”

Culture of Trust

It was the combination of Daniel’s initial success and the brilliance of the content marketing team that allowed Piggyvest’s leadership to grant the team so much leeway to experiment in ways that many other African startups wouldn’t. 

The proof was in the pudding, and what a tasty pudding Daniel had put on fire. It also helped that Piggyvest had a culture of trust in its employees; a culture that empowered and emboldened the team.

“The thing I love about Piggyvest is that they believe in themselves. Like, if they hired you, it’s because they trust that you know what you’re doing.

I remember the first meeting we had [about Grown Ups] was at Odun’s house, and we were throwing character ideas and she was giving feedback like ‘yeah, I like this, I like that’. It was just a lot of support.

And when you work at a place like that, it makes you more creative. It gives you courage to throw even your craziest ideas around.”

Piggyvest Savings Report & Data Storytelling

Research reports as content forms are hardly a new thing. Yet, social media lit up when Piggyvest released its 2023 Savings Report.

What was so special about this report? Why was it getting so much buzz? 

The Idea

According to Daniel, the report wasn’t intended to be used externally, at least not at the beginning. Daniel simply wanted to do some user research to satisfy his curiosity about how Nigerians (Piggyvest users) were navigating the economic situation in the country. 

But once he started working on the report, he knew it HAD to go out. Daniel believed that data was very important for making people feel seen and represented. And he was right. People did feel seen & represented.

The most impressive thing about the savings report was that it was built completely in-house. Daniel mentioned that he initially reached out to a research firm, but the amount they quoted was more than the entire marketing budget for the year. 

The Execution

One of the toughest parts of building research reports in-house is collecting the data and getting a representative sample size. Companies typically try to increase the number of respondents by adding an incentive, but the Piggyvest team decided against doing that because they had just launched anti-fraud communication and didn’t want to confuse users.

Sending out surveys without an incentive only made the work harder, so the team had to be intentional about building out the survey questions. There were so many questions to ask, but too many questions would turn off the user and cause drop-offs. So, instead, Daniel created some dynamism in the survey questions.

“One thing I got out of working at Zikoko and interviewing 500+ people is that I know how to ask questions. I know the kind of questions to ask to make people share, so that informed the questions we asked. And I was very picky about the questions not being too much so people didn’t get bored halfway. So we tried to make the questions as engaging as possible and we also did a lot of logic linking. So if you say no to a certain question, there are some questions you won’t see. We also gave people a lot of options and allowed them to type in an answer if they wanted. That was where the data cleaning got really hard, of course.”

Because this was a research project, the content and data teams had to collaborate. The data team helped select a randomised sample size and made sure the data collection & analysis followed the right processes. But the content team did the work of analysing the data and telling stories with it.

Deciding which stories were worth telling took a lot of meetings. The team had to decide what data stories were compelling enough.

“It was one of the most stressful things. It was me, Bolu (content marketing associate), and Kelvin (editor at the time). We’d sit on a call for hours day by day, breaking down the data and deciding what was interesting enough to be a part of the report. So there were some things we gleaned that didn’t make it to the final report. Even stats that we thought were very interesting. It was a process of getting data, deciding what was relevant, what was important, and what made for a compelling story when tied together. And that took us blocking out time and basically losing our minds on the call. But it was very worth it.”

The Output

Hours of work went into creating the report that we all saw. Multiple teams were involved. Daniel said he turned a little insane during that period because he wanted things to come out perfect. When he felt like he was being too nitpicky, his boss, Piggyvest’s CMO, reminded him that this was his project to own. That emboldened him to stick to his guns to get exactly the output he wanted. The report itself went through many design iterations because of this.

“I wanted it to be an experience people would remember; something I and my team would be proud of. The first design didn’t work for me at all and we went through about 5 design iterations.”

And now to the part that made the report even more special – the live page. The more the team worked on the report, the more they worried about whether people would read it. That was when Daniel had the idea to take some of the interesting insights and distill it into an interactive web page.

“We were scared that people wouldn’t want to read the full thing, and because of that, they would lose out on all the insights. That’s how we had the idea to make two versions of it. We wanted clarity; we didn’t want to create something that was just for finance bros. I wanted everybody to be able to engage with this and come away with something. That was the driving force for me.”

Of course, no one would spend so many resources on a project without tracking results and testing that everything worked.

“It’s like ‘okay, you’ve created something, but are we tracking the right things? Are we tracking conversions? Are we tracking how people are navigating the pages?’

We were also doing a lot of testing. I got all the people around me involved. I’d just send it to them like ‘test it on your phone, is the flow nice?’ I’d send to someone with an iPhone, someone using an Android, someone using a Big Mac PC, someone using a smaller laptop. I needed everybody to test it, to make sure that the experience was solid for every single person.”

It was all worth it. In the end, over 120,000 people visited the report page, with over 20,000 people downloading the PDF report.

Grown Ups

The popular Supa Strikas comic series was one of the first indicators of a comic culture in Nigeria for many of us. Supa Strikas is now largely obsolete, and for many people, so is the comic culture in Nigeria. But Daniel noticed a rising trend in readership of Webtoons in Nigeria and theorised that the comic-reading culture in Nigeria was still alive, especially among younger Nigerians.

And so Grown Ups was born. For the uninitiated, Grown Ups is a comic series launched by Piggyvest in 2023. It follows the financial mistakes & successes of a friend group of 4 young Nigerians. The comic series has now been read by over 500,000 people.

Grown Ups was a project that required a lot of creative energy with inputs from multiple people. In fact, on average, Grown Up issues have 5 people working on them.

Daniel says the team held a weekly brainstorming session to develop story ideas. These sessions involved a lot of back-and-forth, with many ideas being cut. But Daniel doesn’t have veto power in these sessions; it’s a democracy and the majority takes the win.

“I’m not the kind of leader who needs to be right all the time. Sometimes I say ‘I don’t agree with this’ but I’ll put it up to a vote. I ask ‘Do you guys think it works?’ If everybody else says yes, I’m like ‘Go for it, I guess I’m the one in the wrong here.”

If you’ve managed creative people before, you probably know how easy it is to go down a rabbit hole of ideas and then struggle to find your way back up. Daniel solved for this during the brainstorms by having a designated script editor/supervisor, whose job it was to keep the story together and flowing.

“We had someone who typically writes for the blog, but for Grown Ups, she was the script editor. Her job is to say ‘Does this thing match what we said in season one? Is this timeline correct?’’ Sometimes, we throw ideas around and suddenly we’ve moved to a different planet. So Tobe [script editor] is always there to ground us and make sure we’re not flying off the handle in terms of continuity. That’s one of the things we did to make sure we were consistent, because ideas are always flowing and it’s very easy to get sidetracked.”

The Grown Ups characters resonated with many people and part of the reason is that the characters were well-defined. Daniel says this is something the team did intentionally.

“We didn’t want to force certain outcomes. We just wanted to define our characters really clearly, then throw them in different situations. Then we allow them to navigate it in a way that feels true to the characters. So we never had set agendas for how these characters behave and that’s what makes it fun. We’re just like ‘okay, if this character who is so obsessed with money gets put in this kind of situation, what would happen? And we just go from there”

Content Repurposing & Distribution

Both Grown Ups and the Savings Report were such viral projects that I had to ask Daniel about his approach to distribution, especially since Piggyvest largely leads with organic rather than paid marketing. Daniel says one thing that the team does (apart from optimising for search) is to make their content inherently shareable and then nudge people to share every chance they get. Daniel specifically referenced an insight from a previous MFG issue, about how people don’t always remember to share good content. So sometimes, the team adds in an incentive to share.

“One of the things that we did for Grown Ups that really helped was offering people the chance to win merch if they share. That shot up the number of shares we were getting and increased the number of people that visited.

And for the Savings Report, we made it inherently shareable. For stats that we thought were interesting, we allowed people share directly. And on the day of release, Piggyvest was trending because of that little share button. We try to constantly give prompts to share.”

Another strategy that helped the team, especially for Grown Ups, was the community they built around projects. Daniel says that community is important in any work that you do, because those are the people who would advocate for you. He recommends actively nurturing and rewarding community members (like Piggyvest did with its Grown Ups event).

“There’s a community of people that subscribe to the Grown Ups newsletter and they get it before everyone else. They’d always respond to emails saying how they loved issues and how they were sharing it. And so, we decided to create [an event]; something that brings these people together so they can talk to us, the creators, and we can listen to them. That event was such an eye-opener, hearing people talk about the project.

There was a fan who said she forced 2 of her friends to download Piggyvest because of the project. She said that a company that could create something like this that is so honest about money is exactly the place you should want to keep your money. And I was wowed. That sells Piggyvest better than anything I could have said.”

In general, Daniel believes that content is an investment and you should try to get as much mileage as you can from it. This means he thinks about how to cut costs to increase ROI, but it also means he’s always thinking about how to repurpose projects to reach even more people. This includes digital efforts (like quizzes, short-form articles, videos, and emails) and physical ones (like the Grown Ups event and the Finance Roundtable held after the report).

“We’re constantly thinking about the ways we can engage that still feel true to what the business does. We do quizzes, so if we want to do a quiz about Grown Ups, it doesn’t feel out of place. Piggyvest likes hosting events [and so we held events]. We always try to think about what we can do that tie into what the brand already does so we can engage people and keep the momentum lasting a bit longer.”

Balancing Storytelling & Conversion

Stories are great, but they don’t always lead to results. Yet the Grown Ups comic series led to over 40,000 downloads of Piggyvest. I couldn’t end the interview with Daniel without asking how he manages to balance compelling stories with real results; conversion metrics like sign ups, as opposed to more vanity metrics like views.

The first thing Daniel disillusioned me of is the belief in binary comparisons of conversion metrics and vanity metrics. He explained how the path to conversion isn’t always a direct line; sometimes people need more content before they convert.

“You don’t have to use every single opportunity as a time to sell. Sometimes, you can just introduce something else. It’s not every time you ask a visitor to download the app; sometimes just tell them to join your newsletter. Allow them to go on a journey; you can’t expect them to convert immediately after engaging with you once.

It’s about being able to know when to use a different prompt. For us now, that’s getting people to join our newsletter. We then push at least two ads on the newsletter. And these things have been converting. That’s the power of content. You can take people on a prolonged journey.”

Daniel explains that it's important to make these expectations clear to management as well, so they don’t expect magic within a few weeks.

That being said, Daniel says that content can lead directly to conversion when you utilise product-led content. It’s a philosophy that Daniel strongly believes in and has trained his team on. With product-led content, content teams can use emotional stories to sell products; by showing people the direct impact of the product on people’s lives.

“Product-led content is about making your products such an integral part of the story you’re trying to tell and that’s what really makes it convert. It’s about finding the right positions and opportunities to put these things in.

For example, we started this new series called PiggyFirst, which follows people who have used Piggyvest to do something monumental for the first time. We put our first story out and it has done really well; the conversion from that story has been higher than most other content. And that’s because it’s very direct about how Piggyvest fit into this person’s life and fundamentally changed it. So that’s how storytelling can convert.

I think content marketers need to embrace the product a lot more and show how [the product] can actually help people by telling those stories. That’s how you do something compelling that also meets business goals.”

And that’s it. That’s the playbook behind “the Daniel Orubo effect” and how exactly Piggyvest’s content team manages to churn out such high-quality viral content.

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You can see more of Daniel on LinkedIn, Twitter, or his personal website.

P.S. If you’d like to read the full transcript or listen to the recording of my conversation with Daniel, you can check that out here:

What project, product, or campaign should I focus on next? Feel free to recommend a project you love (could be one you worked on even) by leaving a comment.

What I’m Reading

The Growth Vault by Demand Curve — Definitely stealing this tactic soon for Marketing For Geeks. Love it.

Your ultimate guide to affiliate referrals for B2B SaaS

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