She Bootstrapped Her Fintech to 10,000 Users. She Still Earns Less Than Her Former Salary.

Every Monday, BETAR.africa publishes an anonymous first-person profile of an African founder or tech professional — real numbers, real decisions, no PR spin. This week: a Lagos-based woman who left a bank job to build a payment infrastructure startup. She asked us not to use her name or the company name. The numbers have been verified.

Tell us who you are — without giving yourself away.

I’m 31. I left a Tier-1 bank in Lagos in 2022 after four years as a product manager. I built the thing I kept proposing internally that kept getting shelved. My startup does payment orchestration for SMEs — think middleware that sits between a business and multiple payment processors, so they’re not held hostage by one provider’s downtime or forex fees. We’re B2B, and we currently have about 10,200 active business accounts.

What was your salary when you left the bank?

₦1.8 million a month. That was my total comp including allowances — housing, transport, the works. At the time, that was genuinely good money. This was mid-2022, before the naira started its extended downward spiral.

What do you pay yourself now?

₦600,000 a month. And that only started six months ago. Before that, I was paying myself ₦350,000 — which I justified by telling myself I was building equity. My co-founder and I set a rule: we don’t increase our pay until our monthly recurring revenue clears ₦50 million. We’re at ₦38 million now.

So you took a 67% pay cut to build this.

More than that when you account for inflation. ₦1.8 million in 2022 buys what ₦600,000 barely touches in 2026. I try not to run that calculation too often. It does something to your brain.

How did you fund the first year?

Savings, a small loan from my mother that I’ve since repaid, and one angel cheque of $25,000 from a friend-of-a-friend who believed the idea was right even if I had no traction yet. I used that to hire one engineer and pay for AWS credits for eight months. My co-founder took nothing for the first six months — she was still working her day job and building on weekends.

We got to 200 paying customers before we touched any external capital. I wanted to prove it worked before I gave anything away.

Have you raised since?

Yes. One pre-seed round in late 2023 — $400,000 at a $3 million pre-money valuation. Seven investors, mostly angels and one small fund. We used it to hire three more engineers, a customer success person, and do our first proper compliance audit to get our PSSP licence from the CBN. The licence process alone cost us about ₦8 million in fees and consultancy, and took 11 months. Eleven months.

Was there ever a moment you thought about shutting down?

March 2024. A large customer — who was 30% of our revenue at the time — decided to build their own in-house payment stack. They gave us three weeks’ notice. Three weeks. Our MRR dropped from ₦22 million to ₦14 million overnight. I had made the classic mistake: too concentrated, too comfortable. I cried for two days, then I called every prospect who’d ever said “maybe later.” We rebuilt that revenue in four months, with better diversification this time.

Now our largest single customer is 9% of MRR. I track that number every week.

What does your team look like now?

Eight full-time people. Four engineers, one customer success, one sales, one compliance/legal, and myself. My co-founder handles product and design. Monthly payroll is about ₦14 million. We run lean. Most of our infrastructure is on AWS with a move to some GCP services happening this quarter — the pricing works better for us at our current volume.

10,200 active accounts — what does “active” mean?

Processed at least one transaction in the last 30 days. Our average business processes ₦3.7 million through us per month. We take between 0.4% and 0.9% per transaction depending on tier and volume. That’s how we get to ₦38 million MRR.

What’s your burn rate?

About ₦22 million a month — payroll, infrastructure, office space (we have a small office in Gbagada), and compliance costs. We have 14 months of runway at current burn. We’re not fundraising right now. I want to be profitable before I raise Series A. The market is punishing companies that aren’t.

You’re not profitable yet?

Not yet. We’re EBITDA-negative by about ₦4 million a month. But the trajectory is clear — if we add 200 active accounts a month at current average revenue, we’re EBITDA-positive in Q3 this year. I’ve modelled it obsessively. We’re adding about 280 accounts a month right now.

What do you wish someone had told you before you started?

That the loneliness is real and it doesn’t go away. In the bank, I had colleagues, structure, a boss who made some decisions for me. When you’re building, every decision lands on you. The product, the team, the pivot, the fundraise, the customer crisis at 2am — it’s all you. I’ve gotten better at it, but I still feel it.

Also: get a lawyer before you sign anything with investors. I thought I understood term sheets. I didn’t fully understand what I agreed to until six months later when I needed a lawyer for something else and she read through our documents. Nothing catastrophic, but there were things I’d have negotiated differently.

What do you think about the Nigerian fintech regulatory environment right now?

Complicated. The CBN’s intent is correct — they want the sector to grow responsibly. But the implementation is slow, expensive, and sometimes arbitrary. We spent ₦8 million and 11 months to get licensed. A startup with $25,000 in the bank can’t do that. It creates a moat, but it’s a moat built by bureaucracy, not by better products. The market is growing fast enough that everyone who got through the gate is getting customers. But I think about the founders who couldn’t afford to wait.

Last question: do you regret leaving the bank?

Ask me when we’re profitable. Right now — no, not really. But I won’t pretend ₦600,000 a month feels fine when I know what my former colleagues earn. The honest answer is: I believe in what I’m building. I think it matters. I think we will get to a place where this was obviously the right call. I just have to stay alive long enough to get there.

BETAR.africa verifies the core financial claims in all #StartupLife profiles. Revenue figures, funding amounts, and salary data in this piece were confirmed via bank statements and company financial records shared with our editors. We do not publish unverified numbers.

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