My Fintech Raised $500K, Then Burned Through It in 8 Months. Here’s What Actually Happened.

He was 29, had just closed the biggest round of his life, and had no idea what he was doing. Three years later, he’s rebuilding — with significantly more humility and significantly less cash.

This founder is anonymous. Revenue figures, funding amounts, and personal income details have been verified with documentation. Company name and identifying details have been withheld at their request.

Tell us who you are — without telling us who you are.

I’m a Nigerian guy, mid-thirties now. I studied computer science at a federal university in the South-West, did two years at a Lagos bank in their tech department, then left to build. That was in 2021. The company was a B2B payments infrastructure play — we wanted to be the thing that sat between businesses and their banks, making reconciliation and bulk disbursements not a nightmare.

What did the company look like when you raised?

When we closed the $500K pre-seed in early 2022, we had four co-founders, a working product, and about 15 paying businesses on the platform. Monthly transaction volume was around ₦180 million — so not tiny, but nothing crazy. The lead investor was a Lagos-based angel syndicate. We had two months of runway before the round.

Two months. I was closing deals from a position of extreme weakness and I didn’t fully process that.

Walk me through the eight months.

Month one: we hired. We went from four people to eleven in thirty days. We brought on three engineers, two sales people, a “Head of Operations” (who was 24 and had never operated anything), and a product manager from a Nigerian super-app who cost us ₦650,000 a month. We were paying ourselves — the four founders — ₦450,000 each. Suddenly our monthly payroll was ₦4.2 million. On top of infrastructure costs, office rent in VI, and compliance work.

Month two and three: we were burning about ₦6–7 million a month. That’s roughly $5,000–6,000 at the rates then. The business was generating about ₦4 million in gross revenue. We were not close to break-even.

Month four: we pivoted. One of the investors suggested we go B2C — basically build a consumer wallet. I said yes when I should have said absolutely not. We’d spent eighteen months building B2B infrastructure. Pivoting to consumer meant rebuilding the product, re-targeting sales, and confusing everyone who was already using us. But I was scared and I wanted to show momentum.

Month five through seven: the consumer product launched and had a bad product-market fit. We got about 3,000 sign-ups from a launch push, 400 of them transacted once, about 80 were active after thirty days. Meanwhile our B2B business suffered because we took the engineers off it to build the consumer thing.

Month eight: we had ₦12 million left in the account. I called a co-founder meeting. We let seven people go. We paid three months’ severance to everyone, which took us down to ₦5 million. We killed the consumer product, went back to B2B.

What did that meeting feel like?

I’m not going to pretend I was okay. I sat in a bathroom for forty minutes before I walked in. These were people who left other jobs because they believed in what we were building. The Head of Operations — the 24-year-old — I’d basically told her she was getting her first real growth opportunity. Letting her go felt like a specific kind of failure.

Two of the engineers we let go have since gotten jobs at international tech companies and are earning in dollars. So life moved on for them. But I still think about it.

What were the actual mistakes?

Three big ones. First: we hired for the company we wanted to be, not the company we were. We needed to be generating ₦15 million a month in revenue before our payroll made sense. We were at ₦4 million.

Second: I said yes to the consumer pivot because I was afraid of the investors, not because I believed in it. You can’t build from fear. It infects every decision.

Third: we didn’t know our unit economics. We knew our gross revenue. We didn’t know our contribution margin per transaction. It turned out we were losing money on a portion of our transaction types because of the interchange model we’d agreed with one of the switches. We found this out in month six from our new CFO — who we hired after the damage was done.

Where is the company now?

Three co-founders, four employees. Monthly transaction volume is about ₦2.1 billion — we grew the B2B business properly after we stopped distracting ourselves. Revenue is around ₦9 million a month. We’re paying ourselves ₦600,000 each. We’re not raising again until we’re solidly profitable. We have seven months of runway.

I’m not ashamed of any of it anymore. I was for a long time.

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

That fundraising is the beginning of accountability, not the end of survival. Every ₦1 of that $500K — about ₦225 million at the time — represented someone’s belief that we could turn it into something bigger. I treated it like a finishing line. It’s a starting gun with a very specific clock attached.

Also: the investor who pressures you to pivot in month four probably has ten other bets and doesn’t feel your burn the way you do. That doesn’t make them wrong, but it means you have to filter their advice through that lens.

What does your monthly personal budget look like right now?

I earn ₦600,000. My rent is ₦160,000 for a one-bedroom in Surulere — I moved out of VI when things got rough, and honestly I should have done it sooner. Transport is about ₦45,000. Food, roughly ₦80,000. I send ₦100,000 home to my parents monthly. That leaves me about ₦215,000 for everything else. I don’t save enough. I know this.

When things were burning, I wasn’t paying myself for three months. We needed the cash in the business. My savings, which were about ₦2.3 million going into that period, went to zero. I borrowed ₦400,000 from my older brother who didn’t ask questions. I haven’t forgotten that.

Would you do it again?

I’m doing it again right now. That’s the answer.

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