He Left a $120,000/Year Tech Job to Build in Lagos. Three Years Later, He’s Not Rich. He’s Not Leaving.

He had the résumé that makes Nigerian parents proud. He gave it up. Now he earns less than he paid in US taxes — and he says it’s the best decision he’s made.

This founder is anonymous. Income figures, company metrics, and personal financial details have been verified with documentation. His company and identifying details are withheld at his request.

Set the scene.

I’m thirty-four. I grew up in Lagos — Ikeja side — went to secondary school here, then got a scholarship to study computer science in the UK. Did a master’s, joined a fintech startup in London, then moved to a large American tech company as a software engineer. I was in their Dublin office for two years, then transferred to their New York team. By 2022 I was earning $120,000 base plus equity that was vesting at about $30,000 a year. Total compensation around $150,000.

I came back to Lagos in January 2023. People thought I had lost my mind. My mother cried. Not for joy.

Why did you come back?

Genuinely? Because I was bored and guilty and the combination became unbearable.

Bored because my job had become very comfortable. I was a senior engineer on a team where the real infrastructure decisions were made three levels above me. I was executing other people’s vision extremely well. I was very good at it. It was not interesting to me anymore.

Guilty because I’d been outside Nigeria for eight years. My parents were getting older. And I had this specific, sharp feeling whenever I read about Nigerian tech — like I was watching something happen without me. I knew how to build the things these companies needed. I was just not there.

I also want to be honest: there was ego. I wanted to found something. That’s not a noble motivation but it’s a real one.

What did you build?

A B2B SaaS product for Nigerian SMEs — specifically for inventory and order management for product-based businesses. Think: a provision store that’s scaled to thirty locations, a wholesale distributor, a cold-chain food business. These companies are running their operations on WhatsApp and Excel and physical ledgers. We built a clean, affordable, mobile-first system to replace that.

Current pricing: ₦25,000 to ₦65,000 per month depending on the tier. We have 180 paying businesses on the platform. Monthly recurring revenue is about ₦7.4 million — call it $4,800 at current rates.

How does ₦7.4 million MRR compare to what you were earning?

My US salary, annualised at today’s exchange rate, was about ₦18 million a month. So we’re doing about 40% of that in MRR across the whole business, three years in. That is not a comfortable comparison to make.

I pay myself ₦550,000 a month. My co-founder — she handles sales and operations — takes ₦500,000. We have four engineers and two customer success people at salaries ranging from ₦220,000 to ₦380,000. Total payroll is about ₦2.8 million. Infrastructure and tooling runs about ₦350,000. We are profitable on a cash basis — about ₦3.5 million net per month stays in the business. But we are not paying ourselves what we’re worth. Not close.

What’s been the hardest part that nobody talks about?

Re-entry is harder than people admit. I came back thinking: I know how to build software, I understand the market from the outside, I’ll be at an advantage. What I underestimated was how much institutional knowledge I didn’t have.

I didn’t know how to do business here in a practical sense. I didn’t understand the payment reconciliation complexity, the logistics dependencies, the specific ways Nigerian SME owners needed to be sold to — not via email sequences and SaaS trials, but in person, with relationship, with demonstration, with patience. I burned about four months trying to grow with a playbook that works in a US SaaS context and it did not work here.

My co-founder — who had never left Lagos and had spent six years selling enterprise software to Nigerian companies — saved the business by teaching me how to sell in this market. I am the technical founder who had to learn the market from the business founder who had never used Jira in her life.

What does your personal financial life look like?

I live in a two-bedroom flat in Gbagada. Rent is ₦180,000 a month — I sublet the second room for ₦95,000, so effective rent is ₦85,000. Transport: I drive, fuel is about ₦60,000 a month, which is painful. Food, roughly ₦90,000. I send money home — about ₦200,000 to my parents. I do not have a robust savings plan right now. I have about ₦4.1 million in savings that I’ve been protecting as a personal emergency fund.

I don’t have dollar savings anymore. They were mostly equity that I forfeited when I resigned. I try not to think about that too closely.

Do you regret it?

There are bad days where yes, absolutely. Usually around month-end when I’ve been dealing with a payment partner issue and I’m looking at my account balance and I know exactly what I would be doing right now if I’d stayed. I’d be reviewing a pull request in a temperature-controlled office somewhere and collecting a very good direct deposit on the 15th and the 30th without anxiety.

But those moments pass. The work is mine. The decisions are mine. When we shipped a feature last November that reduced our churn by 11 percentage points — I felt that in a way I hadn’t felt anything professionally in years. That’s the deal I made with myself. I knew what I was trading.

What’s the goal?

Five hundred paying customers by end of year. That gets us to about ₦20 million MRR, which is when we can pay ourselves properly and start building a meaningful equity story. We’re exploring a seed round — not because we need capital urgently, but because the right investor would open distribution into markets we can’t reach organically. Abuja, Kano, Port Harcourt. Even Accra eventually.

I am not leaving. I want to be extremely clear about that. I am not building this to sell it quickly or to generate enough of a profile to get a job back in the US. I’m building something that should exist in Africa. That’s the entire point.

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