This is the third episode with a guest. The first episode was with Megasley. Last week we talked with Samson about owning your code in the age of AI. This time we go into the story of how a Kenyan startup made Bitcoin spendable for 40 million people, and what building it taught Shamsudeen about reliability, trust, and freelancing your way into a founding role.

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, and more.

In this episode, we discuss:

1) The Upwork gig that became Tando

• How a basic Flutter UI prototype turned into a founding-engineer role

• Why the founders trusted him with the backend, the server, and the money

• What “the backend engineer is the life of the company” really means

2) Building Kenya’s Bitcoin M-Pesa

• How Tando lets people spend Bitcoin as easily as they spend shillings

• Reliability as a feature: the IntaSend outage, and why Tando acquired Splice

• Why owning your payment infrastructure matters so much in fintech

3) Advice for freelancers in Nigeria

• Putting yourself out there, and getting past gatekeeping and imposter syndrome

• Being true to yourself: don’t buff up a LinkedIn you can’t back up

• Surviving rejection on Upwork, and how AI changed the proposal game

4) The business of free

• How a no-fee app makes money, and why Tando isn’t profitable yet

• Cooperation over competition in the Bitcoin space

• Taking user experience and stuck transactions seriously

A few lines worth highlighting:

“In the Bitcoin space, when you’re actually solving the problem, money comes to you.” —Shams

“You have to put yourself in a market that’s outside your own.” — Shams

“Don’t just start jumping from one role to another when you don’t have the experience, because it will show.” — Shams

“There’s really no clocking out in fintech.” — Jeremy

“Of all the jobs I’ve gotten, it was all by recommendation.” - Jeremy

Where to find Shamsudeen:

• LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/shamsudeen-adedokun

• Yet (his indie app): https://byrde.app

Where to find me:

• X: https://x.com/jeremyikwuje

• LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/ijsucceed

Referenced in this episode:

• Tando: https://tando.me

• bitcoin.co.ke (every M-Pesa number becomes a Lightning address): https://bitcoin.co.ke

• Upwork: https://www.upwork.com

• Companies and names mentioned: Splice, IntaSend, M-Pesa, Bitnob, Tapnob, Mavapay, Chipper Cash, Payday, Grey, Patricia, Flutter, DevFest, Bitcoin++ and Bitcoin Nairobi

Full transcript

Lightly edited for clarity.

The story of Tando

Jeremy: Hi, guys. It’s another good time again to have a wonderful conversation with a very good friend. Last episode I had a conversation with Samson, where we talked about how you have to be responsible for whatever code you write. It doesn’t matter whether I write the code or you write it yourself. Today is going to be a bit different, and it’s going to be wonderful. It’s going to be more of a background story of a company based in Kenya that has been letting people spend Bitcoin like money in Kenya. And today with me is Shamsudeen from Tando. Shamsudeen is a software engineer, and he has been the guy from day one. Welcome, Shamsudeen.

Shamsudeen: Thank you, Jeremy. Thank you so much.

Jeremy: Okay, guys. So I met you at the Bitcoin dev meeting in Abuja.

In 2024, before the [African Bitcoin Conference] event started. People started talking about, you know, “Tando, Tando.” And I was like, what is Tando? Throughout that entire Bitcoin conference, people just kept talking about Tando, Tando, Tando. And that made me realize you guys built something really good. I never knew the guy who built the software lives in Abuja. I was talking with my co-founder (Onionsman), asking, who are these guys that built the app? It meant you guys really prepared for this event, because when it started we began to hear of Tando. And it makes sense, because you were able to get an initial user base who needed the service so badly. Nigerians coming to Kenya, many people coming to Kenya, they have Bitcoin, they want to spend it. So just tell me how the whole thing started from day one. As we met, I got to know you were the developer who really started the whole thing. So get us to the beginning.

Shamsudeen: Okay. So if anybody doesn’t know, Tando is an app that allows you to spend Bitcoin in Kenya. One thing everybody says when you tell them about Bitcoin or crypto is, “is it actually money? It’s digital money, but what can you use it for?” That’s been a question for a very long time, because if you want to spend your Bitcoin, you have to sell it. That kind of made people feel it’s not really money. It’s money, but not really spendable. So the whole magic is the founders, Jason and Sabina. Because Tando is an incredibly simple app, a utility tool, but it makes a huge difference. I’ve been a software engineer [professionally] for about five years now, I think this is the sixth year. And primarily I’ve been freelancing on Upwork.

Jeremy: Upwork. Okay, so you guys are the ones making all the freelance money.

Shamsudeen: Yeah, when you’re in Nigeria, everybody wants to be a global talent. You have to put yourself in a market that’s outside your own. And it was working, freelancing on Upwork. But as a freelancer, anybody who freelances will know this: most times you just need one or two clients, because if you have a good relationship with somebody, you’re going to keep working with them.

Jeremy: So how did they [Tando founders] meet you? How were they able to get you going? Give us that background story.

Shamsudeen: So I got an invite to check out a job post on Upwork. It was just a basic UI prototype, that was the little, a Flutter prototype. I was like, oh okay, this is just UI. So I did the UI. At the time there was another developer, Dedan; he’s Kenyan, and he worked on the backend. When I delivered the prototype, it was up to Jason, the founder, and he did the connection. This was just to test if it was actually going to work: basically, if a user sends Bitcoin to a specific lightning node, will they be able to pay out. And when it worked, it was like, okay, this is looking good. Then Jason came back and we started polishing the app more and more. After a couple of months, the app was in a very stable state and we were able to upload it to the stores. Around that time there was a very bad protest in Kenya, so the other developer [Dedan] was off for a while. I had worked on backend stuff before, so I stepped in, and that’s how I started working on the backend too.

Jeremy: So you came in as a mobile app developer, a front-end developer, just to build the front end. But then you ended up working on the backend and the whole stack of Tando in general. Makes sense. And the relationship was really good? It must have been really good working with them. It’s been almost two years now.

Shamsudeen: Over two years actually, two years and about six months.

Jeremy: That means you must have been very good working with them, and you’ve made so much progress. I think last year, when Sabina posted, was it one million transactions?

Shamsudeen: I’m not sure I’m at liberty to disclose the exact amount, but we’re way beyond that. Way beyond. Let’s say three or four million.

Jeremy: So people spend Bitcoin like that in Kenya?

Shamsudeen: Yeah. I think it also really appeals to foreigners. I was in Kenya for Bitcoin++ and Bitcoin Nairobi.

Jeremy: That was a few months ago. And you did not go with cash.

Shamsudeen: I went with cash, like one hundred and fifty dollars.

Jeremy: But I like the way you guys were able to strategically launch the app at a very good time, when there was an event happening in Nairobi. If you look at most Bitcoin products, they’re mostly in Nigeria. And there’s never been a major Bitcoin conference in Nigeria where people push a particular Bitcoin app in the country. There are all these apps, and they just come one day and say, hey guys, we launched a new app, and people start using it. But you guys were able to launch at a very good time.

Shamsudeen: Yes, it was the right idea at the right time. And this is why I keep saying the magic is in the founders, because making sure you launch something like that at the right time is very important. That, combined with reliability, and the two founders being based in Kenya.

Jeremy: Based in Kenya. And you guys have most of the grant money. Last year it was just back to back, right?

Shamsudeen: I think that’s one thing about the Bitcoin space: when you’re actually solving the problem, money comes to you.

Jeremy: Exactly. But the guys who’ve been having problems, I don’t know if maybe they’ve applied, or maybe it’s because of the commercials around their product.

Shamsudeen: In Africa in general, Kenya is, I think you must have seen this, they say Kenya is a Bitcoin country. Actually, like Nigeria, it’s a bit of a hassle. Crypto is technically banned, so all these crypto companies have to go through loopholes. I know there’s a gray area on crypto in Kenya, but Kenya is the Bitcoin country.

Jeremy: If not for the fact that we Nigerians are very resilient, this country wouldn’t have experienced the kind of innovation it has, because people just keep pushing. I remember the first time I launched my first company, it was a Bitcoin rewards app, where you could buy airtime, pay bills, and get cash back in SATs. That was the first thing I did with Bitcoin, to stack Bitcoin. We did over thirty thousand dollars in spend. And the day after we launched, they announced the news that Bitcoin was banned in the country. But that never stopped us from launching. That shows that even with those things, Nigerians have produced more innovations than many countries in Africa. It’s just the bad PR we have.

Shamsudeen: Yes, that’s true.

Reliability, IntaSend, and acquiring Splice

Jeremy: So tell me how you’ve been able to do a lot of backend work. You said you started from the front end and went to the backend. And I heard you guys acquired Splice.

Shamsudeen: Yeah. So for people who’ve been using Tando from the beginning, they would have noticed a brief period of downtime. Before, when you transacted with Tando, whoever received the Kenyan shillings would see an IntaSend alert, because IntaSend was the payment processor. Then IntaSend ran into some compliance issues and they were down for a while. And there were these two guys, Vlad and Colin. They built Splice, a payment processor on M-Pesa. Not lightning, just a payment processor. So that’s what we then started using. But because we did not want a situation like what happened with IntaSend, where Tando would be non-operational for a while, Jason made the decision to acquire them.

Jeremy: So basically you were acquiring the external processing infrastructure, so you have full control over your destiny.

Shamsudeen: Exactly. Because reliability is very important.

Jeremy: So important. I remember a company I was working for. They had a US partner issuing dollar accounts, you know how this whole thing can be. And the partner pulled the plug because of compliance issues, since so many yahoo boys were using the app to launder money. Can you imagine, they were holding about six hundred thousand dollars of deposits. And customers had withdrawn the naira out. So the company had a serious hole in their liquidity. They couldn’t continue, so they had to pause for like three months, and customers left. There was no trust anymore. By the time they came back, only a few customers were left. The company still has not recovered fully.

Shamsudeen: I think that reliability thing, I’m not sure if you know about Patricia? That’s probably one of the things killing fintechs in Nigeria too. That reliability issue has happened a couple of times. It’s very bad in payments.

Jeremy: Very bad. If not for Payday going down, I don’t think Grey would be this popular today. Because Payday was the app you used other than Chipper Cash. If you didn’t like Chipper Cash, Payday was the alternative. Then Grey was coming up, and now there’s Raenest [Geegpay] coming up. But it was Payday we all knew at that time.

Shamsudeen: Just because they had that issue with that one bank abroad. And remember, it was even Patricia, they said they had converted customer funds to their token. Yeah.

Jeremy: So when you guys acquired Stripe, I mean Splice, not Stripe. I remember, in the Bitcoin hackathon we did, there was Splice, Stealth Money, and Bitpension, which was our own project that came first. I think Splice was among the projects that launched in that period. So I recall how these guys all started. When you acquired them, how did the whole process go? Did you continue to work on Splice internally? Did you hire their engineers?

Shamsudeen: So Splice was pretty stable at the time it was acquired, so we didn’t really have to do much active work on it. We do still make updates, because we have to patch whatever holes we come across, and we’re planning on adding features. So we still work on it and maintain it. But it’s not being pushed for other people to come and use Splice. It’s fully internal right now.

Jeremy: But that wasn’t the goal of the founders of Splice.

Shamsudeen: Yeah. But when you think of what happened to IntaSend, because we’re processing a lot of volume, compliance issues, stuff with the government, Splice may end up having those same issues if we’re not careful. It’s just easier to avoid that when all the volume Splice processes comes from Tando.

Jeremy: I know a lot of deals that happen within Africa, the figures aren’t that high compared to what we hear globally. Do you have an idea how much the acquisition was? Was it life-changing?

Shamsudeen: Honestly, I have no idea. I tend to stay on the dev side a lot more. Maybe if you get the founders on your podcast.

The backend engineer’s job, and earning trust

Jeremy: So tell me about your team ethics, your processes in building products. You came in as a freelancer two years ago, building the front end. They trusted you to the point where they let you see their backend code. I used to joke that the backend engineer is the life server of the company, because he sees the money, he knows where the money is going, he can choose to change things. So they trusted you enough to give you access to the backend code. That means you must have been very good in how you worked with them.

Shamsudeen: Yeah. I think that’s one thing you learn as a freelancer. In the process of building software, you see a lot of devs who just build what they need to build, and they don’t really look into the user experience or the big picture. That’s what AI currently cannot do yet. I use the word “yet” because it’s going to happen over time, honestly. So as a freelancer, you learn people skills, and you learn to look at the whole big picture of the product you’re trying to build. My relationship with Jason and Sabina is really good. They’re really good people, easy to work with. So it just felt natural to keep extending the relationship. It wasn’t like, oh, I’m not sure I trust you to give you access to this backend code, or the server, or the Splice dashboard, which actually holds money. We just trusted each other over time.

Jeremy: That means you must have been very good, because there are some engineers I’ve worked with. There was one I worked with some time ago. At some point he was telling me he was busy, he didn’t have time to do this. I was like, what the hell, this guy is crazy. I just let him go. Let’s end this, I need somebody else.

Shamsudeen: But how did he tell you?

Jeremy: There was a formal agreement that this thing would be built in three months. We agreed on three months, with some iterations as to how things would go. It’s a new product, not an established one, so of course you expect changes. He needed money so badly. The guy was like, okay, yeah, I can do it. First part of the contract, this guy was doing fine, doing the work, the guy is talented. But the work ethic was bad. At some point he started saying there’s a new product he just got, one month into the project.

Shamsudeen: No, that’s bad. That’s really bad. As a freelancer, you can take as many projects as you want, sure. But you have to make sure to deliver on the job.

Jeremy: And you shouldn’t be telling a client you’re working with that you have other projects and you don’t have time for this anymore.

Shamsudeen: I mean, that depends on your relationship with the client. For me, for example, on Upwork, your job history is public. You can see how many jobs you have pending. So at the time when I started working with Tando, I had something else on Upwork, and I was very open, telling them, okay, I’m currently doing this. But I delivered.

Jeremy: You were very open from the onset.

Shamsudeen: From the onset. But I made sure to always deliver at any time I set, even if that meant sleepless nights, because nobody forced me to take the extra job. So sometimes it’s easy to think every freelancer is like that. Maybe that’s credit to me.

Advice for freelancers

Jeremy: What advice would you give to developers, some of whom will listen to this and might also be freelancers? Are you still a freelancer?

Shamsudeen: No, I don’t freelance anymore.

Jeremy: That means the money they pay you must be very sufficient. So what advice can you give to freelancers, people who are optimistic, maybe looking to become freelancers because of the opportunities we have right now? Some intend to do it just for the freedom it comes with. What’s your advice for freelancers in Nigeria?

Shamsudeen: The first thing I’d say is you need to put yourself out there. It’s very easy as developers to just stay inside.

Jeremy: How have you put yourself out there?

Shamsudeen: So I didn’t really do a good job of putting myself out there. I started learning to code back in like 2017, and I did not get my first freelance job until like 2020.

Jeremy: Wow. So you were hiding somewhere? Nobody knew you then?

Shamsudeen: Nobody, actually. I did not go to events. And one thing about the Nigerian tech scene is that there can be a lot of gatekeeping, which can discourage people. I did not like that. Upwork was very helpful in that aspect. I did not have to meet people. I was in school, in Ekiti, Ekiti State. So yeah, you have to put yourself out there. I know there’s a bit of imposter syndrome when you go into these events and you see guys talking. Like the last event, there was one guy [Sadiq] saying so many things I did not know. And then people were like, oh, you work at Tando, that’s really good. And I’m like, bro, what can I do? I don’t know what people are saying.

Jeremy: But over time, I got to know that some of those things are actually [bullshit]. Like this whole thing about, okay, this guy, if you see his LinkedIn profile, he’s able to say a lot of things he does. But you know, I was having a call with this kind of guy once. We joined the team, and he was the engineer I met there. I came in as an engineer before I was asked to lead the engineering team. And I discovered that this guy, I looked at his work, and I had been giving him respect earlier because I was working differently, I had my own project. I asked him to get something done. He could understand some basic terms, but I’d say your code has to do this, and the guy couldn’t explain exactly. He was just copying things from Stack Overflow.

Shamsudeen: Exactly. And that leads into the second thing I was going to say: don’t rush, and be true to yourself. Because being a freelancer, you’re going to have to put yourself in many shoes, wherever the money or the job is. You could start as a mobile developer and see a web development or backend job. If you genuinely cannot do it, do not rush and fill up your LinkedIn with those skills to make the client think you can. Everybody tries to buff up their profile, but there’s a wrong way and a right way to do it. If you do it and you end up getting the job and performing really poorly, it’s going to show on your record. It’s just a bad experience for the client and for you. I’m not saying you should wait until you’re one hundred percent skilled up on something to start. But don’t just start jumping from one role to another when you don’t have the experience, because it will show.

Dealing with rejection on Upwork

Jeremy: How have you been able to deal with rejections on Upwork? This can be very brutal.

Shamsudeen: Yeah, it can be very brutal. A lot of times you can send thirty proposals in a week. I used to do like two or three proposals a day, back when I was still applying on Upwork. You could send thirty proposals and only hear back on two. And it’s a hard back-and-forth. So it can be difficult. You also need to be able to tell, okay, if this person is starting to seem difficult, just don’t go into it. Some people can be difficult. Some you agree with, okay, I’m going to award the contract to you, and then they just ghost. So it can be brutal. But I like to think of it as a numbers game. Just keep doing it, and you’re going to come across one, one way or another. The algorithm has a way of pushing you when it sees you’re hearing back from people. And on the client side, when they post a job, they’re also looking for experienced people, and Upwork can suggest your profile and invite you to take a look at their job. I think that’s what happened to me with [Tando].

Jeremy: was it Sabina?

Shamsudeen: No, it was Jason. So just keep your chin up on all the rejections and keep going, and it’s going to come. Now I think it’s a bit more competitive because people are using AI to submit proposals, so it’s harder for clients to filter through them. You could post a job and in five minutes see thirty proposals, because everybody’s auto-generating them.

Jeremy: Five minutes? How exactly?

Shamsudeen: So people have Upwork bots. Upwork used to have an RSS feed, but I think they got rid of it. For every job that comes up on the feed, they feed it to an agent, ChatGPT, it spits out a proposal, and you submit it, in seconds. Many people do that. People even sell the bots. So it’s become harder for clients, and some of them just end up leaving. That’s why putting yourself out there now is more important, because when you go to things like DevFest, or write articles on Twitter, you see people like, oh okay, I have this job [for you].

Jeremy: Somebody once said eighty percent of all jobs aren’t advertised. Of all the jobs I’ve gotten, it was all by recommendation. Somebody just said, hey, I want you to join this call now. I remember the job I got. A friend of mine I met in Abuja just said, what’s up, are you available for a call? I said yeah, sure. He said join this call. And that was how I joined the company. No interview. I just joined. That was how I started working with them.

Shamsudeen: So you need to get to know people. You need to build people skills. Put yourself out there, build people skills. That’s very important. If you don’t want to do that, then you’re better off not being a freelancer.

Competition, grants, and how Tando makes money

Jeremy: Let me ask you a quick one. Do you guys plan to enter other countries? You’ve been in Kenya for a long time. Or do you want to fully hold that market?

Shamsudeen: So we kind of wanted to. But one thing about the Bitcoin space, you don’t want to compete too much.

Jeremy: Even if you do, it’s on the side. It’s like everybody helps each other.

Shamsudeen: That was something I recently learned. Knowing normal traditional companies, they would typically take the market share before the competition. But at events, there were times where, okay, this person is interested in building a Tando for his country, so, oh, you can walk him through how we did it. That’s how I met the founder of Tapnob. And I met a few others in the space.

Jeremy: BitSpender? Makes sense. I he just got a grant.

Shamsudeen: Congratulations to them. It’s nice seeing these guys.

Jeremy: I remember the BitSpender guy was having calls with Onionsman, trying to get ideas. And even someone from Mavapay was saying how the Bitnob guy [Benard Parah] was the one giving them advice, even if their product was competing with Bitnob in some areas.

Shamsudeen: So that’s a really nice thing about the Bitcoin space.

Jeremy: And Tando doesn’t charge fees. So how do you guys make money? Grants?

Shamsudeen: Right now we’re just really focused on the goal of making more people open to Bitcoin.

Jeremy: So how do you make money? Is it just spread? I know companies that don’t charge fees tend to make money from the Bitcoin spread.

Shamsudeen: Currently, we have the app, and we have bitcoin.co.ke, where everybody in Kenya now has a lightning address tied to their phone number. To claim your address, you pay a small fee. And there are actually transaction fees when you transact with bitcoin.co.ke. So there’s a bit of income from that, but it’s very little.

Jeremy: But again, everybody having access to Bitcoin doesn’t mean everybody actually has it, because you have to apply for it. Permission has to be granted.

Shamsudeen: Yes. We are not currently profitable.

Jeremy: So you guys need more grants. Because if you’re not profitable, that means you’re basically an NGO.

Shamsudeen: Yes. And again, credit to the founders, because it’s not easy. When you’re trying to get somebody to use your payments platform, I think that’s what we did at the beginning: not charging transaction fees or stamp duty and stuff. And when you tell Kenyans, oh, if you use Tando, you don’t pay fees, it’s lower than M-Pesa, they’re like, oh, really? And they end up using it. And then you’ve got another person into the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Jeremy: So you guys plan to grow by offering free service. Nobody can beat a free service, you can’t compete with free. So in the future, hoping you’ll at some point acquire customers, then find a way to make money. Is that the model?

Shamsudeen: Maybe. I can’t really speak to that. But as long as we achieve the goal of …

Jeremy: Bitcoinization…Hyperbitcoinization.

Shamsudeen: Getting more people onboarded. We’re happy.

Side projects, and taking reliability seriously

Jeremy: It’s been nice talking to you. One thing before we close: what’s your most valuable experience working with Tando that you think you can take elsewhere? In fact, let me ask, do you plan to build your own product in the future, or just keep working for other companies?

Shamsudeen: Oh no, I do plan to. I want to build my own product.

Jeremy: Within the finance space?

Shamsudeen: I’m currently working on two things on the side. The first is an indie app that lets you record your spending very easily. That’s actually on the App Store, it’s called Byrde. The second is a B2B SaaS for legal use, basically a utility to help speed up the work of lawyers. But something I’ve learned at Tando that I’m taking into both my app and my side project is that reliability is very important. Prior to Tando, I hadn’t worked on something that had as many users as Tando. You have to be really keen about the user experience. Just little things like loading time, or adjusting for the different types of users. You have to take user experience really seriously. And it’s becoming increasingly important that you don’t have to spend so much time on the code itself, you just have to make sure the experience is right.

Jeremy: How do you deal with stuck transactions, like a payment that is hanging? You have to take those things very seriously.

Shamsudeen: Yes, exactly.

Jeremy: That’s something that as a freelancer you don’t get to experience, because you’re not close to the project. You just did it and go. But now you’re close to the project.

Shamsudeen: That’s something we’ve been working on a lot lately: the best way to streamline or fix stuck transactions. Are you asking me how we handle it?

Jeremy: I just want to know. Working in fintech is totally different from working in any other software company, because you have to be reliable, you have to be up, you have to be available when they need you. There may be a stuck transaction at 2 AM, and they might call you to fix it.

Shamsudeen: Yes.

Jeremy: So actually, there’s really no clocking out in fintech. There are no official off-hours. But then as a CTO or founder, just tell your guys, I can call you anytime, and just be available when I call you.

Shamsudeen: Yes. So we have a somewhat manual flow of handling stuck transactions currently. Luckily, M-Pesa is a very reliable service.

Jeremy: Very big company.

Shamsudeen: But there was something that happened. I think M-Pesa was down briefly a few days ago, which caused a bit of trouble; we had a couple of stuck transactions. We do manual refunds, but that’s after our code has tried to retry the payment a few times. If it fails, then we do refunds. It’s hard to have automatic refunds when we don’t store users’ data. There’s no login.

Jeremy: I was about to ask you how you guys do refunds. So you don’t take KYC?

Shamsudeen: No.

Jeremy: You guys don’t take KYC. What’s the maximum transaction amount?

Shamsudeen: I can actually check, because it changes.

Jeremy: More than one thousand dollars, or less than that?

Shamsudeen: It’s around fifty thousand [Kenyan] shillings. That’s per transaction. We don’t do daily caps or anything like that. Per transaction is fifty thousand shillings.

Jeremy: Let me see [the app]. This is different from the current production. It looks sleek, man. Very sleek. Did you design this?

Shamsudeen: Not me. The designer did it. The designer is also a Nigerian. He’s in Lagos.

Jeremy: Thank you Shams [for showing up]. It was wonderful. I didn’t realise that was forty minutes.

Shamsudeen: Don’t worry, next time I’ll call you out to discuss monierate. I actually want to hear about that.

Jeremy: Cool. I’m always open, man.

Shamsudeen: Cool, man. Thank you. Thanks so much, man. Cheers.

Jeremy: Cheers.

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, and more.

This is the conversation we tried to record once before, until the Nigerian internet had other plans. This time we sat down in the same space, offline, and got into it.

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, and more.

In this episode, we discuss:

1) Owning your code in the age of AI

• What does “your code is your responsibility” actually mean when an AI wrote the code?

• The rate bug that quietly cost my company money, and what it taught me

• Why “the AI wrote it” doesn’t get you off the hook, and how that echoes an old idea from aviation

2) How a lean fintech team ships safely, and fast

• The exact steps Samson’s team runs before any code reaches production

• When is it fine to reach for Claude Code, and when is it not?

• How Mavapay once switched payment providers overnight and still shipped to production

3) Partners, standards, and the fintech stack

• Why the wrong partner can sink even a great engineering team

• The virtual-card deal that fell apart, and what it cost

• Paystack versus the old guard: how API standards diverge, and why good docs matter more than people think

4) Beyond fintech: a price index for Nigeria

• The side project born from watching market prices change day to day

• Crowdsourcing data on a “verify, don’t trust” principle

• Why Samson doesn’t trust official inflation numbers, and what a rolling price index could fix

A few lines that stuck with me:

“If you break the system, they’re not going to call the AI. They’re going to call you.”

“AI itself is just a black box. It’s what you feed into it that it gives you back.”

“Test like your life depends on it.”

“In fintech, a partner either breaks you or makes you.”

“I’m not concerned about what the seller is selling. I’m concerned about what the buyer buys.”

Where to find Samson Olusegun:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samson-olusegun/

• X: https://x.com/nully0x

• Mavapay: https://mavapay.co

Where to find me:

• https://x.com/jeremyikwuje

Referenced in this episode:

• Your code is your responsibility, even if AI wrote it (the Senko Rašić post that sparked the theme): https://blog.senko.net/your-code-is-your-responsibility-even-if-ai-wrote-it

• Claude Code: https://www.anthropic.com/claude-code

• The Big Mac Index (The Economist): https://www.economist.com/interactive/big-mac-index

• Companies and tools mentioned: Mavapay, Sudo, Bridgecard, Miden, Quidax, Paystack, Flutterwave, Interswitch, Remita, E-Tranzact, Binance, Mintlify, Swagger, Postman, Starlink, Spectranet

The full transcript of this episode is available in the Transcript tab. It has been lightly edited for clarity.

In this episode, you’ll get into the basics- the very basics- of what Fintech is about. Let’s get started.

When I was a kid, my dad used to go to the bank to send us money, and we normally went to a nearby bank branch (same bank) to withdraw it as cash. But today I sent money to my dad from my phone, and he received it and spent it with his debit card. But I don’t use a bank. I use a fintech.

What, exactly, is FinTech?

FinTech in full is financial technology. Two words: financial and technology.

Fintech is a technology that makes financial services faster, cheaper and easier to use.

Technology today is mainly software. Software can be a mobile app, a website, a chatbot, or a digital platform.

Financial services are mainly payments, loans, savings and investing.

FinTech means using software, mobile apps, websites, chatbots or digital platforms to make payments, loans, savings or investing cheaper, easier and faster.

We use fintech every day. The app on your phone that lets you send money, pay a bill, or buy crypto is a fintech.

It is not a bank

Most people think of fintech or define fintech as a bank. But they see it as a bank with an app. This is not correct, and it is also misleading.

FinTech is not a company or organisation. It is a technology that we can use to access financial services faster, easier and cheaper.

The app on your phone that lets you send money is a fintech, but the app might be developed by an individual, not necessarily a company. The app might also be developed by X Bank, but if the app is open-sourced, even if the bank shuts down, the app will continue to serve people.

Describing a company as a fintech is like describing Jeremy as a fintech. Even if I build an app that lets you send money, you won’t say I’m a “Fintech”. You’ll refer to me as a Fintech developer or operator.

For instance, Bitcoin is not a bank. Bitcoin is a financial technology. Bitcoin is fintech. Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, is not a banker. And Bitcoin does not have any banking or investment license. But millions of people around the world invest and send money home with Bitcoin. FinTech is built by individuals and companies that usually don’t hold a banking license. So you see, Satoshi Nakamoto is not a banker. He doesn’t even own a bank license. But he was able to create software that is used to move billions around the world every single day.

I’ve built dozens of fintech apps. I’m not a banker; today, I still don’t have any physical banking experience. But I was able to build an app that let millions of people send, save, borrow, and invest.

However, a situation where I named my app Jeremy - then you will mostly know Jeremy as a Fintech.

Which is why the average person can refer to a company or bank as FinTech when the name of the app is also the name of the bank.

The major reason people think fintech is a bank is that fintech is not only technology, but technology plus finance. As I explained earlier, fintech is short for financial technology. And it’s usually connected on top of an existing banking service, which makes it faster, cheaper and more accessible than the underlying banks.

Without fintech, I would have to go to a bank building to send money to my mum and wait for hours or days. But because my bank created an app that allows me to send money more easily, faster, and cheaper.

Five Categories of FinTech

The most successful fintech companies are payment companies.

But fintech is not just payments. It is a set of distinct things, and each of those things is solving a different problem.

When Bob sent $100 to Alice from his iPhone, it’s a payment. When Alice buys Bitcoin and holds for a future return, that’s wealth and investing.

Since you are going to be building fintech, here are five categories I want to talk about:

The first is Payments

Payment is a financial technology that moves money from one person or business to another. You can think of PayPal, Stripe, and M-Pesa.

This is really where beginners start. If you’re jumping into fintech, I always recommend you start with payment, because it’s at the core, at the centre of anything that you will ever build.

You have to touch payment. Doesn’t matter what fintech you’re building, you’ll find a way to touch payment. So building a payment app is where you should likely start.

Payment apps are the most decorated fintechs; nearly all fintech app, every fintech software do payment. And building a business around payment is not that complicated. The business model is usually transactional.

That’s why payment companies are the most valuable companies in fintech in the world. Payment companies were the first unicorns in the world:

PayPal, Worldpay, Alipay, and Wise and all these guys- they are the biggest fintech companies in the world today, M-Pesa and all. So arguably, fintech is generally seen as payment technologies because nearly all fintech touches payment.

Banking Infrastructure (BaaS)

The second kind of fintech category is banking infrastructure, or in this case, banking as a service.

It is like the plumbing that lets a company offer bank accounts, cards or mobile wallets without becoming a licensed bank itself.

This is the least visible category and arguably the most important one to understand as an engineer.

Once you start building around payments, you want to move further; if you really, truly want to become a fintech nerd, try to build a banking infrastructure; try to build a banking service that allows other fintechs to issue virtual accounts, cards, access bank accounts, and make payouts; a good example would be building a global fintech such as Stripe, Rain.xyz, Bridge, and regional examples such as Flutterwave, Mono, and Sudo.

Most BaaS can still fit in as a payment fintech because they enable payments for other payment fintechs, but they heavily use existing banking infrastructure. Their system is connecting directly to a bank.

It is important that a BaaS is not to be confused with a fintech reselling APIs of another BaaS, or a BaaS aggregator. For instance, Bridge, a stablecoin infrastructure company, issues accounts and payment rails by connecting directly to banking partners and card networks. Then there is OnePipe, a Nigerian fintech that pools APIs from multiple banks and BaaS providers into a single unified gateway. The former is BaaS; the latter is an aggregator, not BaaS.

Building a Banking as a Service infrastructure gives you an experience the average fintech nerd lacks as things get low-level. You are not just building a payment system; you are building what powers an ecosystem, from treasury management to ecommerce.

I would liken Crypto Wallet as a Service infrastructure as a new kind of BaaS. Remember, crypto is an end-to-end financial technology. In a hyper crypto world, we don’t need a bank. We can send, receive, lend, and invest without ever touching a traditional banking service.

Building a Crypto Wallet Infrastructure is tedious, just like building a traditional BaaS. It is what powers crypto exchanges, stablecoin apps, and crypto payment gateways. Building one puts you in a position where you can build anything in crypto.

Lending

The third one is lending, which basically is assessing risk, assessing credit risk and disbursing loans digitally, often to people that can’t really get a loan from a bank.

You might have heard the whole idea of financial inclusion. Actually, the core of it is that you build a system that is able to provide a loan to someone who, without the system, will not be able to get that loan from a bank.

From 2017 to 2022, many fintech startups were trying to solve financial inclusion across Africa. Basically, they built an app that lets anyone access a loan.

Today there are so many fintechs in Nigeria offering loans, so many loan apps across Africa, even if they’re loan sharks. But they make it easy so that with only your bank statement, you can be able to get access to a loan. You don’t need to own a business; you don’t need collateral.

These loan apps scan your bank statement, contact list, and public record of your credit/loan default history and quote an amount you are eligible for.

It’s an important fintech category and easily profitable when default is low. Operating a loan app won’t just teach you the technicalities of lending but also consumer behaviors and how the ability to pay is different from willingness to pay.

Wealth and Investing

Then we have wealth and investing apps that let ordinary people invest, save, or trade. It lowers the barrier that used to require a broker.

Prior to 2015, if you wanted to buy a stock, you had to go to a broker's office.

A senior friend told me he bought stock in 2010. And they gave him a paper, a certificate, and he has been keeping that certificate for a long time. If he wants to liquidate his stock, he has to take that paper to the company again. So there’s a lot of manual process in between.

Today people use their phone to buy and sell stock. They invest in GOOG, AAPL, AMZN, TSLA without going to a broker's office.

We invest in Gold, Bitcoin, Crypto, and precious metals from our Laptops. We even bet crypto on Polymarkets and lose a lot of money.

Fintech that allow us to do this are in the wealth and investing category.

Insurtech

There are fewer fintechs in this category, but they apply the same “unbundle and rebuild digitally” concept; they apply the same concept with all those categories we’ve mentioned, but then they apply it to insurance.

I subscribe to health insurance from an app, and everything took less than 10 minutes. In my dad's generation, he would take two weeks.

Fintech made this possible.

Payments, Banking as a Service, Lending, Wealth, and Insurtech are the five major categories in Fintech.

Nearly every fintech company you can name fit into one or a combination of these five buckets. When you’re evaluating a company or a job, the first question worth asking is which of these five are they actually solving? Are they solving payments? Are they serving banking infrastructure? Are they lending? Are they enabling investing? Are they selling Insurance?

Do the problems that they are solving fall within the five categories? If they don’t, chances are they are not a “FinTech”.

Building a FinTech is not the same as building an app or working in a Bank IT Department

There are a hundred and one things that make building fintech a genuinely different engineering discipline from typical software engineering, and also from traditional banking.

I’ve a friend who works as a software engineer in a bank; all he does is build and manage their websites and portfolio sites.

If you work in a bank as a software engineer or in the IT department, it doesn’t mean you are a fintech engineer or operator. FinTech is different.

The mindset to have, the principles to imbibe, is different when it comes to building fintech.

3 Fintech Principles you should read every day

The first principle is money can’t be “mostly correct”

Mostly correct in quotes.

For instance, a social app can ship a bug that shows the wrong follower count, and it’s embarrassing; but a fintech bug that shows the wrong balance is a fire alarm.

PayPal cannot afford to wrongly credit a customer; account numbers and balances must be correct and correctly assigned.

This changes how you write tests and ship code.

If you’re building an app for, let’s say, e-commerce, and you show a higher price, it might affect customers’ willingness to buy, or it might mislead the customer, but the impact is not as high as if you show the wrong balance in a banking app.

So you can’t say, okay, there are times customers' balances will not be correct; and it’s fine so long as we fix it. Or there are times when our services, our system, will wrongly give customers value.

no!!!

It always has to be ONE HUNDRED PERCENT CORRECT AND AT ALL TIMES, because a single mistake can shut down your company.

There are so many businesses that have gone under just because an “experienced software engineer” did something wrong. So balance can’t, money can’t be mostly correct.

If a customer sends $50 from your app, ensure that customer has enough funds to debit that fifty dollars, and ensure the money goes to the beneficiary, not excess or less. I know a fintech in 2021 that shut down because the developers commented out the line of code that checks if a user has sufficient funds during a test, and they forgot to remove the comment tag before going live.

It might be a fail-safe if your app sends less than what the customer expects. But the point is, if it is less, the customer will complain, and they might stop using your app.

So money can’t be mostly correct. It has to be correct, ALWAYS.

The Second principle is that Regulation is a Core Constraint, not Paperwork.

In most software businesses, you build a product first and worry about legal later.

In fintech, what you are legally allowed to build often determines the architecture before you write a line of code.

Many fintechs skip regulations, and they hardly succeed. There are a few exceptions, such as Bitcoin and other open-source fintechs.

However, if you truly want to do a fintech business, try to be a regulated fintech; try to go through the regulatory paths; it’s a competitive advantage. There’s no successful big fintech company today that is not regulated. Check any region anywhere. As long as you’re building a fintech company, an entity, become regulated, or else you won’t be big, and you will fail.

The third is, you will depend on infrastructure you don’t control.

Your app might be perfect, right? You might build the perfect app, use the Rust programming language to code it, even if you use the Fable 5 AI model to build it end-to-end with a strong backend human review.

But if the bank rail, mobile money infrastructure, payment system, or crypto api you are connected to is not reliable, your service too will not be reliable.

Let’s say you’re building an app that allows Nigerian UK immigrants to send money home, just like LemFi, and you are using Flutterwave Bank Transfer API to process payouts to Nigerian bank accounts.

If Flutterwave is down, your app too will be down. If NIBSS ( a bank-to-bank settlement service in Nigeria) is down, your app will be down.

So your app is great, but because your partner is down, you are also down.

The fintech space is more about dealing with downtimes: how do you deal with an offline partner or a hacked crypto api?

So you have to consider these things. You depend on infrastructure you don’t control. Your underlying third-party banking api makes or breaks you.

FinTech engineers spend a lot of time designing for failures that happen entirely outside their own system.

You must take into consideration that the customer will get a good experience or a bad experience based on your underlying partners.

So you want to choose the right banking partner; you want to choose the right fintech partner to use. To be resilient, you want to use multiple partners, especially for settlements, so if one is failing, you switch to another. Many successful fintechs don’t rely on one banking service on their settlement leg.

Where switching gets complex is Collection ie Deposits.

Several neobanks use Bridge.xyz to issue a global dollar account to customers. This allows their customers to receive foreign payments. Bridge is in partnership with Lead Bank. If Lead Bank is doing maintenance on account issuing, Bridge and all the neobanks using Bridge will have to pause deposits.

The neobanks can’t just decide to switch to a new partner immediately. They mostly have to wait for Lead Bank to restore their services, and Bridge notifies them.

As you build and design your fintech, also build and design an effective customer notification system so that if any of your partners is down, you immediately notify your customers; this will allow them to make the right financial decision.

Lastly, when it comes to depending on infrastructure, you need to have excess liquidity. Liquidity is simply money available to use. You can’t easily succeed in fintech without excess liquidity. Even the right partner can one day go down for two weeks, and all your money will be hanging with them. Without excess cash storage you have elsewhere that you can move to a new partner, your app can’t function, and all your marketing spend is vanity.

Not all markets are the same

Where does fintech matter more?

Fintech is needed everywhere. But there are regions where fintech is critically needed. And there are region specific fintech are more needed.

In the US or Europe, the banking system works. FinTech in this region is largely about making an already functional banking system faster and more convenient.

In Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, Pakistan and South Africa, fintech is frequently solving a more fundamental problem for a huge share of the population: there was no convenient banking system to begin with in these markets.

That is why mobile money, a phone-based wallet service that does not require a bank account, became such a big deal in East Africa. It is why agent banking networks, human agents who handle cash in and cash out, remain central to how money moves in West Africa.

If you go to Kenya today, people use the M-Pesa mobile money service everywhere. M-Pesa allows you to send, receive, and even get a loan without having a bank account. It worked out; it’s been used heavily since 2009.

Today in Nigeria, you find OPay, Moniepoint, and PalmPay POS agents everywhere. They succeeded because existing banks were not reliable and easy to access.

FinTech in Africa and the Middle East regions isn’t just optimising an existing banking system; in a lot of cases, it is the system.

If you are going into these local markets, to succeed you are most likely going to be building your own rails; otherwise you are just another unreliable service.

Building fintech in some markets can be a genuinely different engineering problem than building in other markets. In London, you might be solving a niche fintech problem such as providing bank accounts for older immigrants above 60, because the general financial system works well.

But in Africa, you might be building a general-purpose payment system just like Wave Mobile did in Senegal in 2018.

The fintech rules are different in each market, the constraints are different, the scale of impact is different.

To succeed in each market, you must know what is needed.

What does a fintech engineer actually do day to day?

This is going to be the next episode.

Now that you know what fintech actually is, the next thing worth knowing is what a fintech engineer does day to day.

As a fintech nerd, you’re either a fintech engineer or work with one. The engineers are the building talent block in this space; nearly every other function can easily be picked from other industries.

Before you move on, if you know that friend who would love to get into fintech, consider sharing the Building Fintech show with them. The more people listen and read this, the more I’m encouraged to make more content.

Thank you. My name is Jeremy ‘Code’ Ikwuje. Talk to you soon.

This will be the first-ever episode on how I got into Fintech. So you can NFT it.

It’s going to be weekly, where I will publish once a week, but you might get more than one piece of content in a week.

Just to give you guys some background information, my name is Jeremy “Code” Ikwuje. I have been working professionally since 2020. I started my coding journey as far back as 2017 during my undergraduate studies.

How I got into fintech started with a phone call in October 2018.

I received a call from a friend who was trying to come up with a site for a client, and the client needed a payment system on the site. The client wanted to accept payment from Nigerians. My friend called to ask if I knew any payment system to integrate.

I recommended Paystack.

I’ve been following up with the Paystack story on Techpoint, so it was an easy recommendation.

So he went in and looked at Paystack and how he could integrate it, but he had some difficulties with it.

He reached out to me again and told me that he’s trying to integrate Paystack into his website, but he’s unable to write it in PHP at the time. I said, okay, I’ll just try my best to look at it and then get back to you.

I was in class at the time he called, and I went back to the hostel. I picked up my laptop, and throughout that night I consumed the entire Paystack documentation.

Payment gateways were still new in Africa, so it was hard to find a really good article at the time on integrating with PHP. Today it would be easier because AI is here and can help you integrate the entire thing end to end.

I was able to integrate the Paystack checkout payment that night, and I sent my friend a sample code, and he was able to implement it, and it worked.

But then I felt, instead of me just giving him a sample code, let me write an article on this. Funny enough, at the time, I was trying out blogging for some side income as a student. So I put out the article on the internet, and about a week or two, developers began to reach out to me to send them more sample code, asking me questions about how to integrate it.

I was jumping on a call at least once a week to help someone out. I started getting gigs from small business owners asking me to setup payment system for them. That single article brought in a client that sent me my first million naira in 2020.

That was when I knew that fintech is going to be a big thing, especially in Africa, because every new week a new fintech startup springs up and you see that they are integrated with Paystack.

That was how I got into payment and fintech.

Since then, I left school and got my first job in 2020 for a real estate investment company, and I built a payment system for them to be able to receive investment from their clients and disburse to vendors. Within 6 months, they were able to process more than a million dollars. That same year, I got another gig for a crowdfunding app that let users invest in farmland; remember FarmCrowdy?

I went on to start my own company in 2021 to allow people to buy Bitcoin before winding it down in 2022. I’ve gone on to work for several startups, mostly payments companies, including contracting for Paystack.

In 2023, I launched Monierate.xyz with my cofounder, an FX data aggregator with over 10 million pageviews.

Today, I mostly work around stablecoins and cross-border payments. Currently the lead engineer at Spendin, the Revolut of Africa.

The last six to seven years have been a very good ride in the fintech space, and there are still more niches in fintech. Fintech is something that we need, especially in Africa.

I’ll recommend anyone starting a tech career, especially in Africa, to go into Fintech. There are more successful startups in Fintech than any other startup category you can think of.

VC loves fintech, and it is important to follow the money. We are going to see a trillion-dollar fintech soon.

In the Building Fintech series, I’ll be sharing everything I know about building fintech, explaining every single important concept.

If you haven’t subscribed to my Jeremy Code newsletter, now will be a good time to do so. New content will drop every week.

You can search for Jeremy Code on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or on your favourite podcast app.

Thank you for subscribing.

I’ve never had time for consistently making content out there. I created my first blog in 2016, then another in 2018, then another in 2020, each time on a new domain name.

But I didn’t publish more than 10 articles for each.

The truth is, I never took content creation seriously because of what my teacher told me: “Boy, stop making content and become a great coder.”

lol. No matter how I tried, that statement made me place less value on writing and even podcasting. I considered them low-value tasks, even if every year-end I would feel I should have written more out there. No matter what great code I write, I regret not writing the previous year.

Blogging. Podcasting. YouTube. TikToking. Substacking. I tried them, but after a few days in, I would stop.

Do you know my first Substack was in 2021? But then I stopped writing after one month.

Well, not anymore. Because I now have a different mindset about values.

You see, there are only four value ladders. The first ladder is Implementation, and it is the lowest form of value. This is you doing the thing, doing the actual work; the coding. Every software engineer who only writes code is on this first ladder — Implementation.

Software engineers are implementers.

Implementers don’t take any risk. They just do the thing they are mostly asked to fix. Plumbers, auto mechanics, coders, including hired pirates, are implementers. And they usually earn minimum wage in any market, as they are the lowest on the ladder.

But software engineers are high-value implementers; they usually earn above the median. If the annual minimum wage in a market is $100, software engineers earn between $500 and $1,000. The high-value implementers can earn 10x the minimum wage. But it rarely gets past that.

In California, the annual minimum wage is $31k to $36k; most software engineers there earn between $142k and $161k — around 5x. Top-value engineers earn $250k to $350k (~10x).

Now take the same job, implementation, in two other markets using dollar value. In London, the minimum wage is around $33,750 a year. Software engineers earn $94,500 to $121,500 — about 3x. Top engineers hit $162,000 to $202,500 (~7x). In Lagos, the minimum wage is around $540 a year. Software engineers earn $3,870 to $5,420 from local employers — 7x to 10x the minimum wage.

It hardly gets past 10x. It’s almost impossible to get paid more than $300k writing code alone. Any higher earnings are no longer just engineers but project managers, team leads, vp, and engineering managers, which leads us to the second level of value — Unification.

These are people who provide value by unifying things. They bring implementers (engineers who just code) together to get a job done. They are paid for managing others. A chief security officer earns more than the security guy at the gate. A site contractor earns more than his most skilled workman.

A software engineer who manages other software engineers is no longer just writing code. He now manages others. And takes some risks. If a project goes bad, he is to blame. He is paid not only because he can code but also because he can get others to code. A great example is an engineering manager/lead.

An engineering manager is usually paid more than the average software engineer. Their base pay is usually the average of what software engineers earn, sometimes several times over.

In California, engineering managers earn $180,000 to $270,000 on average, with top earners reaching $350,000 to $410,000. In London, they earn $189,000 to $297,000, with top earners at $337,500 to $405,000. In Lagos, engineering managers earn $11,610 to $23,225, with top earners at $30,970 to $38,710.

The big difference between an Implementation and Unification is the communication level. An implementer might not need to communicate to anyone other than her direct team lead. But the team would communicate to everyone and also to the VP.

The reason you can never be rich just writing code in a company is that you hardly communicate to anyone outside your office peers or lead. You are economically limited by your circle of audience.

I’ve seen a few guys in Lagos who used to just code before now earning as high as $100K annually. Way more than engineering managers earn in the country. In the US, you will find many “former engineers” who now earn up to $2m annually.

Well, if you look closely, it is not just a company paying them that amount. They are now podcasting, running a YouTube channel, a paid app, a startup, or selling online courses and books.

They are now communicating more. creating content and code out there for others. The third and fourth levels of value are Communication and Imagination. People who earn from communicating or their imaginations.

This is where the highest money is made in any career. When you begin to communicate and create things. No matter how small.

I read about a software engineer in Australia who was learning to code, then created a website called Sitepoint to help other people learn to code. He became a dollar millionaire.

I read a paper that said a rich programmer is no longer a “programmer.”

Funny, but to some degree, true.

Gergely Orosz, author of Pragmatic Engineer and millionaire software engineer, is a famous podcaster and runs one of the largest Substack newsletters.

Taylor Otwell of Laravel went from earning an average salary to driving a Lamborghini after building Laravel, the most used open source web framework. He is no longer a “programmer”; he is a creator and innovator.

The CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, used to be a project manager. A key difference between a project manager who unifies others to get a project done and a CEO is that the company thrives or dies by the CEO’s imagination and communication. The more innovative he is, the more successful Google becomes.

Coding won’t make you rich. Communicating your code and the value of it in a new way that increases your circle of influence and surface area of luck will. Coding is now a productized labour; all we need is to burn energy (Claude tokens).

How good are your ideas? Unless you are Elon Musk, a master of attention who never made it by coding alone. Or you are Zuckerberg, who created a social network at 19, at the right time and place, but never created anything else successful since then.

But you are not, and 99% of coding ideas today will be dead on GitHub in two weeks. But if you can turn the flip and entertain or educate from your coding ideas, you will see how lucrative that is.

I was discussing this with a friend, and he said, “But how about footballers? They just kick the ball. They are implementing the game.” Well, I said, they are not just kicking the ball; each kick is a communication because people watch them. The reason why they are paid more is that they are communicating more than the average software engineer. Whatever is not communicating to people is not economically viable. Entertainment is a form of communication, and it requires a lot of imagination to thrive.

Football began to thrive richly when players started having a lot of speaking engagements before, during, and after games. A comment Lamine Yamal made after a game against Real Madrid will have more engagement than the match highlights. That is why Adidas paid him $34m.

But you don’t want to start a career with communication and creativity as your main source of income. No. It’s hard and takes time. You won’t make money the first few years creating a coding channel, building a new AI app, or publishing courses. You are better off starting with implementation as your main source of income, a job that pays you to code today. The reason is that there is no lower bound as to how much a communicator can make. They can make $0 or $100m. It is the reason why you used to be richer than your friend who started a YouTube channel 6 years ago rather than getting a job, but you are still earning from job to job today while your friend is a millionaire teaching people how to code online and yet never worked for a serious company.

But you would’ve been better off both at the beginning and now if you had also taken your communication and creativity beyond the circuit board of your company. But you didn’t see any real value communicating out there and not being paid monthly. The high-earning communicators don’t earn monthly; they earn big.

It is also the reason why your friend has been building products without a job for more than 8 years now, but he is still broke. Because when you earn from your creativity, it takes time; and you can earn as little as zero and as much as a million.

You don’t want to be friend B, but you also don’t want to be friend A at the start of your career. You want to start as an implementer and get paid to code, while creating content out there beyond where you work.

In any career, including software, if you ever want to earn big, the most important skill you can develop is communication. From implementation to imagination, the highest earners in each ladder are the ones who communicate better.

A founder who communicates more and improves will raise more money and build more successful products than the one who hardly communicates.

You are not improving in your communication if you are always communicating to the same people. Increase follows attention and vice versa.

This is why I have decided to take writing and podcasting consistently going forward. I now consider communication a much more valuable activity than writing code. It is now my most important job.

I admonish you to do the same. Take your communication seriously. Start an X blog, a podcast, a YouTube channel, a Substack, or even a physical meetup and communicate with people.

If you are going to do this, here is my ultimate advice on how to build an audience: find a schedule you can live with, and stick to it for a year. Probably several years. Whether it’s YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, or Substack, find a schedule and stick with it. The more frequent the schedule, the better. Don’t outsource.

It won’t be easy. But you have to start from where you are right now.

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He loves to go to church wherever he travels. I remember when we first met in 2022, in the city of Accra, at a Bitcoin Conference; he was telling me how much he would love to be at Shiloh, a yearly conference organised by the Living Faith Church, Nigeria.

He is a bright, young, humble, and amazing individual.

And now, dear friends, this is the Jeremy Code Podcast. Let’s listen to Megasley.

Today, I am unbelievably excited to introduce you to something we’ve been building. Something born out of a real problem, a real night, and a real frustration that I know many of you have felt.

It’s called Bitmonie, and the link is www.bitmonie.co.

Borrow. Repay. That’s it.

Bitmonie is a Bitcoin-backed loan service that lets you borrow up to ₦1 million using your Bitcoin as collateral. No technical knowledge required. No jargon. No complexity. If you already know how to send money from your phone, you already know enough.

There are only two things you will ever do on Bitmonie. You borrow money, and you pay it back. That’s the whole product. We’re not building ten things. We’re building one thing, and we’re building it right.

Simple. Tight. Sustainable.

Why Bitcoin as Collateral?

Bitcoin is the best collateral in the world.

I know that sounds bold, but hear me out. We’ve verified it. Land, houses, cars, stocks. These are the conventional assets people pledge when they need financing. They come with paperwork, valuations, middlemen, and delays. Bitcoin comes with none of that. It is open, verifiable, globally liquid, and never sleeps.

Bitcoin is a superior form of collateral. And it’s time a product treated it that way.

How It Works

The entire journey, from needing cash to having it, is five steps:

1. Visit www.bitmonie.co

2. Register with your email and verify with a code

3. Enter how much you want to borrow and see the exact collateral required

4. Open your Bitcoin or Lightning wallet and send the collateral

5. Your bank account, mobile money, or stablecoin wallet gets credited

Start to finish: 2 to 10 minutes.

A Story

The idea is not novel. It is a derivative of a personal problem.

Last year, when Bitcoin was around $90,000 and the dollar was swinging between ₦1,400 and ₦1,500, I was stuck in a hotel several thousand miles from home. I needed about ₦300,000 to book a flight back and cover the extra days. My income was arriving in three days. I’m not the guy who calls friends to borrow spending money. And the Nigerian loan apps like Fairmoney and Easemoni charge sky-high monthly rates for money I only needed for 72 hours.

I knew Bitcoin-backed loans existed. Binance, Ledn. So I locked up 400,000 sats, about $360 worth of Bitcoin at the time, and took a $200 USDT loan against it. I converted that to ₦286,000 at roughly ₦1,430 to the dollar.

Three days later, I had to buy ₦300,000 worth of USDT just to repay. The dollar had crept toward ₦1,500 on the buy side. The difference came from swap fees, spreads, and conversions. It ate up ₦14,000.

I ended up paying roughly 4.8% for a three-day loan. Cheaper than if I’d used Fairmoney or Easemoni. But there was still serious damage.

Now, the Binance interest rate for the three days itself was way lower than 1%. The damage wasn’t the loan. It was the friction. Converting naira to USDT and back again is where the value disappeared.

So I asked myself a simple question. What if the loan was disbursed in naira, and repaid in naira, I would’ve repaid ~ ₦2,000, that’s ₦288k rather in total instead of ₦300k.

The answer to that question is Bitmonie.

Bitmonie Is That Loan, Done Right

You lock your Bitcoin. You receive naira. You repay in naira. You only pay for the exact days you borrowed. Your Bitcoin is never lent out. It is SAFU, and it comes back to you the moment you repay.

No shitcoins. No swap fees. No spread. No conversion loss. Just a clean, simple, naira-denominated loan backed by the hardest money on the planet.

If you need urgent cash and you’re sitting on Bitcoin, there is now a better way. Up to ₦10 million.

www.bitmonie.co

one way you can start is by solving a problem you have.

If you build something you want or need, a solution to your own problem, chances are others are having a similar problem and want a solution.

This works especially well because you deeply understand the problem you’re solving. After all, it’s your problem too.

I read a story of a broke young man who wanted to be rich but didn’t know what to do. So he interviewed hundreds of millionaires in America, put all their answers in a book, sold millions of copies and made riches for himself. He began by finding a solution to his problem, and because other people had the same problem, he sold them the solution.

A famous example is Airbnb.

Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia couldn’t afford rent in San Francisco and needed a way to make extra money. They rented out air mattresses in their apartment to conference attendees, leading to the creation of Airbnb.

• Jan Koum wanted a simple, reliable, and private way to stay in touch with friends and family globally without paying for expensive SMS. He and his friends built WhatsApp.

• Dropbox founder Drew Houston conceived the Dropbox idea after repeatedly forgetting his USB flash drive while he was a student at MIT. He created a better way to access and share his files across different devices and platforms and millions of people wanted it too.

• Bobby Gruenewald is the founder and CEO of YouVersion, the Bible app with over 100 million downloads. Gruenewald wanted to find a way to engage with the Bible more consistently. He wondered how new technologies could change the way he and others engage with the Bible. He believed that if he could find a way to engage more consistently, it would likely help others who had similar struggles.

I used to open multiple fintech apps in Nigeria to find the best exchange rate when sending money, it was tiring, so I created monierate.com to make it easy for me to find the best rate on multiple fintech apps, and it happens that 1M+ people have that same problem every month.

Other examples of famous products such as Slack, Calendly, Shopify, and GitHub were created as a desire or the founder's need to solve a problem.

The list is endless.

I’m a nerd, so most of my examples would be in tech. But it isn’t just about tech. It applies to all kinds of products and solutions.

The good thing is, if you solve your own problems, you won’t have them again. And if you are lucky, you will be rich and famous.