We hired our first software engineer in 2019. Today we have a team of fourteen building SaaS platforms, mobile apps, and the technology that runs our own fleet. Here's what five years of building software in Lagos has taught us.
Hire for character, train for craft
We've stopped optimising for resume signals. Half our engineers are self-taught or career-switchers. What we hire for: written communication, intellectual honesty, and demonstrable ownership on a single project — paid or unpaid.
Infrastructure is choices, not defaults
Default cloud regions are us-east-1. For Lagos users, that's 220ms of unnecessary latency. We host on eu-west-1 (Dublin) or af-south-1 (Cape Town) — both materially closer.
Payment gateways are commodities — almost
Flutterwave, Paystack and Squad are all good. We default to Flutterwave for breadth of payment methods, fall back to Paystack for stability of API, and use Squad for card-only flows where fees matter. Build the abstraction layer so you can switch.
The real moat is reliability
Clients tolerate a feature gap. They will not tolerate a system that goes down on Tuesday mornings. Spend disproportionate effort on observability, alerting, and incident response. Build the on-call rota before you build the next feature.
