In our bid to understand the applicability of Escrow solutions to different sectors and niches, we recently had a chit chat with Nnamdi Okafor, a Growth Analyst with Bundle Africa which is a Crypto company headquartered in Lagos, Nigeria. This interview explores Nnamdi’s journey into Growth Marketing and his views about Digital Escrow solutions:

Tell us who Nnamdi is and what makes him tick.

N: Nnamdi is a 24-year-old Growth Marketer currently with Bundle Africa. He was the Head of Content and SEO at Hotels.ng. I am a graduate of Botany from Unizik and I am from Anambra State. Errrrm, do I really know what makes me tick? I am a very passionate person that always gets committed to the things I do.

How would you describe what you do?

N: I work as a Growth Analyst and basically, that involves coming up with ways and insights and also trying to figure out ways to grow a product, company and you know, pull up metrics to track what KPIs matter. It also involves figuring out what marketing channels should be optimized as well as understanding user behavior so that it is easy to optimize for specific users.

Basically, what I do is trying to gain insights and meaning into everything we do. We run ads, analyze campaign results, and know-how to experiment properly. I analyze reports, gain insights, and look at the numbers on the metrics.

What inspired your journey into Growth Marketing?

N: I started in 2017 and that was at University. In my final year, our departmental president organized a training session and got a Google representative to train us. The person spoke to us about Google Digital Skills for Africa and how to get started. I remember completing the course in about 3 days or so.

After that, it piqued my interest and I began following people that I figured were in a similar niche, and as of then, I didn’t really know a lot of digital or growth marketers. The few that I knew were Caroline Wabara, Ized, and Yemi Johnson. I began following Yemi Johnson because I was like a big fan of his tweets and thought process around growth and scaling a company. I thereafter took part in an internship and here I am.

What would you consider the challenges associated with being a Growth Analyst?

N: First off, there isn’t like enough or much of a community or so around growth marketing and analytics and this is mainly because, in this part of the world, growth is an afterthought for most people. There is this erroneous belief that Entrepreneurs tell themselves which is ‘a good product sells itself.’

With this mindset, most people think that you do not really need a growth team or that you probably only need one person to come on board and run ads or manage social media accounts. This is why a lot of companies in Africa fail to scale properly and that is a major issue that we face.

Secondly, not enough people understand why they need to grow a company. The first growth team was drawn by Facebook and this team had a lot of technical people that helped in growing Facebook. The coming together of that team was what led to its growth but in Africa and Nigeria especially, it is not a niche that we have gotten around or used to so most businesses do not understand why we need a very technical person in their growth team.

Growth analysis is a very technical role because you first need to understand what truly matters to the company then write sQL and python scripts to extract that data. You also spend a lot of time on tableau and other data viz tools to present that data in a neat and easy-to-read format for stakeholders and other team members.

What areas of Growth Analysis are you most focused on?

N: So, this is dependent on the niche but I’m focused on the entirety of the process, so growth analysis is basically analyzing growth and then, you now have to define what growth means for a startup or for the company you work at.

If you work for a company where the metrics that matter to them are ‘how many vendors signed up to the platform, and not necessarily how much the vendors are making. Then, as a growth analyst, what you would consider is the number of vendors signed up to your platform, where are they coming from? How can you get more of these vendors to sign up? Where are the most active vendors from? and other stuff like that. So, that’s how we look at what area of growth should be focused on. I work for Bundle Africa, a crypto company so I’m always looking at how many transactions, how much users trade daily and user counts, and numbers of signups.

What do you think about Fintech and its current evolving state?

N: Fintech has readily established and it is like one of the most concentrated aspects in the African tech space. But still, there’s still so much there is left to be done in Fintech in Nigeria and Africa at large. There are still many problems to solve. Recently, we saw Paystack’s exit at a whopping 200 million dollars and we also saw Sendway’s exit. That is like a huge boom for Africa. I think that these exits would increase foreign investments and nudge a lot of products to solve more complicated investing problems and this is exciting.

What aspect of the Fintech Ecosystem do you think needs an overhaul?

N: Overhaul is a strong word but erm I think that Fintech products need to challenge the banks more. With enough competition, we can challenge banks even further. A lot can be done to make banks become more tech-savvy and help bank the unbanked.

How do you think Escrow can be applicable to your sector?

N: As a crypto company, there is something called P2P where the buyer is trying to buy crypto and the seller is trying to sell. Escrow is very applicable here because there is the question of trust where both parties need to avoid fraudulent games but with Escrow, the middle man then serves to ensure transparency in the transaction so that both parties can trade knowing that nothing would go sideways.

Tell us a situation where you’ve needed Escrow or wished you had used Escrow.

N: I think it was when I ordered something online and I paid before delivery and then the order I got is not exactly what I wanted or what I saw in the picture online and this was really discouraging. The whole process of getting a refund was tiring. I pretty much just threw the product away and it was a waste of money. If I had used Escrow, I’d probably have canceled the order or stopped the money from going through and returned the goods without having so much back and forth.

What would you recommend for someone trying to get started with Growth Marketing?

N: I would recommend reading the basics, understanding the channels, what growth entails. Reading blogs, and articles. I’m currently organizing a growth marketing academy with some other prominent marketers in Nigeria and the 1st Cohort is currently ongoing. They should try and get into training like that or try and follow prominent growth marketers in Nigeria, Africa, and the world at large. They should just read up and find ways to apply this knowledge.