Hello! Who are you and what product are you building?
My name is Jude Obiejesi. We're building Sendbit, a payment application that helps freelancers receive payments from their clients seamlessly.
How did you come up with the idea for this product, and what problem were you aiming to solve?
Sendbit started as an idea when I was struggling with payments. I used to work with a few Austrian companies, and most of the time, we had issues with receiving payments. I had to rely on some of my friends and, especially, my co-founder to help me receive the payment and send it to me in Nigeria. It began as a solution to solve that problem for myself, but we later saw an opportunity to commercialize it. That’s how Sendbit came to be.
Give us a step-by-step process on how you built the first version of your product.
At first, it was just a landing page. I had a lot of bloggers reaching out to me. That was in 2023—they were trying to receive guest post payments through their PayPal accounts. So, I designed a landing page where they could fill out a form when they reached us, and I would help them create a PayPal invoice. By this time, we had already registered the company in the U.S. through my friend, so I could generate invoices for them.
As time went on, we started automating everything happening on that landing page. That was the point where we began building the system, and that’s how we got here.
We weren’t too particular about technology choices because I’m more of a front-end person, and my CTO is more of a back-end person. He’s a software tester at a very renowned software company in the U.S. So, we thought, let’s just use what we know to build this application, right?
The frontend was built with Vue because I juggle between Vue and React all the time. He’s a very good PHP guy—he’s been doing it since school, way back in 2017, 2018. So, he’s good at it. We didn’t need to stress over learning new technologies; we just focused on building the system with what we knew.
The reason we automated everything was the delays. Most times, when someone filled out the form, I might be busy and unable to create the invoice that day. That led to people constantly reaching out, following up, and so on. Eventually, I realized this wasn’t sustainable, so we built a system where someone at the back could generate the invoice for them automatically.
How did you launch the product?
First, it was just that I had a few followers on Facebook. After the first automated software, we built the app first—the web version is still not functioning properly.
So, I made a post on my Facebook page explaining what Sendbit was all about, and a lot of people responded. Since many of my followers are freelancers, software developers, and bloggers, they were really interested and started signing up. I think, on that single day, we got about 200 or 300 installs just from the Facebook post. That was where the whole magic happened.
How did you land your first customers?
The first user was actually Francis Okpara, who is like a brother to me—he’s my cousin. He saw the post, and since he’s a big-time blogger who writes about travel, education, scholarships, and similar topics, he signed up right away. Most of the time, people abroad send him publications, so he needed a way to receive payments. I think he was the very first person to sign up that day. He created two PayPal invoices for $150, which became the first transaction we ever had on Sendbit.
After that, we started seeing more people creating invoices. At first, we only had PayPal invoices because that was the main problem I was addressing. But as time went on, I noticed that people also wanted to create other types of invoices, not just PayPal. So, we started adding support for more invoice types.
That first transaction was a big moment. After signing up, Francis was still asking me a lot of questions—things like, how does this work, how does that go? I remember we had a long conversation on the phone that day, where he asked about the products I used to build Sendbit. And in the end, he created that $150 invoice, marking the first transaction on the platform.
How have you grown your business so far?
Every single day is still a journey. At some point, we faced a lot of technical issues on Sendbit because it wasn’t something we were used to. We experienced some downtimes and other challenges, so we had to analyze our issues, learn more, and improve Sendbit.
At one point, we paid micro-influencers to create videos and post them on social media. We also started running a few ads—not big ones, just awareness ads. That’s how we’ve been growing over the past year, bit by bit, continuously adding new features. Every day, we ask ourselves: What will be more helpful for freelancers?
There was a time when we included crypto invoices, but due to the crypto regulations in Nigeria, we had to remove that feature. I didn’t want to deal with those issues at that time. However, we hope to bring it back in the future, maybe in a more reinvented way that avoids any complications.
Give us a breakdown of your transaction volume and financials
We have already processed over $70,000.
For the first month, we processed about $3,000, because at this point, people were still not sure if it was going to work for them.
The third month, it was about $5,000. I started believing that, okay, this is something interesting. But the first month, the transaction volume wasn't that so big, because it was just still lunch, people just signed up.
Today, we are seeing more transactions going through the purchase of airtime and data. But at the first three months, most of the transactions happened with the invoicing, and we processed more than $25,000 within that space of those first six months.
What does the future look like?
We are going to look out for every freelancer. We will try to expand more into other African nations, especially Ghana, because Ghana is a country I have a strong connection with.
Sendbit plans to expand to Ghana and become the go-to platform for freelancers when they need to receive payments, make payments online, or carry out any transaction. This is where every freelancer, every digital nomad, will come to. That’s the plan for us.
Three most important things you have learned that have been helpful to you since launching this product?
The first thing is patience. I like my things done as quickly as possible. Like, you know, go now, now, now, now. While on Sendbit, I understood that sometimes I just have to take it one step at a time because most times when I take decisions so rationally and so fast, like the way it’s coming, I end up burning my hands, you know, and my fingers. So, I just learned patience with Sendbit, you know, take things slowly, slowly.
The second one is resilience. It taught me how to restart. As I said, this interview might not bring every single thing that has happened on Sendbit forward. There were a lot of times I thought about closing it up, right? Because of the problems that came with it. At some points, we had problems with chargebacks and all the rest of them. But then it taught me resilience. I kept on pushing, we withstood all those problems and continued pushing through. And all thanks to my co-founder, he has been my friend forever. He has always known how to push me for more.
The third is tolerance, learning how to relate to people. While I was learning this, I was doing the customer support for Sendbit. At some point, you just feel like giving somebody a blow because of something. And then you just be like, oh God, okay. And then you just have to talk so nicely. Sometimes the email comes so bad. When you read it, you feel that it is very insulting and condescending, but then you have to answer so politely. It’s not easy.
Also, it has taught me about doing business here in Nigeria and how to relate to people. This is something I had never seen or noticed before. In the past, I just used other people’s apps, but now, with my own app, I’ve learned a lot. In the first three or four months, I was also doing customer support, so I saw a lot of different things. Sometimes users are at fault, right? Maybe they are trying to log in, and where they used a capital “A,” they are now using a small “a.” The system is clearly telling them not to use a capital letter, but they don’t read it, and now they think it’s an error. They message customer support, and when you ask them, “Okay, show me what’s on your screen,” they show you, and you’re like, “It’s right here.” So it has taught me how to guide people and be patient.
I wore different hats in the first four or five months of Sendbit. I designed some of the flyers on Canva, monitored social media, and checked what was happening on Twitter, Facebook, and everywhere. Every single day, we were also dealing with some bugs. Since I was using the app myself, I experienced the issues firsthand, and we fixed them as they happened. It was really a different experience for me—doing marketing, talking to users, handling everything.
Sendbit was a great phase for me because I had to wear so many hats. I had to post on my personal pages, design flyers with Canva, check what was happening on social media, and convince some of my friends to help make posts. Some of them are freelancers, like Solomon, who is well-known on Twitter for backend coding. He used the invoicing feature at some point, so I had to convince him, “Hey, make a post.” I was monitoring everything, also being the marketer, designing the product flow, and figuring out what should happen next.
I was never sure I was good at marketing, but when I found myself pitching TechieBytes to a group of people, I discovered a part of me I never knew existed.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to build their own product or already started building?
New people trying to build something should just embrace the fact that it’s going to be tough. It’s not as shiny as it is in their heads. When I first had the idea of Sendbit, I thought that once we automated it, everything would be easy—just running on autopilot. But that wasn’t the case. There were a lot of difficulties—dealing with scammers, closing loopholes, and many other unexpected challenges. So for those trying to build, they need to understand that it’s going to be difficult. They’ll have to deal with all sorts of issues, including managing customers. There’s a lot involved, and they have to embrace those challenges. If they claim they’re solving a problem, they need to accept that solving problems doesn’t come cheap. It requires a lot of effort and dedication to actually make it work. Solving a problem is not easy.
And then, building in Nigeria—you need to understand that Nigerians are a different breed. I’ve been fortunate to witness a lot of things happening on Sendbit, and I can confidently say Nigerians are unique. If you’re launching anything for the Nigerian market, you need to be extra careful because Nigerians operate differently.
What do I mean by that?
Now, this is me being positive while hoping the market improves. Nigerians don’t always have the patience to read what you are trying to say. Whatever they have in their heads about how something should work is how they expect it to work. If they expect a feature to be on the left and it’s on the right, that’s a problem. Nigerians will complain about it.
For example, if you tell a Nigerian, “Upload your statement of account,” and that’s clearly written in the description, they might go ahead and upload their NEPA bill instead. And even when the system keeps rejecting it, they might still keep uploading the same picture over and over again, expecting a different result.
So when you’re building for Nigeria, you have to keep an open mind. Nigerians will always try to find loopholes, to see if they can somehow game the system. I’ve seen a lot of things happen on Sendbit, and sometimes you just have to laugh, wondering what the person was even trying to do.
There’s a funny example that happened to a friend of mine in 2018. A lady was trying to access her account but had forgotten her password. He told her, “Open the website now and click on ‘Forgot Password.’” She replied, “I told you I forgot my password, why are you asking me to click on ‘Forgot Password’?”
It’s funny, but these are some of the realities that builders face in the country.
Where can we go to learn more?
Our website is mysendbit.com. We're also working on bringing everything available on the mobile app to the website while making it more secure.
The web-based version is currently in development, and since we have a very small team, it’s going to take a bit longer than expected.
You can find us on social media:
Instagram: @mysendbit
Facebook: @sendbit
LinkedIn: @sendbit-app
X (Twitter): @mysendbit
So, it’s either @sendbit or @mysendbit on all platforms. That’s where you can reach us.
Our website is a great resource—whether it’s our blog or guides on creating invoices, everything is right there.
In a few months, people will be able to do on the website everything they currently do on the app.