If you watched Big brother Nigeria in 2020, we are sure that the “2020 na crypto way o” jingle lives rent-free in your head by now. As we all know, Patricia technologies sits at the helm of the Digital Assets niche in the Fintech industry in Africa.
Recently, Hanu Fejiro of Patricia sat down with Peace Itimi of FoundersConnect to discuss his bootstrapping journey with the largest cryptocurrency exchange in Africa.
Hanu Fejiro is one of a handful of people alive today who do not see limitations, popularly known for his “Do the most” mantra. Fejiro has been a shining example, carrying the torch of innovation high and proud.
In this interview, he narrated to Peace how he started what we all see today in a boys quarter apartment. Somewhere in the Lekki suburb of Lagos with only two staff members, and had to work throughout the Yuletide season all by himself, as his staff had to go home to their family.
The other lady didn’t come back. Fast forward to the new year, only one staff member returned from the holiday, Who is now the Chief Operations Officer overseeing the general running of Patricia today. Months later, we made some more money and hired two staff to help with the ever-increasing rate of transactions.
All our work was manual then, we were using Whatsapp and converting and paying and all that manually. Later on, we moved to Instagram, which proved to be a very wrong step. We got frustrated because we couldn’t even scale these platforms. We had tried building a website, but we couldn’t find a company that could understand it because it was a new technology and so they kept failing.
Circa 2019, Hanu’s friend helped put together a hackathon that had 12 developers and so the Patricia MVP was born. Months after the first version of the Patricia Mobile app was released in March 2020.
You may have also wondered why the Cryptocurrency Exchange is named Patricia. Well, according to Hanu the name reminds him of his favorite people; who are namely his Mom and his Grandfather.
Hanu’s tango with digital assets began when he had received BTC from his Uncle who lived in London back in 2015. He needed a place to exchange his BTC for fiat but found none. Realizing that there must be others like him across Nigeria who have this problem. Hanu decided he’d someday solve this consumer pain point. So, he put
Speaking on how he has been able to build himself such a formidable team and a great product. Hanu stressed the importance of finding talents who are passionate about their crafts and making believers out of them. By doing so, they can and will fly your flag to the ends of the earth.
Also, the ripple effect of having believers in your corner as a tech startup is that they are just about as crazy as you. Every wild idea and seemingly nuts project is backed up by their genius and more often gets to see the light of day than not.
These believers have gone on to lead the ever-growing teams of talented minds whose collaborative efforts have put Patricia on the map.
When asked how he’s managed to stay at the top despite the hurdles he’s had to scale. Fejiro Hanu replied saying, the plan might change many times more than I can count. But my goal is my goal, it does not change.
