Selected work
Index · 2023 to 202601 Case file · Named client · Lagos, Nigeria
Pika
Pika's founder, Tony, had built a three-sided logistics and commerce platform connecting vendors, dispatch riders, and customers across Lagos. He had reached Antler's final stage, gone through YC's pitch process, and presented at Africa Startup Festival. Everyone gave him the same note: strong technical grasp, weak business case. People understood what Pika built. They could not tell you why it mattered to them.
The team was entirely technical, which meant Pika's internal language and its audience's language were two different dialects. Copy alone could not fix that. Fixing it meant working out what Pika actually was to a vendor, a rider, and an investor, since each needed a different answer to the same question.
I also had to choose the right founding story. Tony's instinct was a dramatic spike: two hundred messages in a single day after a product went viral. Memorable, but it describes an exception. The story that holds up daily is ordinary: a vendor confirming payments by hand, calling riders who do not answer, closing a day of sales she cannot fully account for. Ordinary problems convert better than dramatic ones, because more people recognise themselves inside them.
Fig·01 Before and after repositioning — the Pika messaging system
One core sentence anchored everything. Pika is the operating system for African commerce, a platform that runs your business even when you are not there. Every product detail became proof for that sentence instead of a competing claim.
From there, three separate messaging tracks. Vendors heard about time and trust. Riders heard about fair pay and route efficiency. Investors heard about market structure and the gap left open by the incumbents. A brand voice guide and a field sales script gave the whole team one consistent way to repeat all of it correctly.
Vendor signups grew 300% in the two months after launch, from 200 to 800. Past the number, Pika went from one founder explaining the product inconsistently across rooms, to a documented system any team member can use correctly, for the right audience, in language that the audience already understands.
A startup does not have a messaging problem until it tries to be one thing to everyone. Better words rarely solve that. Deciding, on paper, who the product is for and what each of them needs to hear is what solves it.
02 Case file · Under NDA · Africa
A fintech infrastructure company
The client builds core banking infrastructure. It sits under a fintech group that has processed over $7.5 billion, and it lets other fintechs launch global money products without building the plumbing themselves. The product is technical, and the buying decision is expensive, so the words around it matter as much as the code.
Three audiences needed to hear one story at once: engineers evaluating the platform, investors assessing the company, and new users encountering the brand for the first time.
Each needed a different entry point into the same product, but the site offered only one. Engineers left unconvinced, investors uncertain about scale, and newcomers unclear on what it did. One page, three audiences, none served.
Fig·02 Sterllo — the fintech infrastructure platform
Technical products often lead with depth, but that only serves people already engaged. I started with speed and consolidation, which founders care about first. The brochure opens on the pain of stitching together multiple vendors, not the system design.
From there, I added proof, uptime, coverage, and $7.5B in transaction volume. That supports engineers and investors once they continue reading. Interest first, evidence next.
Everything followed the same structure: benefits before features, numbers before explanation, and no competitor mentions. I built five core assets on this approach and defined copy rules for the design team to keep it consistent after handoff.
The company now meets all three audiences with one story instead of three half-stories. The newcomer understands what it is in a sentence. The engineer finds the proof a layer down. The investor finds the scale behind it, the $7.5 billion no longer buried in a footnote but doing the work it should.
The brand walked into its next chapter with a message that holds together, and a set of rules that keep it holding together without me in the room.
A technical product does not lose deals because it is weak. It loses them because the first person who reads about it cannot tell what it does before they give up. The work made the product legible to the three people who decide its future, in the order they each needed to hear it. The clarity is the asset now, and it keeps paying out on every page the company publishes.
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