Quick Fire 🔥 with Semiloore Akoni

Semiloore Akoni is a growth and product marketing leader focused on consumer technology, fintech, and digital commerce across Africa. With over a decade of experience in marketing and more than seven years in tech, he has built and scaled products across marketplaces, payments, and platform ecosystems. His work centres on user acquisition, activation, and retention, with a strong emphasis on solving adoption challenges and turning product value into clear, scalable growth channels.

He previously led marketing at Hytch Africa, then headed marketing at Goshiip, and served as Marketing Officer at Coast Group, where he worked across a suite of products spanning SaaS, fintech, and e-commerce. He has also worked with a US-based event startup, Coco Cabana, among other ventures. Currently, he works on commerce and financial infrastructure products, focused on reducing onboarding friction, improving conversion, and driving sustainable revenue growth through data-driven experimentation and a deep understanding of user behaviour in African markets.

• Explain what you do to a 5-year-old.

I help shop-owners find the right people who actually need what they are selling. Then I make it very easy for those people to try the product for the first time. After that, I make sure they like it enough to keep coming back, and even tell their friends about it. It is about helping them get the right customers who see value quickly and stay.

• What is one growth belief you hold that most marketers around you would disagree with?

Most people in growth and marketing believe retention is something you fix later. They think that once users sign up, you can bring them back with emails, notifications, or discounts.

That thinking is flawed. Retention is already decided before the user signs up.

If someone joins because of hype, a giveaway, or a discount, they are not there for the product. They are there for the incentive. The moment that the incentive disappears, they leave. No lifecycle strategy fixes that.

But if someone joins because the product solves a real problem they have, retention becomes natural. You are not convincing them to come back. You are fitting into something they already need.

The same mistake appears in localisation. Many companies translate words. They do not translate behaviour to suit the country in which they operate.

They assume users in different markets think the same way, respond to the same triggers, and trust the same systems. That is not true. Real growth comes from understanding how people actually behave in that market, how they spend, how they trust, how they decide.

If you get that wrong at acquisition, everything that comes after is damage control.

• In your last role, what is the smallest experiment that unlocked the biggest revenue or retention lift?

I stopped looking at sign-ups as a measure of success.

Rather, we asked a more precise question: how long does it take a new user to get value for the first time?

We defined value as the first successful transaction. Then we measured the gap between signing up and that moment.

That gap was where the problem lived.

We made a decision. Anything that does not help the user reach that first transaction immediately is either removed or delayed. I didn’t do any redesign or add new features; we just made it our core obsession to push users to unlock value fast.

Steps that felt important internally but did not contribute to the first action were pushed forward. The flow was reordered to guide the user straight to the value. It stripped out friction. 

More users completed their first transaction within their first session. Product activation climbed from 1.6% to 3.4% in three months, with around 300,000 monthly website visits. Retention improved without us touching retention tactics because users had a reason to keep coming back.

• Tell us about one “failed” growth bet you would still make again tomorrow, and why.

We tried to grow a pooled savings platform by going directly into offline markets.

For us, it made perfect sense; pooled savings already existed there (ajo/esusu). Trust made it easier for pooled savings to travel. 

So we went in physically. We worked with market leaders. We used field agents, set up kiosks, and helped people transition from manual savings groups to a digital system.

Behaviourally and strategically, it made sense when we kicked off. But financially, it broke our business.

The cost of acquiring each user became too high. Field operations, coordination, physical presence, and onboarding support stacked up quickly. For a startup, the model was not sustainable.

When we figured this out, we stopped targeting individuals and shifted to targeting the administrators of these savings groups. One administrator controls multiple users. Acquire one admin, and you acquire ten users. If that admin runs multiple groups, that could mean thirty users from a single acquisition. We used leverage.

The initial approach looked like a failure, but it revealed the correct distribution layer. If I were to do it all over again, I would still go into that market again, and use the same leverage.

• What is one metric African founders obsess over that you think is mostly a distraction?

Downloads feel like progress, but they are not. They tell you how many people showed interest for a moment. They do not tell you if anyone actually used the product in a meaningful way. A product can have thousands of downloads and still be failing silently.

How many users reach a meaningful first action, how quickly they get there, and how many come back to repeat that action?

If those numbers are weak, growth is an illusion. You are measuring attention, not value.

• If you had a magic wand to remove one user friction in African online payments for e-commerce, what exactly would disappear from the checkout flow?

Right now, the payment process breaks at the exact moment of intent. A user decides to pay, then gets pushed into multiple steps: one-time password (OTP) codes, redirects, switching apps, and waiting for confirmation.

Each step introduces doubt and creates an opportunity to drop off. In environments where network stability is not guaranteed, this becomes even worse. If I had a wand, I’d fix that because the gap between intent and completion is where a significant amount of revenue can be lost.