How I Bootstrapped A Fintech to 360k Users and $6.7k MRR without Raising A Single Dollar

We were speaking with Raphael Prince Obodugo, engineer, founder, and one of the quietly determined builders reshaping fintech across Africa, when he leaned back and said something that stopped us mid-note: “We never raised. Not a single dollar.” So we asked him to tell us everything.

Honestly, a bit of both, but it quickly became a philosophy. When I started MySub, I wasn’t thinking about pitch decks. I was thinking about a real problem: West Africans pooling money for rent, subscriptions, travel, school fees, doing it over WhatsApp groups and spreadsheets, with zero structure and a lot of trust. I built the first version to solve that. Revenue followed the solution, not the other way around.

Walk us through what MySub actually was.

A shared-payment infrastructure for everyday life in West Africa. You want to split a Netflix subscription with four friends, pool rent with your flatmates, or contribute toward someone’s school fees, MySub handled all of it cleanly and accountably. No awkward “you owe me” conversations. No lost contributions. It worked because the behavior already existed; we just formalized it.

360,000 users is not a small number. How did you get there without a marketing budget?

Community embedding. We went where the conversations were already happening, digital communities, student groups, young professional networks, and made MySub the obvious tool for what they were already doing. Word of mouth did the heavy lifting because the product solved a felt pain. When something genuinely makes your life easier, you tell people. That’s the only growth hack that actually works.

$6.7K MRR bootstrapped is respectable. How did you structure the business to stay profitable?

Ruthless prioritization. I wasn’t building features to impress investors. Every decision had to either retain users or generate revenue. We ran a hybrid US-Nigeria entity, which meant navigating two regulatory environments simultaneously, compliance wasn’t optional, it was existential. I learned early that in fintech, trust is the product. If users don’t trust that their money is safe, nothing else matters.

You got into Startup Lisboa — Portugal’s flagship incubator. How did that happen?

MySub caught their attention because the model was genuinely novel. Shared-economy fintech for West Africa wasn’t a crowded space, we were among the earliest. Startup Lisboa validated that what we were building had international relevance beyond our home market. It also opened doors to a European perspective on scaling, compliance, and product thinking that sharpened how I ran the business going forward.

What was the hardest part of building without outside capital?

The silence. When you raise, there’s a structure, investors, board calls, milestones with accountability baked in. Bootstrapping means you’re making every hard call alone, often without validation. There were weeks where growth plateaued and I had nobody to tell me whether to pivot or persist. You develop a deep internal compass, but it costs something to build it.

Why did you eventually transition out?

Because I’d done what I set out to do. The foundation was profitable, the operations were structured, and the product had proven its model. I didn’t want to scale for the sake of scaling. Avae was already forming in my mind, a bigger, bolder idea, and I owed it to a founder who was fully present. Walking away from something healthy you built is harder than most people think. But it was the right call.

What’s the one thing every first-time fintech founder gets wrong?

Building for investors instead of users. The metrics that impress a pitch room, user count, market size, TAM, are not the same metrics that keep a business alive. I grew to 360K users because I stayed obsessive about the person actually opening the app. What were they confused by? What made them come back? What made them tell a friend? That loop, relentlessly tightened, is what bootstrapping actually is.

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Raphael Prince Obodugo is the Founder of Avae and Web Engineering Lead at Derayah Finance. MySub remains one of West Africa’s earliest and most organically grown sharing-economy fintechs.