How do you retain trust as you scale?

How do you build internally for trust and community as you scale? How do you make sure growth doesn’t depend on one person, one channel or one experiment while maintaining trust?

The first mistake a lot of brands make is that they just want to scale. It’s a mistake I’ve made myself. They want to scale and forget to actually build a community while scaling.

You’re at 5,000 or 6,000 users and you’re just saying, “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s keep building.” You’re acquiring customers, people are coming into the brand and using your product, but you’re not necessarily growing a community. Then you get to 100,000 users and realise, “Damn, we’ve not actually grown our community.”

One example I always like to use is Cowrywise. When they started, Razaq would sit in front of the screen. If somebody was trying to add their card and it failed on Paystack, he would call the person immediately. “Hi, my name is Razaq. I’m from Cowrywise. I noticed something happened with your card. Would you like us to assist?”

That eventually led to what we now call founder calls, where certain customers were put into WhatsApp groups. They became, in quotes, insiders of the brand. But it wasn’t dependent on Razaq alone. He documented the entire process and built a playbook anyone on the customer support team could use to replicate it.

That’s one thing I’ve realised: experiments and community don’t scale if you don’t start building the community early. The second thing is documentation. If there’s no playbook and Feranmi starts something, what happens when Feranmi leaves?

Is there a way to determine when people’s trust in your brand has broken, especially when it’s not obvious publicly?

There are a couple of ways. Say every week you sign up 100 people and 40 convert, and the minimum transaction value those customers make is around $100. If you’re still converting 40 people, but the minimum transaction value suddenly drops to something ridiculous like $5, it’s one of two things. Either your audience targeting has changed, or people are becoming sceptical of your product.

That recently happened to us with a feature we launched. There were glitches with the fee structure and how money left the app. Before we even called customers, I already knew there was a problem, because people weren’t sure what to expect at the end of the transaction.

The second signal is social listening. It lets you see when people mention the brand, and sometimes it’s not even a direct mention. Someone asks about digital cards and the comments say, “No, these guys have this problem.” It means nobody is really relying on the brand for positive reasons.

Beyond community, what separates fintech companies that keep acquiring users from companies that acquire users while actually retaining that trust?

Let me give you a simple answer: storytelling. What is going to separate one brand from another is the age-old art of storytelling. Cowbell didn’t necessarily have a community, but their storytelling was clear. The message was essentially: we know milk is expensive, but we want your children to enjoy it.

You see something similar with Wise. They talk about how other people hide their fees, and that narrative shows up in the entire product experience. If I send you money, I can show you exactly what the transaction is. They’re extremely transparent, and that narrative is what drives the brand.

Have you ever experienced a situation where trust was broken with a company you’ve worked with? How did you handle it?

Let me refer back to Cowrywise. In 2020, our trust broke with one of our biggest customers and advocates. Somebody had logged into her account, taken the money out, and deleted the withdrawal emails so she didn’t know. Then she tweeted that ₦2 million had disappeared from her account.

We made a very weird mistake, one I don’t think I can ever make again. In the middle of the crisis, we responded with a tweet focused on saying “money is safe in Cowrywise.” We defended Cowrywise first, and made it look like we didn’t care about her. People started attacking the brand.

Thankfully, our investors connected us to a PR company, and I learned one simple thing. Whenever there’s an issue of trust, don’t be too quick to issue a public statement. And if, after waiting, you realise something was your fault, take the blame, but take it in a smart way.

What do you think growth teams misunderstand about building trust, especially in a market like ours?

Everyone needs to go back to basics. Today, somebody launches a product and the next thing they’re doing is throwing influencers and popular faces behind it. People forget that Nigerians have a radar for this. If they see a lot of influencers talking about a new product, they’re thinking, “Wait, what’s going on here? Are you sure you’re not going to steal money from somewhere?”

Trust is gradual work. Sometimes it requires one-on-one engagement. My best case study is Paystack. When they came in, there was a lot of opacity around how payments worked. Paystack would write articles explaining how card payments worked. Not everybody read them, but the people who did became advocates who explained things to others.

I’m stupidly big on education. I believe trust comes from how well you can educate your customers, and you can never over-educate them. That’s why, even in design, there’s something called intentional friction. You intentionally make someone pause before completing a journey.

I always tell people: if Tosin had started Ladda before Cowrywise, she might have more users today. But even coming after PiggyVest, Cowrywise and Bamboo, she’s still a major force. Why? Because people trust her for what she has done and how she has taught. Thought leadership is how you build trust.

If a company is well known but people aren’t actually using it, does that show up in growth numbers?

It became a problem when our referral programmes weren’t moving as fast as they should, despite the rewards. It became a question of, “If I refer this to my friend and it crashes, what will I tell them?” The people transacting heavily were mostly people who knew me or the founders. That was a serious red flag. If people trust you, they use your product as a primary method. People were using us as a third choice.

So the founders and I started calling our top customers. “Hi, my name is Feranmi. I’m from Timon, just checking in.” And they’d say, “Oh wow, you called me!” Almost like clockwork, the following week transactions went up and they brought their friends. We even set up stands at the airport, so people could physically see us, pick up their cards, and know real people in Nigeria were running this product.