“We had no clear path about how this was going to turn out”: Day 1-1000 of Blaaiz

Two years ago, Ifelade Ayodele began his mornings glued to the app store. He refreshed the dashboard, checking how many people had downloaded Blaaiz, the cross-border payments startup he had launched in 2023, since he last looked. Blaaiz had about 500 users at the time, but Ayodele would tell you that he knew most of them by their first name.
Today, Ayodele says he no longer monitors app downloads. The customers he keeps tabs on are banks, fintechs, payment companies, and financial institutions, integrating the payment infrastructure he built.
To understand how he switched from building a consumer-facing app to a payment infrastructure, you have to go back further than Blaaiz’s first ...