Building Okpah: What Two Years Taught Me

Okpah Ltd is two years old. Here is what I know now that I wish I had known then.

The Market Is the Teacher

The most important thing I learned about building for the Ghanaian market specifically — and African markets broadly — is that your assumptions are almost certainly wrong. Not because you are bad at research, but because context is everything, and context is only available from the ground.

The ways people use mobile money in Ghana are not the same as the ways they use mobile money in Kenya. The trust dynamics are different. The competitive landscape is different. The regulatory environment is different. You cannot pattern-match from M-Pesa to everything else.

What Worked

Listening more than talking. Building in public — Ghanaian tech Twitter is small but highly engaged, and being transparent about what we were building created early advocates who became early users.

Also: not raising too early. We stayed lean, which forced us to be creative and meant we were not beholden to investors whose incentives were not perfectly aligned with ours.

What Did Not Work

Moving too slowly on partnerships. In markets where trust is built through relationships, the time you invest in partnerships — with telcos, with existing businesses, with community institutions — pays compounding returns. I underestimated this.

Also: hiring before I had clear enough processes. When you hire people into ambiguity without strong systems, you waste their potential and your time.

Where We Are Going

Okpah is now focused on oKadwuma — a jobs platform for the West African market. The problem we are solving: connecting skilled workers with employers in an environment where most hiring still happens through personal networks and informal word-of-mouth.

The opportunity is significant. The challenge is trust and behaviour change. Both are solvable.