Ajo.cash

The behaviour came first

Ajo.cash didn't begin with an attempt to invent a new way for people to save.

The behaviour already existed.

For generations, people have organised themselves into groups, contributed money and used collective saving as a way to achieve things that can be difficult to accomplish individually.

In Nigeria, one familiar expression of that behaviour is ajo.

The interesting question for us wasn't:

How do we convince people to start saving together?

They were already doing it.

The question was:

What can technology make better about a behaviour people already understand and trust?

WhatsApp before software

We started with WhatsApp.

It wasn't the final product, and we never expected it to be.

It was simply infrastructure that already existed, that people already understood, and that allowed us to operate the system without first spending months building dedicated software.

That mattered because it kept us close to the people using the system.

Instead of beginning with assumptions about how an ajo product should work, we could observe how people actually behaved.

We could learn from the system while operating it.

Real behaviour before dedicated technology

Over the following two years, members saved more than ₦1 billion through the system before we began building the dedicated Ajo.cash product.

That mattered to me for reasons beyond the number.

It demonstrated something I have come to believe strongly about building products:

Technology does not always have to create the behaviour. Sometimes its job is to understand an existing behaviour and make it work better.

By the time we began building dedicated technology, we weren't starting with an idea on a whiteboard.

We were building from behaviour we had already observed.

Don't digitise the culture away

There is a temptation when building technology around an existing offline or community behaviour to redesign everything according to how software companies think people should behave.

I think that can be a mistake.

Some of what might look inefficient from a purely technological perspective may be part of why the system works in the first place.

Trust matters.
Relationships matter.
Accountability matters.
Familiarity matters.

The goal shouldn't automatically be to remove those things.

The better question is what technology can improve while preserving the behaviour that made the system useful in the first place.

What Ajo.cash reinforced for me

Fitness Space taught me that a product can exist before the app.

Ajo.cash reinforced the lesson in a completely different industry.

One was health.

The other was money.

Both started close to people.

Both could operate before dedicated software existed.

And both allowed real behaviour to teach us what technology eventually needed to do.

That is increasingly how I think about product building:

Problem → People → Behaviour → Learning → Technology

Don't begin by asking what app you can build.

Begin by understanding what people are already trying to accomplish.

Sometimes the opportunity is to introduce entirely new behaviour.

But sometimes the behaviour is already there.

Your job is simply to notice it, understand it and build technology worthy of it.