This article is part of Had I Known, Zikoko’s theme for September 2025, where we explore Nigerian stories of regret and the lessons learnt. Read more Had I Known stories here.
At just 22, Ikenna* had turned a simple idea: selling airtime and data online, into a business processing thousands of monthly transactions. But after losing nearly a million naira to failed developers and watching his app collapse, he was left with nothing but lessons and regret.
As told to Aisha Bello
I watched my telecoms business die on a Sunday morning in August 2025.
I didn’t even click a button; I simply let the domain subscription expire. One moment, my business existed online; the next, it was gone, swallowed by the internet. It was a mercy killing, a silent admission that I couldn’t chase stressed customers, broken code, and developers with excuses anymore. After years of fighting, it was over.
I felt like I’d lost a piece of myself. The business wasn’t just a side hustle; it was how I sustained myself through university, while trying to build something useful for my community, and it all started with a simple idea.
In 2020, the year I finished secondary school in Eastern Nigeria, I watched an awkward transition unfold. COVID had pushed everyone online and glued them to their phones. Yet, my neighbours still walked to corner kiosks to buy paper recharge cards, then laboriously typed long USSD codes just to load data.
This clunky process felt outdated to me, and that’s when the idea struck: what if there was a simpler, more digital way to buy airtime and data?
I started researching and discovered virtual telecom platforms—websites where you could buy and resell data bundles and airtime at cheaper rates. It felt like finding a secret tunnel to the future.
The business idea was simple: launch a virtual top-up service that lets people recharge, buy data, pay utility bills, and even renew DStv subscriptions, all from their phones. I was convinced I was stepping into a future that hadn’t reached my community yet.
The First Signs of Trouble
In the beginning, I was a small-time reseller.
I used an existing telecom website to sell airtime and data to my classmates and earned a small commission. By January 2022, I had saved enough to build my own platform. I reached out to an old teacher for guidance, and he referred me to a developer. That was where my problems started.
Every week, he’d devise a new excuse: “My laptop got stolen,” he’d say, or “My child is sick.” One week, he was “too busy.” I had given him ₦150,000; five months later, in May 2022, he still had nothing to show for it. He never refunded me, claiming the money had already gone into hosting and domains.
In July 2022, I found another developer through a Google search. He charged ₦120,000 for a basic website. It was up and running by September, handling airtime, data, and cable payments. Still, I needed an upgrade. People preferred using apps, so I asked him to build an Android app. This cost ₦200,000 and took five months to deliver.
We finally launched in March 2023.
The setup cost me about ₦400,000, which I’d saved from my allowance over the years and my initial reselling business. A friend gave me ₦50,000, and my aunt topped up the rest. It was a massive financial bet for me, and I was all in.
The Inner Workings of the Business
The business’s revenue model was simple and effective. It involved buying in bulk and selling at a discount.
Think of it this way: I was a middleman. I had to pay a big telecom reseller, almost like a wholesaler, to load my account with a bulk amount — say, ₦100,000 worth of airtime and data. This was my “stock.”
Customers would then use the app to fund their wallets with their debit cards. That money didn’t come to me right away; it went through payment companies like Paystack. They handled all the complicated stuff, and then, at the end of the business day, they sent me my earnings.
But here’s the key: when a customer bought a data plan for ₦5,000, the app took that money from their wallet, and then the equivalent data was deducted from my ₦100,000 stock. The catch was that I had bought that data at a wholesale, cheaper rate. So, instead of paying the full ₦5,000, it might have only cost me ₦4,500. The customer got a good deal, and I kept the ₦500 difference as profit.
It was a volume game. One transaction wasn’t much, but with hundreds every month, the small profits added up. This model kept customers coming back, and for the first time, the business felt like it was truly working.
The Peak of the Business
Things really started picking up after I invested in Facebook and Google advertising. Between August and October 2023, the app crossed 1,000 downloads. Out of that, only about 100 were active users, but they were the engine of my business.
We were pulling in about ₦180,000 to ₦200,000 monthly. Data was our biggest seller; cable TV payments picked up during football season or shows like Big Brother Naija.
At the peak, I had saved over ₦1 million in a little over a year. I was disciplined, too. Every month, I’d budget a portion for hosting and renewals, and another for pure savings. I was able to put aside ₦50,000 to ₦70,000 every month. The business sustained me through school, and I felt I was finally in control of my future.
The Beginning of the End
My biggest challenge wasn’t competition or sales; it was the people I trusted.
The first developer who built my mobile app disappeared on me. He had promised six months of free maintenance, but every little fix became a negotiation after that. A simple diagnostic could cost ₦10,000 to ₦20,000. Worse, no other developer wanted to touch his code. The system was his, and anyone else trying to work on it risked breaking everything.
On top of that, costs were rising. Hosting and domains were charged in dollars, so my bills went up every time the naira crashed. The market was also getting crowded. I was stretched thin between school and business. By the end of 2023, the app was riddled with problems: failed signups, broken wallet funding, and frustrated new users.
The developer stopped responding to my calls.
In January 2024, I decided to start over. I got a ₦200,000 government grant, added some savings, and found a new developer through a close friend. This time, I did things properly: a contract drafted by a lawyer and signed copies. The deal was to build a new website and Android and iOS apps, for ₦900,000. I paid the first instalment and planned the relaunch for March.
I even rebranded, bought T-shirts and caps, and prepared gifts for loyal customers.
But three months passed, and all he had to show was a landing page. He kept asking for the second instalment, claiming he needed to “pay his team.” I gave in. Five months later, nothing had changed. That was when I discovered he had been pirating another virtual top-up app and trying to pass it off as his own work. I pulled out immediately and demanded a refund.
Recovering that money was another nightmare. Out of ₦600,000 I had already paid, he promised to return ₦500,000. In the end, I had to involve my lawyer. With a court order, the bank could only claw back ₦300,000 from his account. The remaining ₦300,000 is still hanging today.
The Final Attempt and a Hard Lesson
Frustrated but not defeated, I tried again in October 2024. I added the ₦300,000 I recovered to another ₦300,000 from my savings and hired a third developer from a Facebook group. Barely a month in, he fell sick and went silent for weeks. He kept ghosting and resurfacing with new excuses. From October to March 2025, I only got another landing page. When I demanded a refund, they only returned half, promising to pay the balance over time.
Meanwhile, the old platform was still limping, making barely ₦30,000 a month compared to the ₦200,000 it once brought in. Network providers were introducing policies that made our work harder: removing cheap bundles, hiking prices, and setting daily limits on how much data we could resell. Hosting costs increased, competition grew tighter, and I was stretched thin. The frustration had eaten deep. Three developers, three failed attempts, millions lost, and countless promises broken. The business that once felt so promising was slipping through my fingers, and I had lost the zeal to keep chasing after developers.
Ultimately, I realised it was better to close down than frustrate myself and my users. Every morning, I awoke to complaints: wallets not reflecting, delayed subscriptions, and hanging payments.
These weren’t things I could fix on my own — they were deep technical issues. Nobody wants to chase their data or cable subscription; they just want it to work. Once customers experience friction two or three times, they move on.
By August 2025, my old mobile app was beyond salvage, so I let the domain expire instead of renewing it.
A Different Kind of Gain
Sometimes, I still think about the business’s potential. The money was good. It could have easily sustained me until I made it big, opened a walk-in store, and grown into something much larger. But I don’t consider it a total waste. I learned a lot, and that knowledge stays with me. What really limited me were developers and, to some extent, myself.
I’ve always been introverted and not very social. Growing up, I didn’t get many opportunities to travel, network, or meet people who could have helped. Maybe if I had been more exposed, I might have found the right people earlier and avoided some of the costly mistakes. Everyone talks about Lagos; that’s where things happen. Maybe if I had been there, it would’ve been different.
Today, I’m in my final year of medical school. I’m starting to save again. Maybe after graduation, I’ll try to learn coding and build something new, but this time, it will be on my own terms. Losing my business still hurts, but I carry the lessons with me. I learned that in business, as in life, the biggest risk isn’t failure, it’s trusting the wrong people.
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