In its first year, PiggyVest recorded ₦21 million in savings. That figure is worth pausing on, not because it is large by today’s standards, but because of what it represents.

What is now a platform trusted by millions of Nigerians has processed billions of naira in savings and investments. Yet it began with ₦21 million and a product built in less than a month. The path between those two points was shaped by ten failed businesses, late nights in cities where the founders did not know anyone, and a team that stayed together through challenges that would have broken many partnerships.

Ayo Akinola, one of PiggyVest’s co-founders, shared the story on Living Boldly with Queen Martins. The account he gave was less polished than the version often repeated about PiggyVest’s beginnings, but it was also more revealing.

The company’s first product was not the result of months of careful planning and market research. The founders spotted an opportunity, moved quickly, and launched an MVP within weeks. That pace is less common in Nigerian fintech than many founders admit, where there is often a temptation to wait until a product feels perfect before showing it to users.

PiggyVest did not wait. The team launched what it had, observed how people used it, and built from there. The ₦21 million saved in the first year was the market’s first response. It showed that people would try the service, but it did not yet mean they trusted it.

Trust, as Akinola’s story makes clear, could not simply be built into the software. In Nigeria, where fraud stories are common enough to make people cautious, convincing users to hand their savings to a new app required more than technical functionality. It required the founders to show up as real people.

Akinola said the founders made themselves accessible in a way that went beyond a customer service email address or a corporate contact form. Users could reach the people behind the brand directly. They were not dealing only with a logo and a bank account number asking for their money.

That human connection mattered as much as any feature the product offered. Nigerians were not only looking for a better savings app; they were looking for one they could trust. In that context, trust came from human proximity as much as from product reliability.

The turning point in PiggyVest’s trajectory was not a funding round or a product decision. It was a road trip.

The founders introduced a series of Open House events in different Nigerian cities, where they met users in person, listened to complaints, collected suggestions, and learned how people were actually using the platform. Akinola said the information gathered at those sessions was instrumental, serving not just as useful feedback but as a blueprint for future product features.

In hindsight, the approach seems obvious, but few startups actually do it. Many companies wait for feedback to come through reviews and support tickets. PiggyVest did the opposite. The founders traveled across the country to sit down with the people whose money was on the platform.

What they gained was not just product data, but a deeper understanding of users. That kind of insight makes a product feel designed for real people rather than for an abstract target audience, and in a market where financial trust is hard won, that closeness can matter as much as the product itself.

Before PiggyVest, Ayo Akinola and his co-founders had failed at more than ten business ventures together. That detail is often treated like a familiar footnote, but it is central to the story.

Most founding teams that fail once eventually split up. Blame grows, trust weakens, and people go their separate ways. PiggyVest’s founders, by contrast, failed more than ten times and stayed together. Akinola described their relationship as a kind of shared trauma, and the phrase carries weight. After that many setbacks with the same people, a team learns things that no accelerator program can teach you.

They learn how each person responds under pressure. They learn who stays calm, who does the hard work, and who can be trusted when things begin to fall apart.

Their skill sets were also complementary. The team covered numbers, operations, marketing, and design, giving the business broad internal coverage without unnecessary overlap. It is the kind of founding team structure investors often say they want, but PiggyVest built it the hard way, through repeated failure.

Akinola’s own path included another form of rejection. He was suspended and later expelled from Covenant University. The details of that experience matter less than what it signified: a young man being told, in institutional terms, that he did not fit. The way he later built PiggyVest reflected that experience, combining determination with a willingness to learn from failure and keep moving.

PiggyVest’s success is often told as a story of vision: the founders saw that Nigerians needed a better way to save, and they built it. That version is cleaner, but it leaves out the more useful details.

The real story is one of iteration. The product was built quickly and changed often. The team listened more than it spoke. The business grew not because it had all the answers at launch, but because it kept asking the right questions afterward. Akinola has been explicit about that approach, saying he has become less emotional about business ideas, more data-driven, and more willing to fail fast when something is not working.

For a founder who has more than ten failed ventures behind him, that is not just advice. It is autobiography.

PiggyVest processed ₦21 million in savings in its first year. That number was never the point. The point was that people showed up, and the team was humble enough to understand why, then disciplined enough to keep building until the answer became clear.