If you ask Toheeb Popoola what he does, he will not give the one-word answer many people expect.

“I like to just call myself a creative,” he says.

Popoola traces that identity back to childhood, when his parents wanted him to become an engineer.

“That was when I started asking, ‘Why should I study this? Why should I become an engineer?’”

After secondary school, he applied to study Mass Communication at the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) in 2012 but was not admitted. He tried again the following year, but when that effort also failed, he decided not to delay his education any longer. He accepted admission to study Business Management at the same university.

Before he could begin, however, financial realities pushed him in another direction. As his family’s situation worsened, earning an income became just as important as pursuing a university degree.

Around that time, his father returned home with a laptop that had Adobe Photoshop 7.0 installed, unaware that it would shape his son’s career.

Curious, Popoola says he searched online to find out what Photoshop was, then began teaching himself through trial and error. Internet access was limited and tutorials were scarce, but his father encouraged his growing interest by bringing home other creative software, including Cinema 4D and 3ds Max. As he experimented with motion design, he discovered something he had not expected: a sense of purpose.

“I think this was where I went from zero to 90,” he says. “I realised I want to be solving problems.”

By November 2013, the family’s financial pressure had become impossible to ignore. When a friend working at e-commerce platform Jumia could not confirm whether the company was hiring, Popoola searched online for the email address of its design lead and sent a cold email.

“I sent him an email telling him, ‘I can do this and that. I would like to work with you guys,’” he says.

He expected no response, but that same evening he received a reply inviting him to interview the next morning. He travelled to Lekki, a commercial and residential district in Lagos, where the interview ended with an immediate job offer.

In November 2013, Popoola joined Jumia in his first professional design role. He enjoyed the work, but quickly realised the salary would not be enough to sustain him.

“I wasn’t there to have fun,” he says. “I was there to work and make money.”

Around the same period, Popoola says he feared he would lose his job after his manager warned that either he or a struggling colleague whose workload he had been helping manage would be laid off.

Before his manager announced who would be leaving, he says he received a phone call from digital pay-TV company Montage Cable TV, which was looking for a 3D animator. He was invited to interview immediately.

At the interview, he says he used Cinema 4D, which he had taught himself, to recreate a tutorial he had studied the previous week.

“They were quite shocked,” he recalls. “They were like, ‘We’re going to hire this boy.’”

He says the company offered him a monthly salary of ₦150,000 ($110), more than double what he was earning at Jumia.

“In my mind, I was screaming,” Popoola says. “But I smiled and said, ‘Let’s make it ₦200,000 ($147)’”

The company declined his counteroffer but assured him it would support him as he continued his education. He accepted the offer.

Rather than wait for Jumia to announce who would be laid off, he resumed work at Montage. Looking back, he says he wishes he had handled his departure differently.

“It was my first time resigning,” Popoola says. “I don’t think I handled that very well. I should have done better.”

At Montage, Popoola became the company’s first designer, building its visual identity from the ground up while sharpening his skills in 3D design and visual effects.

“It was a really nice time for someone like me that liked to experiment,” he says. “I had a computer that was really fast, so I became really good at 3D.”

Using his first salary from Montage, Popoola says he was finally able to pay the fees for the Business Management admission he had secured earlier and enrolled at university in 2014, graduating in 2018.

Finding a place in advertising

Outside work, Popoola spent much of his free time creating personal projects and sharing them on Facebook. One of those posts caught the attention of the creative director at Centre Spread, a Lagos-based advertising agency, and it led to a job offer.

“I was told I would be the digital executive. The word ‘executive’ to me then was like, ah, something very big. So I was so excited,” Popoola recalls.

Centre Spread ushered Popoola into the advertising industry, where he says he worked on campaigns for brands including Kia Motors Nigeria and earned a reputation as the “Pitch Doctor.”

“I was in charge of pitching. That was how I slowly started building this whole ‘Pitch Doctor’ name. Anytime we wanted to win a new account, they would say, ‘Let’s bring this guy in.’ I would jump on it, do my magic, and then go back to my normal work,” he says.

Popoola says he first applied to X3M Ideas, a Nigerian creative agency, while he was still at Montage Cable TV but was unsuccessful. After leaving Centre Spread, he applied again and joined the agency, which he had long admired, in September 2015.

“X3M was where I sharpened my design and thinking skills,” Popoola says. “I had to step up my design game and my thinking game.”

At X3M, he worked on campaigns for brands across a range of industries, including Dangote, Chivas Regal, Jameson and Martell, further cementing his reputation as the Pitch Doctor.

“I wanted to do work that would compete with the guys outside Nigeria. I didn’t want to just do design,” he says.

In 2017, Popoola joined DDB Lagos, the Nigerian affiliate of DDB Worldwide, a global advertising network. Two years later, he moved to Insights Publicis, a Nigerian marketing communications agency.

At Insights, his approach evolved again. He began focusing less on visuals and more on solving business problems, eventually rising to Head of Creative Digital.

“I got to that point because some of the people at the top saw that my way of thinking was different,” Popoola says.

But leading a department at a relatively young age came with resistance from some colleagues, and the pressure eventually took its toll.

“I could not just cope anymore. Everything was affecting me, and it was affecting my work as well,” he says.

He resigned in 2021, ending his advertising career and setting the stage for his transition into product design.

From pixels to product

Popoola joined crypto startup Vibra as its founding designer, working across both the company’s brand and product functions.

“I knew for a fact that I always wanted to solve problems,” Popoola says. “But joining that company shifted my thinking. There was a much better way to solve problems.”

After about a year at Vibra, another opportunity emerged. A mentor he had known since around 2011 reached out after seeing one of his LinkedIn posts. He was building a business-to-business (B2B) fintech startup called Deposits Inc. and wanted Popoola to join the team.

The interview exposed a gap in Popoola’s understanding of product design. Until then, he had worked primarily on business-to-consumer (B2C) products. When his mentor asked him to explain what Deposits Inc. did, his answer missed the mark.

“He was like, ‘No, that’s not what we do. This is B2B. It’s not B2C,’” Popoola recalls.

He joined Deposits Inc. as both a brand and product designer. The role also aligned with another goal he had been pursuing: gaining international experience while preparing to relocate abroad.

“I knew having a US fintech on my CV would open more doors,” he says.

More importantly, Deposits changed how he approached product design.

“I remember my boss saying, ‘It’s your product. What do you think will make it easier for users?’”

That level of trust changed his perspective. “If I think about products today, a lot of what I know about user flows and product design came from Deposits,” he says.

By September 2023, Popoola had achieved another long-held goal: relocating to the United Kingdom to pursue a master’s degree. The following year, he joined cryptocurrency exchange Bybit, where he spent the next two years.

Looking back, Popoola says his move into product design was less the result of careful planning than a series of opportunities that gradually reshaped his career.

“It wasn’t like I wanted to enter a product,” he says. “I moved from Insights to the crypto company, then from there to the US fintech company. It was at that point that I started doing more product work.”

Discovering AI and building Trackii

At Bybit, Popoola found a company that encouraged experimentation.

“Bybit was a very forward-thinking company,” Popoola says. “They didn’t mind spending the money. They were like, ‘You guys, any AI platform you want to use, take it, go and learn it.’”

He initially turned to artificial intelligence to improve his design workflow. But after discovering Claude Code, he realised it could do much more than streamline design — it could help him build products.

For years, Popoola had wanted to create products of his own. The challenge was never a lack of ideas. It was execution. Building software meant finding engineers or paying developers, barriers that often left his ideas on the drawing board.

AI changed that.

“I knew what I wanted, and I told AI to write the code for me,” Popoola says.

Earlier in his career, Popoola says he juggled multiple income streams and often struggled to track where his money was going or identify which jobs contributed most to his earnings.

That experience inspired Trackii, an AI-powered personal finance app designed for freelancers, gig workers and anyone earning from multiple sources.

Rather than connecting directly to users’ bank accounts, Trackii allows them to log income and expenses manually while Cheddar, its AI assistant, analyses spending patterns and provides personalised financial insights.

Before launching Trackii, Popoola became one of its earliest users.

One morning, after noticing that his bank balance had fallen unexpectedly, he reviewed his records and discovered an Apple subscription that had been charging him every week.

“That just solidified for me that this was actually going to help people,” he says.

Building Trackii taught him lessons that none of the companies he had worked for could.

“The groundwork just has to be solid,” Popoola says. “Push it out, get feedback from people and keep making changes as you go.”

Today, Popoola is focused on growing Trackii while exploring other products he hopes to build for Africans, starting with Nigerians.

After a career spanning design, advertising and product design, Popoola wants to be remembered for something much simpler.

“I want to be remembered as someone who found joy in solving problems. Someone who solved problems and never ran away from them.”