Crypto is an unforgiving market. Low barriers to entry, fierce competition, and no room for campaigns that look good but deliver nothing. It is the kind of environment that either sharpens your instincts or exposes you quickly. Paul’s instincts got sharper. It is also a market with foreign giants like ByBit, Binance, OKX, MEXC, Luno, etc., as well as heavily backed local competitors like Quidax and Busha.
Paul has watched a pattern play out too often in the Nigerian startup ecosystem. A company launches a campaign. It goes viral. The numbers look incredible… anywhere from 5 million views, 10 million impressions, endless shares. Then the conversion report comes in. Ten new users. Maybe twenty.
“It is very possible to get 5 million views and struggle to get 10 new active users,” Paul says. “We have seen many cases like that.”
He would know, because as Head of Marketing at Dantown, one of Nigeria’s leading crypto exchanges — a fully bootstrapped operation, Paul Ugochukwu Obere competed against well-funded rivals in one of the most cutthroat markets in tech and still pulled multiple 8-figure dollars in annual transaction volume. The company was a Gold Sponsor of #Moonshot2025 — the biggest tech event in Africa, alongside other crypto giants like Luno and Blockchain.com.
He joined as a Growth Marketing Manager in 2023 before his promotion in April 2025, and what he learned about growing a product with limited resources and no room for wasted spend has shaped everything he thinks about marketing today.
The Problem with Chasing Virality
Paul’s central argument will make so many Nigerian startup marketers uncomfortable. It is, “except the campaign goal is awareness, virality sometimes contributes nothing to the bottom line.”
“One of the mistakes I see is startups wanting to go viral and be popular,” he says. “The logic is — if we become popular, more people will know us and more people will use our product. Which is kind of fair if you think about it. But you need to remember you are a fairly new startup with limited resources, and people do not just switch based on popularity if they are already active users of other products.”
The issue is not that awareness is worthless. It is that, for a resource-constrained startup, awareness without conversion is an expensive distraction. Every naira and every hour spent engineering virality is a naira and an hour not spent finding and convincing the specific people most likely to actually use the product.
“The most effective campaigns are usually the boring campaigns,” Paul says. “Because they are focused on the target audience. You really do not care about the whole of Nigeria knowing you. The whole of Nigeria is not your target audience. Find where your target audience is, reach them, and make them choose you. Simple.”
“At Dantown, my very first campaign that delivered huge results at the lowest ever CAC was with a couple of mid-tier X influencers who had an obvious following of our target audience. I practically designed a narrative push for the brand, which spoke to the target audiences and made them actually bring their trades to the product. The goal was never virality; it was getting 10x revenue for every dollar spent. And that particular campaign achieved the lowest ever CAC per campaign in the history of the company. After that, I have seen other smaller crypto companies copy the same strategy.”
He is not against virality entirely. His argument is about opportunity cost. A team of two people spending all their time thinking about content that might go viral is a team of two people not thinking about conversion. For a bootstrapped startup that cannot afford to separate those functions, that trade-off matters enormously.
What Actually Works: How to Get Both Virality and Conversion
So what should startups do instead? Paul offers two practical paths.
The first path on the organic socials or content marketing front is to stop separating brand from product in content production if you have a very small team. If a startup wants the reach that comes with entertaining or relatable content, the product has to be part of the content itself — woven into the story being told.
“You are engineering your content for virality, but you are also telling people how your product solves problems you know they have. The content is centered around that, not outside of that.”
The second path is structural. If a bootstrapped startup has the resources to split responsibilities, it should. Have one person or team focus purely on awareness and reach — social media marketing, content marketing, etc. Then have a separate person or team focus purely on acquisition — performance marketing, paid social, paid search, whatever the channel — with their own targets and their own accountability.
How to Spot a Bootstrapped Startup Worth Working With
For Paul, evaluating whether to work with a company starts with one question: Is there actually a market here?
Beyond market dynamics, Paul’s criteria are straightforward. A solid product. Strong user retention. A growth trajectory that is moving in the right direction.
“A solid product in a very good market with very good retention — that is a very good place to work. The retention part is key because you know the users actually like the product, and they have very little reason to consider switching. That is how you know the company has a solid business and can stay alive for quite some time.”
Speaking on market dynamics, Paul says, “You need to know what the market is saying, who the players are, what market share they have captured, and what opportunity there is for you to come in,” he explains. First movers and second movers both have genuine advantages, he argues — as long as the playing field is reasonably fair. His example of where it is not fair is instructive.
“Nigeria had neobanks before OPay came in. OPay did not come in to play fair. They came in full force with huge funds.” The lesson is not that first movers always lose. It is that market share analysis has to account honestly for the realistic threat of a well-capitalised entrant arriving later and rewriting the rules.
Context, Timing, and the Real Cost of Getting Marketing Wrong
Paul keeps coming back to two words throughout the conversation: context and timing. Not as abstract concepts, but as the specific things that separate a marketing decision that works from one that drains a startup’s budget.
His example is a referral campaign. “You want to run a referral campaign, and your KPI is the number of new referrals. At the end of the day, that is net negative for the company. Because new referrals do not equal extra revenue or additional transactions. It is even worse if you are incentivising that referral because a lot of people will likely try to game the system.”
Campaigns like that are not wrong in theory. They have worked elsewhere. But without checking if it fits the particular context you’re working in, which is a bootstrapped environment, it becomes expensive noise.
“There are certain things you need to consider in certain contexts. And there are right and wrong times to do certain things.
A lot of people who are not actively experienced might be passively experienced — they have seen other people execute certain strategies, so they go ahead and replicate them. Not remembering that context matters. Timing matters.”
The financial cost of skipping this step is real. Results that could have been achieved in one month stretch to three. The cost keeps rising. “Just because some technical details were omitted during planning,” Paul says. “If those things were flagged before the campaign launched, things could have been better.”
Closing Advice for Founders and Marketers
“It is very easy to waste money if you do not know what you are doing or how to go about creating a marketing budget or spending that budget effectively,” he says. “But if you experiment at a small scale, find what works, and double down before exploring other strategies — that is how you make marketing actually work.”
For founders wondering if they need someone like him, consider this: If your marketing team is running campaigns you do not fully understand, reporting metrics you cannot interrogate, and spending budgets without clear accountability, that is the gap he fills. Not just strategy, but the technical leadership oversight that keeps the marketing function honest.
Paul Ugochukwu Obere is a seasoned growth and marketing strategist who has spent the last three years leading GTM, growth and marketing for one of Nigeria’s top crypto exchanges. His previous experiences include helping multiple silicon valley tech and ecommerce startups grow their revenue through a SF-based growth/marketing agency and he currently shares growth/marketing insights on Substack, LinkedIn and X.
Founders and marketers looking to connect can reach him via his social platforms, or subscribe to his new Substack for deep dives
