There's a particular kind of nervousness that comes with standing on a busy Lagos street, flyer in hand, trying to explain something nobody has heard of yet. I found that out firsthand introducing CozonLagosHub to traders and small business owners across the city — not through an ad campaign or a slick launch event, just the old-fashioned way, one conversation at a time, walking up to a stranger and hoping they'd give me thirty seconds.
I expected some resistance going in. I didn't expect quite how much of it would come down to one single word, said quietly or not so quietly: scam.
The first few days were genuinely humbling. I'd approach a trader, explain that CozonLagosHub was a place where they could list and sell their products online, and watch their face shift, almost on cue, into polite suspicion. Some looked at the flyer like it might bite them. A few asked outright if it was real. Others just walked away without saying anything at all, which somehow stung more than the ones who at least argued with me.
That stung, at first, more than I expected it to. But the more conversations I had, the more I understood exactly where it was coming from. Lagos doesn't have a shortage of people who've been burned before — fake investment schemes, empty promises, "opportunities" dressed up nicely that turned out to be nothing underneath. Their skepticism wasn't rudeness. It was a completely reasonable response from people who'd learned, the hard way, to protect themselves. Once I stopped taking the hesitation personally and started treating it as information instead, the conversations actually got easier. I stopped leading with promises and started leading with proof — pulling out my phone, showing the actual platform, walking through a real listing right there on the street instead of just describing one in the abstract.
Something else became obvious fast, once I was paying attention instead of just pitching. A lot of the hesitation wasn't really about trust at all. It was about unfamiliarity. Plenty of business owners were genuinely interested in the idea — a place to sell beyond their usual WhatsApp status or word of mouth — but had never actually created an online account for anything in their life, let alone uploaded a product listing.
So I started staying instead of moving on. I'd sit down with someone, right there, and walk them through creating an account step by step. Help them photograph their first product, figure out how to describe it, and then just stand there while they hit publish for the first time. There's a specific moment in that — watching someone go from confused to genuinely lit up the instant their product actually appears on the platform, real and visible — that I didn't expect to find as rewarding as it turned out to be. It stopped being about the marketplace at that point. It became about handing someone a small, tangible win they could see with their own eyes, something nobody could talk them out of afterward because they'd watched it happen themselves.
I also noticed, fairly quickly, that even the business owners who were genuinely interested still hesitated the moment advertising came up. Even a small amount felt like a real risk to someone running tight margins, someone who couldn't afford to gamble a week's profit on something unproven. So I started crediting early users with enough promotional value on the platform to cover meaningful advertising, at no cost to them at all. The logic was simple — if the only thing standing between someone and actually trying this was the fear of wasting money they didn't have to spare, I wanted to remove that fear completely and just let the results speak for themselves. That one small adjustment changed more conversations than any pitch I'd rehearsed. People get a lot braver about trying something new once the downside of trying drops close to zero.
Not everyone said yes, and I've genuinely made peace with that. Some people wanted to wait and watch how things developed before committing anything. Some were just busy, not in a headspace to think about a new platform on that particular Tuesday. I don't think that hesitation reflects badly on any of them, and I stopped treating every conversation that didn't convert as a failure somewhere along the way. Trust, especially in a market that's seen its fair share of scams, gets built through consistency over time, not through one well-timed pitch on a street corner. Every business that eventually becomes widely trusted started with a small handful of early people willing to take a chance before there was much proof to point to yet. My job was never to convince every single person in one conversation. It was to be consistent and honest enough that the people who did say yes had a genuinely good reason to.
Looking back, the biggest thing that stretch of street-level work actually taught me had almost nothing to do with marketing tactics, and everything to do with patience and just showing up. It's easy to assume building something is mostly a technical problem — write the code, launch the platform, wait for the users to arrive on their own. What I actually learned, standing on those streets, is that building something people genuinely trust is a human problem first, before it's ever a technical one. It requires physically showing up in person. Answering the same question for the fifth time without getting short with the person asking it. Being willing to sit with a stranger while they fumble through their first upload instead of rushing them along toward the next person in line.
None of that shows up anywhere in a pitch deck. All of it, in the end, is what actually moved things forward.