#15: Olabinjo Adeniran—From Curiosity About Blogs to Tech Marketing
Olabinjo Adeniran is a global tech leader with 10+ years in growth & product marketing, co-founding Future Africa and its $6million investments in 60+ startups.
This is the African Growth Marketers Spotlight series for the Marketing In Action Newsletter where we interview diverse marketing practitioners who are putting marketing into action. Share it with your network! ~James
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Can you tell us a bit about your background, education, and how you got into marketing?
I grew up with a deep interest in computers and the Internet. I was very curious and always tried new things on the early web – blogging, YouTube, podcasts, and just spending time on websites. I was also very interested in ads, so as a 13-year-old, my dad woke up one day and dragged me to an ad agency because I was disturbing him too much.
Fast forward to 2008, I wanted to start a blog, did some research, and everyone said you had to learn HTML & CSS – so I spent my Christmas holiday just trying to understand it better. After high school, I had 2 years of A-levels and a gap year where I spent all my time figuring out how to grow a blog - partnered with a classmate and his friend to start a tech blog.
During my gap year, a startup founder saw the blog and hired me to manage his company’s social media and blog – this was my first actual tech marketing job. After my gap year, I went to university to study Information Technology and spent 4 years learning how to build software – programming, software engineering, software design, etc.
On the side, I wanted to get better, so I built blogs and apps and did a lot of internships during the holidays. This exposed me to working for startups in Nigeria and internationally – social media was very new, SEO was new, performance ads were new, and I’d often explore all the possible channels for each startup I worked for.
Thankfully, there were no strong assumptions (literally everything we did was new in the market), enabling me to conduct many experiments. While doing these things, I still wanted to be a programmer. In my final year, I decided marketing was a much better job and shifted my life-long goal of programming.
When I finished university, I basically turned in my final year project on a Friday and started working for a Lagos-based tech company the next Monday. There wasn’t a lot of marketing talent in Nigerian tech when I started my career, so I would often consult for a few startups and projects on the side.
I have been doing this for about 10 years now – figuring out how to grow technology products and drive company goals.
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How do you define growth marketing?
Computers, mobile phones, software, and the Internet present unique opportunities for selling software. My job in growth marketing is to apply marketing and communication principles to grow a software company’s business while taking advantage of the abilities that this new paradigm (internet, smartphones, apps, data) presents.
This is very different from how marketing professionals approach marketing for non-software products.
What are your key areas of expertise within marketing?
My core specialties are: CRM & Lifecycle Marketing (Onboarding-Activation-Retention), Partnerships, Content Marketing, Performance Marketing, Product-Led Growth, Growth Loops, Distribution, Product Marketing, and Email Marketing.
Which marketing channels do you prioritize, and have you found to be effective?
Channels are effective depending on the customer of the product. There are no broadly effective or ineffective channels if the customer doesn’t exist and isn’t active on those channels.
That said, here are some concepts that work across products and customer segments.
Inbound marketing
Partnerships
Community-driven marketing
Content marketing
Product-led growth
What roles have you held in your growth and marketing career?
This is the order of the roles I’ve held: Product Marketing Manager, Senior Lifecycle Marketing Manager, Growth Partner, Growth Marketing Manager, Digital Marketing Manager, Marketing and Communications Lead, Performance Marketing Manager, SEO Contractor, Social Media Intern.
Which companies have you worked with?
Growth Case Studies – I like to study technology companies and figure out how they grow. I then form my unique perspective after these studies, and share them in this monthly newsletter.
Hotels.ng is a travel booking website for Nigerians. I started out as a social media intern and quickly expanded my responsibilities to include SEO, blog, performance marketing - I even helped redesign the platform once!
Devcenter – Devcenter connects African software development talent to global jobs. It also has one of the largest African software development communities - Devcenter Square. I built the Devcenter brand with content marketing for talent & C-suite executives and managed its weekly email newsletter which was popular in the African dev and design space.
Consulting - I’ve consulted for different startups in different niches.
Buycoins – Buycoins was one of the first Nigerian instant crypto-fiat exchanges. At Buycoins, I was a digital marketing manager focusing on SEO because it was the primary driver of crypto purchases between 2017 and 2018. I also managed digital PR, performance marketing and ran a nano-influencer campaign.
Binance (Bundle) – Years after Buycoins, I was contracted to build early-stage growth processes at Bundle - a social-based crypto app by Binance. I worked on the brand, community management, user testing, onboarding and retention processes, and a referral programme. I also wrote every piece of text in the first version of the app.
Cowrywise – Cowrywise is one of Nigeria's largest savings and investment fintechs. I was an SEO consultant at Cowrywise for a few months.
Flutterwave – Flutterwave is a pan-African payments company enabling merchants to get paid. I did SEO for Flutterwave before it announced its Series A round.
Risevest – Risevest enables Africans to invest in USD-dominated assets. Ran performance marketing and built a leaderboard + referral strategy to drive word of mouth, acquisition and retention.
Horizon (Sequence) – Horizon built Sequence, an all-in-one web3 developer toolkit for gaming. I was the first Product Marketing Manager at Sequence, working on repositioning a generic dev toolkit for gaming devs and doing everything from content marketing, events (IRL and online), developer relations and performance marketing on Reddit, LinkedIn and Twitter. I focused on North America and Europe in this role.
Consensys – Consensys builds crypto products for the Ethereum Virtual Machine ecosystem. At Consensys, I was a Senior Lifecycle Marketing Manager, building new privacy-respecting campaigns and programmes for MetaMask, Infura, Phosphor and a few other brands under the Consensys Umbrella. Consensys operates in 150+ markets globally with over 30M monthly active users across its products.
Future Africa – Future Africa was a venture capital platform providing capital, coaching and community. We were most notably known for our syndicate, the Future Africa Collective. I co-founded and led growth at the firm for 3 years, resulting in over $6M deployed to startups, active pure revenue of $450K ARR and a pipeline of $1M.
Can you share a fun or interesting fact about yourself that most people don’t know?
I have lots of interests, and my nerdiness takes over sometimes because my curiosity drives me into all kinds of rabbit holes. LOL.
What do you enjoy doing outside of work?
I like to watch movies/TV series, read a lot of articles and some books, watch birds, and spend time in nature. I’m also a proponent of the daytime nap.
Can you share a resource or template that has been particularly valuable in your work?
Andrew Chen’s Growth Hacker Is The New VP of Marketing essay. I found it and knew I could do more work beyond customer acquisition - a lot of my roles before reading this were focused on customer acquisition and social engagement.
Nir Eyal’s Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products – made me think about my work, companies I worked with or wanted to work with and the software industry as a unique industry with its own advantages and business/usage models.
What advice would you give to someone starting their career in growth marketing?
Being curious is the most significant advantage you could have - enjoy trying new things and working on new channels or approaching problems differently. Focusing on job titles is often detrimental for early marketing careers – our industry shifts frequently, and titles change or become obsolete. It’s much better to focus on specific skill sets and the kind of work experience you’d like to have.
There’s no such thing as non-technical when you’re selling technology products on the Internet. Understanding how each channel works deeply before launching campaigns will always bring value to you and your team. Please lean into technicalities and enjoy the wild ride.
Give us two marketers that you would like us to interview in this newsletter
Iheakachi Nwabueze – Head of Global Marketing and Growth at Grey (YC W22)
Pelumi Oyetimein – Growth Manager & Digital Strategy Expert
If you have a recommendation for who we should be speaking to, or who you would like to see in this interview series, reply with their names, marketing specialty, and how we can reach them (LinkedIn, Email, Phone, Home address 🙂).
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