Picking the Right Problem: Dami Soladoye's Road from Cycles to Bunce

-Sashindra Suresh

How a failed bicycle-sharing startup taught a Lagos founder that solving a real problem and choosing a real market are two different jobs.

Sometime in 2018, in a meeting room in San Francisco, a venture capital partner asked Damilola Soladoye how big his market really was.

Soladoye was in his twenties, an accounting graduate of Covenant University, and the co-founder of Cycles, a Nigerian bicycle-sharing startup. He and his co-founder Segun Olujide had the deck, and they defended the numbers on it. The partner, whose firm had recently backed the largest bike-sharing company in Latin America, then explained why that cheque had actually been written. It had not been written for the mobility. It had been written because mobility opened a door into every other vertical the company's users needed.

Cycles shut down that year.

Seven years later, Soladoye is co-founder and head of product and partnerships at Bunce, a Lagos-built customer engagement platform whose client list, according to the founders, includes Burger King, logistics operator GIG Mobility, Middleman, the lender Baobab, Vale Finance, Zikora and Nairabet.

The distance between those two moments is a case study in something African founders discuss less often than resilience: how to choose what to build on.

A real problem, in the wrong shape

Cycles began where a lot of credible startups begin, inside a frustration its founder lived daily. At Covenant University in Ota, a single shuttle system served more than eight thousand students. Soladoye walked, as everyone did, and eventually he and a group of fellow Covenant alumni decided to put smart shared bicycles on campus, then across estates and gated communities nationwide.

It gained early institutional backing. The team entered the Facebook accelerator programme run with CcHUB in Lagos, raising five thousand dollars in equity-free funding, and built its first bike-share prototypes at the Facebook hub. Soladoye pitched at demo day and later stood inside Facebook's Menlo Park headquarters.

The economics did not follow. In a 2021 account of the period, Soladoye set out three reasons the company failed. The bikes were specialised enough to require importing, which meant hardware costs denominated in dollars against Nigerian revenues. The communities they deployed into demanded revenue cuts, a lesson he compressed into a warning to other founders: "try not to build your business on another man's land."

The third reason was the one the San Francisco partner had already named. Of Nigeria's two hundred plus universities, the team could not establish how many were realistically deployable, how many estates carried the pedestrian density to justify a fleet, or what returns an imported bicycle could generate over its useful life at local price points. They ran the numbers and did not like them.

Soladoye has written that passion was not sufficient to carry the company through those obstacles, and that while other founders might have absorbed the punishment, his team was not going to. In an interview the following year he described Nigeria's startup environment as "dynamic and unforgiving," and argued that the constraint for founders was less the availability of investors than the difficulty of finding the right one.

Three years learning a market

The period between Cycles and Bunce is the part of the story that usually gets compressed, and it is arguably where the second company was decided.

Soladoye worked briefly as a research analyst, then in business development at Riby Finance, before joining CredPal, the Y Combinator-backed Nigerian consumer credit company, where he moved into product management. There he worked on asset financing and buy-now-pay-later products, merchant checkout, credit cards and cash loans. He then joined Tutuka, later renamed Paymentology, building card issuing infrastructure across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and did fintech and payments consulting for African markets through expert networks.

He has been candid about what he lacked. A finance background helped him understand the money moving through the products he shipped and hindered him in conversations with engineers, so he set himself a rule of learning one new technical term, process or tool a day, working through online product courses and the Product Dive community in Lagos. His own definition of the discipline, written in 2021, split it evenly between technical skill and relationship work, on the grounds that a product manager delivers everything through other people.

Three years inside African payments rails gave him the thing Cycles never had: a granular understanding of one market's plumbing.

The second company

In 2021, Soladoye and Paul Ayuk were working at the same consumer lender and dealing with an ordinary operational problem. Borrowers missed repayments, and there was no systematic way to reach them beforehand. The two built an internal tool that messaged customers ahead of a due payment or after a failed one.

It worked, then sat unused for months. What revived it was a conversation between Ayuk and Justus Oseuno, who had shipped software for a client whose launch faltered when payments failed and there was no channel to recover the lost customers. Ayuk called Soladoye, and the three got on a single call. One of them had never met the other two. The name came from a hurried search for slang meaning money.

Structurally, the second company inverts nearly every risk that killed the first. There is no hardware to import, insure or depreciate. It requires no behaviour change from consumers, because it sits on top of payment rails businesses already run, integrating with Paystack, Flutterwave, Monnify, Korapay, Interswitch and Fincra. And the addressable market is not a countable set of deployable campuses. It is every business in Africa collecting recurring payments.

Ayuk has described the founding insight as a discovery rather than a plan. The team set out to fix payment recovery and concluded that African businesses were not short of customers so much as unable to understand them at scale. Soladoye frames the same shift in terms of noise: companies were broadcasting more messages and hoping something landed, and the question the founders took on was how to speak differently to different customers, automatically, at the right moment.

Choosing the market, repeatedly

The clearest evidence that the San Francisco lesson stuck is what Bunce did when its own thesis met the market.

The company's opening target was tech and financial services firms, the sector its founders knew. It did not convert. Ayuk has called the segment a "hell hole" to sell into, because the product required merchants to surrender the asset they guard most closely, their customer payment data. So Bunce moved to e-commerce, where the data felt less sensitive and deals could close.

It then made a second, subtler adjustment. It stopped selling payment recovery and started selling customer data utilisation. Ayuk has characterised this as a messaging pivot rather than a product one, a reframing that opened new markets without rewriting code.

The trust problem was solved slowly. The company encrypted data, offered on-premise deployment to its largest clients so that data never left their own servers, leaned on Paystack and Flutterwave partnerships for institutional credibility, and pursued NDPR and SOC 2 certification. The first customer payment arrived in January 2024, roughly three years after founding. Ayuk has since described a year-long free plan as the company's costliest early mistake.

Both founders credit segmentation as the commercial wedge, and name product manager John Awodeyi as the person who led that work. Soladoye says more than half of Bunce's high-value clients, Zikora and Nairabet among them, adopted and stayed because of the segmentation feature.

The founders also claim a tenfold improvement in customer satisfaction for clients using behavioural targeting. No methodology accompanies the figure, and Bunce does not publish revenue, customer counts or retention data, so the claim stands as an assertion rather than a verified result.

Lean capital, external validation

Bunce has raised roughly one hundred thousand dollars in tracked funding, from Startup Wise Guys in late 2022 and The Baobab Network in October 2023, alongside a grant from the NCAIR-Google AI Fund. By Lagos fintech standards that is negligible, which makes the subsequent recognition more notable.

In 2025 the company was selected for MTN Nigeria's Cloud Accelerator, one of twenty startups from a field approaching eight thousand applicants.

The next version of the same question

The market question that ended Cycles has returned in a different form.

Nigeria is shifting from card payments to bank transfers. A card transaction produces a rich behavioural profile. A transfer produces a name and an amount. The data layer that engagement platforms depend on is thinning underneath them, pushing Bunce and its clients to capture behaviour far earlier in the customer journey. Separately, WhatsApp and SMS remain the channels that work in the market and remain expensive enough to constrain high-volume engagement.

Whether Bunce can hold its position as that data narrows is unresolved. What has changed is the founder facing the question. Soladoye has been wrong about a market once, documented precisely why, and spent three years acquiring the domain knowledge before committing again.

Asked to reduce the company to a sentence, he offered one: "We turn customer understanding into revenue."

The Cycles version of that sentence would have been about moving people from one point to another. It was true, and it was not a business.