Feranmi Ajetomobi on the marketing lies of AI tools and Crypto airdrops
A marketing leader on the fallacy of "doing more with less," why airlines are the only ones cracking loyalty, and the 80/20 rule of budget allocation.
Feranmi Ajetomobi is tired of the noise.
For the better part of the last few years, he was a fixture on the timeline—a vocal proponent of growth frameworks and marketing mechanics in the African tech ecosystem. Then, he went quiet.
“I’m tired of the talk,” he says. “I’ve done the phase where everybody speaks for a year or two. I got work from it, but now I want to focus on execution.”
That execution has taken a fascinating, dual-track shape. On one hand, he remains a sharp operator in fintech and brand growth, obsessing over why “hockey stick” charts are mostly fiction and why crypto incentives are fundamentally broken. On the other hand, he is deep in the trenches of the culinary world, trying to solve a unit economics problem that plagues every restaurant owner in Lagos: how to scale without bleeding cash.
His conclusion? You don’t open more branches. You export.
Ajetomobi has sat at the helm of the growth engines of Africa’s top-tier startups, including Flutterwave and Cowrywise. In this conversation, he talks about a few things he doesn’t agree with, the fallacy of “doing more with less,” why airlines are the only ones doing loyalty right, and his thesis on turning Nigerian food into a global CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) powerhouse.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length, clarity, and flow.
You’ve been critical about how AI products are marketed. Why?
Since the Industrial Age, the role of any tool, mechanical or digital, has always been to help people with relevant skills get better and more efficient. The problem with how AI is currently marketed is the promise that you can ‘leapfrog’ foundational knowledge.
They say, ‘You don’t need the background; the AI will do it better than an expert.’ That is fundamentally wrong. For example, I’ve tried design tools where they claim anyone can churn out a compelling creative, and I struggled. But a designer with years of knowledge and experience picked up that same tool and produced something excellent in two minutes. Why? Because he has the core knowledge.
Yes, some things can be done with AI that you don’t really know much about. For example, I use AI for SQL even though I don’t write code, but I don’t ‘leapfrog’ the logic. But I understand data structures. I know how a query should be framed. I did not leapfrog it. I’m using my foundational knowledge to be efficient, not using a tool to replace the need for it. You cannot bypass the core.
Hmmm. So I shouldn’t be too bothered about an AI CMO product in the hands of a novice. You’ve also been critical of how incentives are deployed, particularly in crypto. The industry runs on airdrops and points, but you argue this is actually destroying value.
First off, I believe that Incentives, when properly done, are strong tools for attention and retention. But in crypto, they are distorted. The current model attracts gamers and mercenaries, not users.
The industry suffers from two issues: a lack of true Product-Market Fit (PMF) and a user base looking for the next “100x” return. When you lack PMF, you use incentives to bribe people into the system. The result is a “giga-dump” where users extract value and leave the moment the incentive dries up.
So, who is doing it right?
The airline industry. They are the only ones who have cracked this.
If you look at mileage programs, they drive massive retention because the incentive is embedded in the utility of the product. A category that’s been trying to get it right is supermarkets. They give you points, but the communication is terrible. If I shop for groceries every two weeks, the system should track that average spend and incentivise my next specific visit. Instead, I just accumulate points I forget to use.
The lesson is simple: If your incentive structure doesn’t solve for the next transaction, you are just burning cash.
There is an obsession with the “hockey stick” growth curve among tech companies. Is this expectation realistic for operators on the ground?
It’s an outlier, yet we treat it as the standard. But that’s not even what really bugs me. The bigger issue isn’t just the expectation of growth; it’s the lack of preparation for the drawdowns.
Founders and growth leads rarely define the parameters of a dip. If we drop 10% for three weeks, is that a crisis or a seasonal fluctuation? Does our model allow for a 3% drop every week for a month? Because these parameters aren’t defined, teams panic at normal volatility. You need to know when a dip is a structural failure versus a market cycle.
Hmm. That’s a good one. How do you approach structuring a growth team?
Most people think growth is just the promotional aspect of marketing. Whereas growth in terms of marketing is everyone’s job. I’ve come to agree that marketing, in a way, is actually both growth because it includes product, promotion, pricing and everything. Everyone contributes to business growth by doing their job well. But back to your question, if I were structuring a ‘growth’ team today, I would separate it functionally:
Head of Growth/Product: Growth is a product function, as much as it’s a promotional and pricing function.
Brand & Acquisition: This team focuses on the top of the funnel: events, paid ads, influencers, and PR.
Product Marketers: These people shouldn’t just be generalists. They should have specific features. At Spotify, you might have a product marketer focused entirely on “Shuffle” or “Year in Review.” In fintech, if you have a “Locked Savings” feature, you need someone whose sole KPI is unlocking value from that specific feature.
Lifecycle Marketing: They sit between acquisition and sales, focusing on cross-selling and retention. This includes customer success.
In B2B, the sales team sits between Acquisition and Lifecycle. Marketing generates leads (MQLs), Sales closes them, and then Lifecycle/Marketing picks them up again to drive retention and cross-sell.
“Do more with less” is a mantra that has grown popular in recent times. How do you actually operationalise that without just burning out your team?
“Do more with less” is usually just code for chaos. For it to make sense, to me, it means “Narrow Focus.”
You cannot target the whole market and “Do more with less.” You must find a vertical and dominate it. If your market is narrow, your messaging becomes consistent. You stop spending money confusing the audience. You cannot sound like a whiskey brand today and a juice brand tomorrow.
An example of a brand that executed this is Timon; its product is a USD-denominated card which appeals to a wide audience, but we decided to narrow our target audience to travellers. We’ve grown to build a money app for nomads, which includes things like eSIM, travel savings and local payout. The message is tailored towards travellers.
If you spread yourself too thin across too many channels without dominating one, you lose leverage.
Do you have a framework for budget allocation based on this thinking?
Here’s how I approach budget allocation:
Speculate (10-15%): Take a small slice of the budget to test wild cards.
Test: Try 5 different channels with that budget.
Commit (80%): Pick the one channel that brings the most value and dump the majority of your resources there.
Most companies spread their budget too thin across five channels. You lose leverage that way. Find the one channel that works and kill the rest.
Let’s seagway away from growth to a recent tweet I saw. There is a growing sentiment that Neobanks aren’t “proper” banks, that they are just features masquerading as institutions. Do you agree?
My perspective on this has changed. They are called Neo-banks for a reason: “Neo” means new. We need to allow them the grace to evolve.
You cannot expect a toddler to run a marathon. The easiest level to operate on is payments and transfers. That is where they started. Now, we are seeing them move into credit, but they are doing it differently. They are using internal data—cash flow history—to offer zero-collateral loans.
Yes, the interest rates are higher, but that reflects the risk of non-collateralised lending. They are filling a gap for lifestyle banking and retention that traditional banks missed. Judging them by the standards of a 100-year-old commercial bank is a category error.
You have a deep interest in the food business. But you’ve said the money isn’t in the restaurant itself. Break down the unit economics for us.
In Nigeria, the profit margins on a standard restaurant are maybe 10%, often lower. Logistics, power, and raw materials eat everything.
If you want to make money in food, you have two bad options: go ultra-high-end (which has a tiny market cap) or go massive scale (which kills quality control).
So what is the third option?
Gastronomic Tourism and CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) Export.
My long-term thesis is that you don’t scale by opening ten more locations in Lagos. You scale by turning your intellectual property into a product. Think of a specific sauce or a bread mix—like toning down the spice of an Agege bread sauce so it appeals to a global palate—and packaging that for export.
The real money is in the product on the shelf, not the plate on the table. It’s like the alcohol business; the margin is in the bottle, not the bar service. I want to build a brand where the restaurant is just the showroom, but the revenue comes from a product sitting on a shelf in five different countries. That is the only way to bypass the infrastructure problems that kill food businesses here. The long-term goal for us is that we want to export.
Rapid Fire 🔥
What’s your favourite meal?
None. It depends on my mood, but in the spirit of being an Ekiti man, I would say pounded yam. 😅
What’s your favourite productivity tool?
My notes app. I sometimes forget things, so I write everything there.
What’s a book or movie that shaped your thinking?
How to Become a Person of Influence by John Maxwell.