As marketers, our job is to get our solution in front of the right people who have a problem that we can solve.

In order to do that well, you really need to understand the problem.

That means doing interviews with your target market. Observing how they interact with your product. Even going as far as participating in their day to day life.

Essentially, you want to fall in love with the problem you’re solving.

That’s exactly what Benjamin Fernandes, founder and CEO of NALA Money, says is the most important when starting and growing a company.

NALA Money is a money transfer app that lets people send money securely, quickly and for low cost between the UK, Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda. Benjamin himself has a fascinating personal story: He was the youngest African to be accepted into the Stanford Graduate of Business and after working for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he returned to Tanzania to launch NALA Money.

NALA Money is the number one finance app in Tanzania, and has 250,000 customers in Uganda and Tanzania. NALA was also accepted into Y Combinator and apparently came in as the company that had achieved the most amount of traction with the smallest number of resources.

In today’s chat, I’m talking with Benjamin about how he fell in love with the problem he was solving (which is very connected to his personal story), why he’s working so hard to unite everyone under one purpose of increasing economic opportunity for Africans worldwide, how he’s built an outstanding team which got him incredible investors and produce high quality output.

Benjamin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminf7/
NALA Money website: https://www.nala.com/