By Ayo Onikoyi
DAVID Munam, founder of BoredHippo, a Lagos-based content marketing agency focused on FinTech, AI, Web3, and blockchain brands, has said that many technically strong startups in Nigeria and across Africa are failing to attract investors and users because of how they communicate.
Speaking on the state of content strategy among African technology startups, Munam said a pattern he observed repeatedly over nearly a decade in digital marketing ultimately led him to establish BoredHippo in February 2026.
“These are companies building genuinely innovative things,” he said. “Payment infrastructure, decentralised finance tools, AI-powered investment platforms. But their websites read like academic papers, whitepapers lose investors on the first page, and onboarding flows assume users already understand the technology. Those gaps cost real people with real money who were interested but couldn’t make sense of what was being offered.”
Munam, a 2024 graduate of the University of Lagos, said his professional experience working across industries as a content strategist exposed him to how consistently technical companies prioritised internal accuracy over external comprehension in their communication.
“There’s a version of every message that works for a developer and a version that works for a buyer,” he said. “They’re not the same version. Founders often write the first version and then wonder why conversion is low. Our job is to write the second version, and sometimes rewrite the first one too.”
Through BoredHippo, Munam said the agency embeds as a long-term content partner rather than a one-off service provider, working with clients on monthly retainers across a range of output including blog content, website and service page copy, whitepapers, newsletters, and PR communications.
He asserts the rationale for focusing exclusively on the FinTech, AI, Web3, and blockchain sectors was deliberate. These were the industries where the communication gap was widest and the commercial cost of that gap most measurable.
Regarding motivation, BoredHippo’s founder noted that his broader inspiration is rooted the access dimension of clear communication. The idea that startups which communicate well open doors to investment, partnerships, and user bases that remain closed to equally capable companies that do not.
“Clarity is not a luxury for well-funded startups,” he said. “It’s a survival skill and for brands in spaces as competitive and technically complex as FinTech, AI, and Web3/Blockchain, it’s one of the highest-leverage investments they can make.”
He called on founders, particularly those building in Nigeria’s growing technology ecosystem, to invest in content infrastructure early rather than treating it as a later-stage concern.
“There are thousands of companies building things the world needs to know about,” Munam said. “Most of them will never be found because nobody helped them explain it properly.”