A designer turned builder on winning with two people.
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Executive producer: C.Y. Lee
Six minutes at PRODFEST in Jos, caught just after the hackathon results, with one of the winners still holding what he built. The subject is Ameer, and the conversation runs from how he learned the work to what his product does.
He starts with the result and immediately shares it out. “my team won the 3rd position in the recent hackathon”, he says, and points out the odd shape of it: teams around them had four or five people, his had two, and while “most of the team came with their teammates, but I and my teammates met at the hackathon.”
The route to the work is a career change. “sometimes that’s why they say nothing goes to waste”, he says, and explains that “I was a UI/UX designer” for about six months after someone in Abuja taught him, though he never took to the tooling. “I’m more of an Illustrator guy though”, he says. “I prefer vector drawing.” Then he moved on, because “the UI/UX industry is somehow saturated and I wanted to explore something that’s more difficult for people to learn”, and started learning blockchain off free university resources online. He is modest about the win to the point of disowning it: “we put in work, but it’s more like a miracle that we won this”, which the interviewer refuses to accept.
He credits the tone of the event for the rest. “The experience was so inspiring”, he says, because the founder opened by telling the room “we should not be intimidated” by the senior developers in it, and that “we just give our best and we should ensure that we build something that works and something that solves a problem.”
The product is a payments bridge. “it’s called ZamPay”, built around “the challenge most Nigerians are facing”, which is transaction limits: “using traditional bank, there’s limits to what you spend.” His case is a seller who wants nothing to do with crypto and a buyer who is fluent in it. The buyer pays in crypto, and on the other end, “We abstract the crypto part for him and he gets his naira.” It is not public, since “it was something that we created in 3 days”, and he admits they never got to test it.
It was the first hackathon he and his teammate had ever entered, and he says it “has given me motivation and hope that, yeah, we can be anything.” His message to viewers is to stay consistent. Then the interviewer makes him spell a word at the camera, and he ends the tape shouting it.
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