Beyond the Dial Tone: PressOne's Hard Lesson in Sustainable Growth
In the vibrant yet often unpredictable landscape of Nigerian enterprise, the mechanics of a simple phone call can either be a seamless facilitator of commerce or a frustrating bottleneck. Many entrepreneurs rarely consider the underlying systems until a call fails to connect, or worse, crucial customer conversations—and the customers themselves—vanish with a former employee's personal mobile SIM. This sharp disconnect between how business phone systems ought to function and their actual operation presented a compelling market opportunity for PressOne.
Lagos-based cloud-telephony company PressOne, founded by Mayowa Okegbenle and Opeyemi Shokunbi, stepped into this void. Their core value proposition was straightforward: enable small businesses with four, five, or ten employees to operate a professional phone network. This meant features typically reserved for large corporations or banks—automated greetings, extensions, intelligent call routing, and complete interaction records—without requiring an enterprise IT budget. As co-founder and CEO Mayowa Okegbenle noted, observing the “Welcome to the name of the bank. Press one for this, press two for that” experience, the question was, “Why can’t everyone have that?”
PressOne entered the market in 2021 and quickly gained significant traction by 2022. However, the founders soon confronted a critical distinction often overlooked in the rush for user numbers: acquiring customers was not their hardest problem. The true challenge lay in retaining those customers long enough to convert rapid adoption into a durable, profitable business. This trajectory serves as a grounded lesson in an ecosystem that frequently mistakes user acquisition for long-term viability, particularly in a subscription model where customers are unaccustomed to recurring charges.
The economic implications of this reality are profound. For PressOne, operating within a market characterized by unreliable infrastructure, difficult economics, and a telecom ecosystem overly complex for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), cash flow could fluctuate wildly. The very quality of their service, a cornerstone of retention, hinged on external telecom networks. This dynamic forces a strategic pivot from mere growth metrics to the demanding calculus of customer lifetime value and consistent service delivery.
This matters because it signals a maturing phase in African tech. The initial euphoria of rapid user acquisition is giving way to a more sober assessment of unit economics and sustainability. Companies like PressOne are highlighting that technological solutions must contend not just with market demand, but with deeply entrenched economic behaviors and infrastructural realities. While SMEs benefit from professionalizing their operations, founders are compelled to innovate beyond initial product-market fit to build robust retention strategies and robust underlying infrastructure partnerships.
PressOne’s experience, born from Mayowa Okegbenle’s frustration in 2019 with relying on a personal phone number that offered “zero oversight or control,” underscores a broader challenge across many African markets. The informal nature of business operations, often relying on personal communication channels, creates structural gaps in accountability, data retention, and professional image. While the cloud-telephony solution addresses this specific business communication gap, its deeper lesson is about the imperative for sustainable business models that account for local market nuances, from payment habits to infrastructure reliability.
Ultimately, PressOne’s journey reveals that even with a compelling solution addressing a clear market need, the path to durable profitability is a complex undertaking. It demands more than just signing up customers; it requires navigating unpredictable cash flows, ensuring service quality reliant on external factors, and instilling a new habit of recurring charges in a market still finding its footing with such models. The emphasis shifts from the initial 'plug' to the enduring 'kazi'—the sustained work of building a resilient enterprise.