Olatunde Success on why distrust is the real tax on Nigerian commerce, and how SAW Technologies designs products like Resikonet and Dbrij Projects to make trust structural instead of personal.
Every Nigerian marketplace has the same invisible line item: the cost of distrust. Tenants pay agents they never meet again. Freelancers deliver work and chase invoices for months. Landlords hold deposits hostage. Each side prices in the risk of the other side misbehaving, and the whole market pays a premium that produces nothing. At SAW Technologies, our product thesis is that this premium is addressable with engineering.
Trust used to be personal. It can be structural.
Traditional Nigerian commerce solved trust socially: you traded with your kinsman, your church member, the friend of a friend. That works beautifully at village scale and collapses at internet scale, where the counterparty is a stranger with a phone number. The replacement is not asking people to be nicer. It is building systems where good behaviour is enforced by structure: escrow that holds the money, reputation that follows the person, and dispute processes that produce fair outcomes without a big man intervening.
What we learned shipping it twice
On Resikonet, escrow-backed rental transactions changed negotiating behaviour immediately: when the money is locked and criteria are explicit, both sides argue about the checklist, not each other.
Trust Scores work only when they are earned slowly and lost quickly. Reputation that can be reset with a new account is theatre.
The dispute path is the product. People accept losing a dispute they consider fair; they abandon platforms over disputes they consider rigged.
On Dbrij Projects, locking acceptance criteria at funding time removed the most common failure in client work: the deal quietly changing after the work started.
The market this unlocks
When trust becomes structural, transactions happen that simply did not happen before: the tenant renting from a landlord in another city, the client hiring a freelancer they have never met, the small business taking a bigger contract than a handshake could carry. That is not a feature improvement. It is market expansion, and it is the quiet ambition behind everything we build.
