How This Nigerian Engineer Built a Bootstrapped GTM Engine
Jakob here 🖐
In my newsletter Fake Mayo I share stories (interviews) of how founders got their first users or customers.
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Dumebi Okolo, a former frontend engineer from Nigeria, transitioned into technical writing—a move that sparked her journey as a founder. When a job posting required daily social media creation, she recognized a massive bottleneck. Although the interview fell through, the concept stuck with her.
In February 2026, she built a basic tool called "Blogger Helper." By June, it evolved into Ozigi, a fully bootstrapped, end-to-end Go-To-Market (GTM) pipeline for lead generation, cold outreach, and multi-channel publishing. Built using Next.js, Supabase, and Google Gemini, Ozigi operates on a freemium SaaS model.
By July 2026, Ozigi achieved solid early traction:
Website Visits: 12,000
Active Users: 400
Paid Subscribers: 5
Marketing taught Okolo her biggest lesson: value goes unnoticed until you show it to people. When Google Ads underperformed, she focused on organic discovery. She listed Ozigi on AppSumo and Indie Hackers, built free side-tools, and hired two marketing specialists.
Ozigi is built specifically for early-stage founders and small teams who need a powerful GTM engine to do more with less.
Read the full story
https://www.fakemayo.com/p/how-dumebi-okolo-bootstrapped-ozigi-to-400-active-users-in-7-months
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One thing I enjoy about stories like this is seeing how different the path usually looks in hindsight.
The milestones are useful, but the decisions behind them are often much more transferable than the tactics themselves.