On a good day, a Nigerian entrepreneur rarely thinks about the mechanics of a phone call. A customer dials an 080 number, an automated greeting plays, a representative answers, an order is confirmed, or a complaint is resolved, and business moves forward. On a bad day, the call does not connect. Or it connects only after several attempts.
Or a business owner discovers that a former employee has departed with key customer conversations—and the customers themselves—stored on a personal mobile SIM. For Mayowa Okegbenle and Opeyemi Shokunbi, founders of PressOne, the Lagos-based cloud-telephony company, the sharp disconnect between how business phone systems ought to function and how they actually operate in Nigeria presented a compelling market opportunity.
The core value proposition was simple: a small business with four, five, or ten employees should be able to run a professional phone network—complete with automated greetings, extensions, intelligent call routing, and complete interaction records—without requiring an enterprise IT budget or a bank’s capital. “When you call a bank, you hear, ‘Welcome to the name of the bank.
Press one for this, press two for that,’” Mayowa Okegbenle, PressOne’s co-founder and chief executive, said in an interview with TechCabal on Tuesday, September 8. “Why can’t everyone have that?
Why is that reserved for banks and big companies?” In Nigeria, the obstacle has historically been a combination of unreliable infrastructure, difficult economics, and a telecom ecosystem that is overly complex for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).PressOne entered that market in 2021 and gained significant traction by 2022. However, the founders quickly discovered that acquiring customers was not their hardest problem.
The true challenge lay in retaining them long enough to convert rapid adoption into a durable, profitable business. That distinction is critical in a tech ecosystem that frequently mistakes user acquisition for long-term viability.