Semiloore Akoni is a growth and product marketing leader focused on consumer technology, fintech, and digital commerce across Africa. With over a decade of experience in marketing and more than seven years in tech, he has built and scaled products across marketplaces, payments, and platform ecosystems. His work centres on user acquisition, activation, and retention, with a strong emphasis on solving adoption challenges and turning product value into clear, scalable growth channels.
- Explain what you do to a 5-year-old.
I help shop-owners find the right people who actually need what they are selling. Then I make it very easy for those people to try the product for the first time. After that, I make sure they like it enough to keep coming back, and even tell their friends about it. It is about helping them get the right customers who see value quickly and stay.
- What is one growth belief you hold that most marketers around you would disagree with?
Most people in growth and marketing believe retention is something you fix later. They think that once users sign up, you can bring them back with emails, notifications, or discounts.
That thinking is flawed. Retention is already decided before the user signs up.
If someone joins because of hype, a giveaway, or a discount, they are not there for the product. They are there for the incentive. The moment that the incentive disappears, they leave. No lifecycle strategy fixes that.
But if someone joins because the product solves a real problem they have, retention becomes natural. You are not convincing them to come back. You are fitting into something they already need.
The same mistake appears in localisation. Many companies translate words. They do not translate behaviour to suit the country in which they operate.
They assume users in different markets think the same way, respond to the same triggers, and trust the same systems. That is not true. Real growth comes from understanding how people actually behave in that market, how they spend, how they trust, how they decide.
If you get that wrong at acquisition, everything that comes after is damage control.
- What is one metric African founders obsess over that you think is mostly a distraction?
Downloads feel like progress, but they are not. They tell you how many people showed interest for a moment. They do not tell you if anyone actually used the product in a meaningful way. A product can have thousands of downloads and still be failing silently.
How many users reach a meaningful first action, how quickly they get there, and how many come back to repeat that action?
If those numbers are weak, growth is an illusion. You are measuring attention, not value.
