Social media is rife with videos and tweets encouraging job hunters to “fake it until you make it”. This means confidently nod to any job requirement and figure things out on the fly upon employment. At 24, Benita Riagbayire, a law graduate with a resume packed with wins—campaigns that boosted app downloads, an award naming her Most Promising Product Marketer—could have bluffed her way through an interview for a marketing operations role at Oyster HR, a global payroll unicorn. The role was managerial and promised a pay cheque that far exceeded her prior five years of working with Nigerian companies.
However, as the interview progressed, Riagbayire realised how starkly different the role was from the kind of marketing she had done previously. This was a more technical, behind-the-scenes position, involving everything from managing user lifecycle workflows to ensuring GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliance and troubleshooting automation tools. It diverged significantly from the more front-facing, creative work she had done in content creation and campaigns. She had been taking courses to upskill and knew the right terms to use to convince them she was ready to hit the ground running, but she did the unpopular thing: she chose candour. This paid off. In a surprising twist, the company, considering her theoretical knowledge and eagerness to learn, offered her a lower-level role that accommodated her need to learn on the job.
“All my life, I had worked towards becoming a global talent,” Riagbayire, who took the call from Agbani, a remote village in Enugu where she was visiting for a while, told me. “It is a cherry on top that the job pays me enough money that I do not have to work several jobs to make ends meet.”
Riagbayire’s journey to a seven-figure role at Oyster HR seems like a natural progression now, but in 2020, as a 300-level law student at the University of Lagos, her resume was far from polished. The pandemic had upended the world, and the ASUU strike closed campuses, leaving students with uncertainty about the future and a lot of time on their hands.
It was during that time that Riagbayire decided to learn tech skills. Though she has gone on to be a marketer in three startups, at the time, she wanted to be a programmer and had initially tried her hand at software engineering and was learning programming languages like Flutter, HTML, and CSS. She’d tried software engineering because it was touted as a more lucrative career. The average salary of marketing personnel hovered at N200,000 or less, while software engineers were paid significantly more at the entry level.
She took up courses on FreeCodeCamp and recruited a friend as an accountability partner. Soon, she realised that software development was too boring for her, especially when she saw the way her friend’s eyes lit up when he talked about projects and debugging.
Then came a quirky opportunity: a freelance gig writing about dog breeds on WordPress for N15,000 a month. It was her first paid foray into digital content for a business. She’d write about different breeds—Lhasas, Shih Tzus, Rottweilers—detailing their features and what prospective owners should look out for before purchasing. It was modest, but writing the posts and tweaking them for search engine optimisation (SEO) tickled her fancy. “I found those interesting—like when on WordPress, your article turns from red to yellow to green. I really enjoyed all of that,” she said. She dropped coding after five months and shifted her focus to digital content.
Her first tech job, her first layoff
Months after starting a social media manager job at an oil and gas firm, Riagbayire moved to Cloudlley, a Nigerian cloud engineering startup based in Delaware. Unlike her role at the oil and gas firm, social media marketing for a tech startup required tailoring one’s messaging to potential buyers who were mostly developers. “The goal was to attract clients for a product costing thousands of dollars,” she explained. She invested in B2B tech marketing courses and also tried to learn the language of engineers.
Cloudlley, still in pre-launch, was a whirlwind. Riagbayire built buzz for features still in development, but funding dried up, and the startup folded. “They sent everyone home,” she recalled. The layoff, though cushioned with notice and pay, was her first taste of startup volatility.
The experience did not deter her from the industry, however. She landed a social media marketing role at Chekkit, a health tech startup using blockchain to fight counterfeit pharmaceuticals. Unlike Cloudlley’s scrappy, six-person crew, Chekkit offered structure—a clear hierarchy with distinct sales, engineering, and marketing teams. “I learned most of what I know working at this company,” Benita said. Under a supportive manager who accommodated her student schedule, she learned marketing automation, wielding HubSpot to streamline email campaigns and social media scheduling. Six months into her role, she led a campaign to partner with the University of Ibadan and visit secondary schools for CSR initiatives.
She worked closely with the engineering team to guarantee accurate data collection and set up a system to nurture new users beyond the initial download. “It’s not enough to get people to install the app,” she explained. “Without automation to keep them engaged, you lose them to churn.” Her efforts paid off, driving a 40% spike in Chekkit app downloads.
A Turbulent turn
Even as she thrived at Chekkit, Benita remained open to new opportunities. A digital marketing associate role at Figg Africa, a crowdfunding platform, promised a step up. But the reality was far less rosy. The team was smaller than Cloudlley’s, piling an avalanche of responsibilities on her plate. She managed client relationships, forged partnerships, and leaned heavily on her email marketing skills, honed through courses and practice. “It was a lot,” she said. The company culture, she admitted, was “terrible,” and the strain eventually pushed her to resign.
What was most ironic about this time, she says, was that in the same month as her resignation, she was presented with the Most Promising Product Marketer award at the No Code Tech Summit, organised by one of Nigeria’s leading tech communities for non-coding professionals. “It was insane,” she said.
Despite her experience at Fig Africa, she sharpened her ability to build marketing processes from scratch. But balancing this work as a student demanded prioritisation. “There’s no perfect balance,” she said. “It’s about knowing when school or work comes first and managing expectations.”
Amid the intensity of 2023, Benita briefly joined . Her role involved amplifying the outlet’s digital presence and managing audience engagement.
Marketing at a unicorn tech startup
Now at Oyster HR, a startup valued at over $1 billion, Riagbayire focuses on the technical backend of lifecycle marketing. “Everything led to this moment,” she says of her current role.
Her past coding experience, law degree, and moot court experience in data privacy are as crucial as the skills she’s developed in her past marketing roles. I asked her if she worried that her honesty about her skill level at the time would cost her the opportunity, but Riagbayire said she wasn’t. Her other skills made her a valuable asset to any company. “I also think that people [for] who use that strategy [fake it till you make it], it may not work, depending on how technical the role is,” she added. “My personal advice is not to lie during an interview about your qualifications because there is a high chance you will get caught in a structured environment.”
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