Peter Olaopa is a technology professional and entrepreneur with a proven track record across enterprise solutions and consumer-facing product development.
His technical foundation spans over a decade of implementing and managing business technology solutions, with deep expertise in Microsoft Technologies, Dynamics 365 CRM, Power Platform, SharePoint, Azure DevOps, and the broader Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Peter have led complex end-to-end digital workplace implementations, managed cross-functional teams, and resolved high-stakes technical challenges across enterprise environments.
In this interview with Sodiq Ajala, Peter discusses his journey building ProsHQ.io, Nigeria’s first on-demand marketplace connecting busy professionals with verified, available artisans within minutes.
Excerpts:
Can you briefly introduce yourself and what you are currently building?
My name is Peter Olaopa. I am a technology professional and entrepreneur based in Lagos, Nigeria. By background I work in enterprise technology, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Power Platform, Azure, helping large organisations solve complex operational problems through software. But what I am currently building is something much closer to home.
I am the founder of ProsHQ.io, Nigeria’s first on-demand marketplace connecting busy professionals with verified, available artisans within minutes. We are coming live soon at proshq.io and we are building the trust infrastructure that Nigeria’s artisan economy has never had.
What first pushed you into technology or entrepreneurship?
Technology found me through curiosity. I was always the person in the room who wanted to understand how systems worked, not just use them, but understand the logic underneath. That curiosity led me into enterprise software, and years of implementing complex technology solutions for organisations taught me one thing above everything else: the most powerful thing technology can do is remove friction from human interactions.
Entrepreneurship came later, when I realised that removing friction for large corporations was important, but removing friction for ordinary Nigerians in their daily lives was urgent.
Was there a specific moment or problem that led you to start this journey?
Yes. When my dad moved to his house and needed to fix final fittings in the house. Few weeks later, we got robber. This same experience also has happened to a few other persons who are close to me.
This originally birthed the idea of the platform, to say if there was a system in place to get verified professionals, this wouldn’t have happened. I remember sitting in that apartment frustrated, and genuinely confused, thinking: why does this keep happening? That question became ProsHQ.
What was the earliest version of your idea, and how has it changed since then?
The earliest version was much simpler, almost naive. I thought I was building a directory. A place where you could find artisans with reviews attached. But the more I spoke to people, the more I understood that a directory solves nothing. The problem is not finding artisans. Lagos has thousands of artisans.
The problem is trusting them. That shift, from directory thinking to trust infrastructure thinking, changed everything. It changed the product, the business model, the pitch, and the ambition. ProsHQ.io has identity verification, escrow payments, AI-powered matching, and real-time job tracking. None of that was in the original idea.
What specific problem are you trying to solve, and who is most affected by it?
Nigeria’s informal artisan services market, plumbers, electricians, painters, cleaners, carpenters operates with zero trust infrastructure. No verification, no payment protection, no accountability. The people most affected are on both sides. Clients, busy Lagos professionals, lose money, time, and peace of mind to unverified, unreliable service providers.
And skilled artisans, people with genuine expertise and the desire to work, have no platform to prove their credibility, no consistent client pipeline, and no protection against clients who refuse to pay. Both sides are suffering from the same root cause: nobody built the trust layer.
Why is this problem important in the local or African context?
Nigeria’s informal artisan economy is worth over twelve billion dollars annually. That number is extraordinary. But what is more extraordinary is that it operates almost entirely without structure. There are no standards, no verification systems, no formal payment rails, no accountability mechanisms. And this is not a Nigerian problem alone, it is an African problem.
The same dynamic exists in Accra, Nairobi, Kigali, Dar es Salaam. Millions of skilled workers and millions of clients transacting with zero protection on either side. When you formalise that, when you build trust infrastructure into that market, you do not just improve convenience. You create economic dignity for workers and genuine peace of mind for clients.
What makes solving this problem difficult in your environment?
Three things make this genuinely hard. First, trust itself is the problem, which means you are trying to build trust in a market where trust has been repeatedly broken. Getting both sides to believe in a new platform requires evidence, not promises. Second, the two-sided marketplace challenge, you need taskers to attract clients and clients to attract taskers.
Getting that flywheel moving from zero is one of the hardest problems in platform businesses. Third, payment infrastructure. Nigeria has made enormous strides with Paystack and mobile money, but a significant portion of the artisan workforce still operates in cash. Getting them into a digital escrow model requires behaviour change, not just technology.
How did you take your first practical steps from idea to execution?
Before I wrote a single requirement or spoke to a single developer, I went and talked to people. Ten conversations with busy Lagos professionals. I asked them to tell me about the last time an artisan let them down and any bad experience they had with artisans in the past.
I asked what they wished existed. I tested pricing with real numbers. I listened far more than I spoke. Only after those conversations, after I had evidence, not just intuition, did I start building. I engaged an external technical team, directed the product development, and managed every decision against one filter: would Tolu, my ideal customer, a 32-year-old marketing manager in Ikeja, actually use this?
What has been your most significant milestone so far?
Honestly, was receiving the first ₦125,000 deposit from a property manager who signed a Letter of Intent. That moment, real money from a real customer, changed how I saw myself and what I was building.
What has been your hardest technical or operational challenge?
The hardest challenge has been the gap between what I could imagine and what I could articulate to a technical team. I am not a developer. I think in outcomes, not code. Translating a vision, “I want clients to feel safe and taskers to feel professional”, into specific technical requirements is a skill nobody teaches you.
I learned it through iteration, through building something and realising it was not quite right, through going back and explaining more precisely what I meant. That process was humbling and expensive in time. But it made me a much sharper product thinker.
How are you currently funding or sustaining the work?
Honestly — personal funds, determination, and a very lean operation. I have self-funded the platform development and hosting. The first external revenue signal, the ₦125,000 deposit, was small in naira terms but enormous in validation terms. I am currently in the process of raising a seed round and have been accepted into some incubation programs.
I have also applied to several international fellowships and accelerators. The unit economics are strong, 96% contribution margin means the business becomes self-sustaining quickly once transaction volume grows.
What is one decision you made that changed the direction of your journey?
Deciding to conduct customer interviews before building anything. That single decision changed everything. It would have been very easy, and very tempting, to start building the moment I had the idea. Most founders do. Instead, I spent weeks talking to strangers, asking uncomfortable questions, and listening to answers that challenged my assumptions.
Those conversations told me the problem was trust, not price discovery. They told me TRUST, SPEED, and REVIEWS were what people cared about in that order. Every feature we built, every design decision, every pitch line traces back to those conversations. Without them I would have built the wrong thing beautifully.
What failure or setback taught you the most?
Early in the process I underestimated how long it would take to communicate the product vision clearly to the technical team. The first version of certain features came back technically correct but experientially wrong. The verification flow felt clinical. The dashboard felt cluttered. The matching logic was basic.
Each of those moments taught me that as a non-technical founder, your most important skill is not technical knowledge, it is the ability to describe human experience precisely enough that someone can translate it into software. That is a writing and empathy skill as much as a product skill.
If you could restart, what would you do differently from day one?
I would start with one feature, not five. ProsHQ.io launched with verification, payments, matching, tracking, and chat all built simultaneously. In hindsight, I should have launched with verification and task posting only, put that in front of real users and let their behaviour tell me what to build next.
Trying to build everything at once stretched time, resources, and focus. The best products are not built all at once. They are grown from a single feature that works so well people cannot imagine the world without it.
Describe a typical working day for you right now.
My days are split between two very different worlds. The first half of the day belongs to my enterprise technology work, client calls, system implementations, project management. The second half belongs to ProsHQ.io, platform testing, application writing, partner conversations, investor outreach, product decisions.
By evening I am usually on my laptop with a notepad beside me, switching between building decks, writing grant applications, reviewing platform metrics, and responding to the community of early users and potential taskers we are building. It is a lot. There is no clean separation. ProsHQ.io lives in the background of every hour of my day.
Where do you usually work from, and what does that space look like?
Mostly from home, a desk by a window in Lagos. The space is organised but lived-in. There is always a notepad open with handwritten notes that somehow make more sense than anything typed.
A second monitor for switching between the platform admin panel and whatever application or document I am working on. A bottle of water that I forget to drink. Sometimes music playing softly. Lagos outside the window, which means noise, energy, movement, and the constant reminder of who you are building for.
What sounds, routines, or distractions are part of your daily building process?
Lagos itself is the constant soundtrack, generators, traffic, neighbours, the general organised chaos of the city. My most productive hours are early morning before the city fully wakes up, and late evening after everything quietens down. The distraction I battle most is the temptation to optimise what already exists rather than build what does not yet.
There is always something to tweak, something to improve, something to fix. The discipline of staying focused on what moves the needle, customer acquisition, investor conversations, product milestones, is a daily practice.
Who are the people around you during a normal working week?
The technical team I engage remotely, developers who have become genuine collaborators in building ProsHQ.io. Mentors from the African Impact Initiative network who challenge my thinking and sharpen my pitch.
Early users and potential taskers who send voice notes at odd hours with feedback, questions, and occasionally the kind of enthusiasm that reminds you why you started. Building in a lean environment means your support network is both broader and more unconventional than a traditional startup team.
What does a stressful day look like for you in practical terms?
A stressful day is when the platform has a bug I cannot reproduce, an investor has gone quiet after what felt like a promising conversation, and a grant deadline is forty-eight hours away. It is the particular stress of a solo founder, there is no one to hand the problem to.
You are the product manager, the sales person, the support team, and the chief worry officer all at once. On those days I usually step away from the screen for thirty minutes, write down the three most important things I need to do, and do only those. Everything else waits.
What does a good day feel like when things are working well?
A good day is when a pilot user uses the platform for the first time and messages me to say it worked. When a tasker tests their verification and sends a voice note saying they feel like a professional for the first time. When an investor responds with genuine curiosity.
When I look at what we have built and feel, not just think, but feel that this is real and it is going to matter. Those days do not come every week. But when they do, they carry you through all the harder ones.
What keeps you going on difficult days?
Two things. The first is the woman I interviewed who told me she had not fixed her broken air conditioning for 3 weeks because she simply did not trust anyone enough to let them into her home. Four months of Lagos heat. Not because of money. Because of trust.
I think about her often. The second is the electrician who had been working informally for eleven years with no way to prove his competence to anyone outside his personal network. Both of them deserve better than what the current system offers. On difficult days, I build for them.
What personal sacrifice has been necessary to keep this venture alive?
Time — mostly. Time that would have gone to rest, to social events, to things that do not move the needle. There is a particular kind of loneliness in building something that nobody around you fully understands yet. People see you working constantly and assume it must be going well, or assume it must be failing.
The reality is messier and more patient than either. The sacrifice is tolerating that ambiguity without losing momentum, keeping going on the days when there is no visible progress, no validation, no signal that it is working. That tolerance is its own kind of sacrifice.
How has this journey changed how you see yourself?
I see myself as someone who can figure things out. That sounds simple but it is not. Before ProsHQ.io, my competence was defined by a domain, I was good at Microsoft Dynamics, good at enterprise implementations. ProsHQ.io forced me to be good at customer research, product management, fundraising, writing, pitching, community building, and a dozen other things I had never formally studied.
Every new challenge I navigated without breaking changed something in how I see my own capacity. I am more patient with uncertainty than I used to be. And I am less impressed by credentials and more impressed by people who simply keep building.
What kind of impact do you hope your work will have in the next 3 to 5 years?
In three to five years I want ProsHQ.io to have formalised the working lives of tens of thousands of artisans across Nigeria and at least two other African markets. I want a skilled plumber in Surulere to have a verified professional identity, a consistent income, and a savings history built through the platform.
I want a client in Abuja to find a trusted electrician in few mins without a single WhatsApp message. And I want ProsHQ.io to have demonstrated, concretely, with data that trust infrastructure in informal economies creates economic dignity, not just economic efficiency.
What is the next big step or ambition for your venture?
Closing the seed round and deploying the AI matching engine. Those two things, capital and intelligence, are what take ProsHQ.io from a working pilot to a scalable platform. The AI matching is particularly important because it is what separates us from every generic marketplace.
Scoring taskers by skills, ratings, proximity, and availability in real time, and explaining the match to the client, is the feature that makes ProsHQ.io feel like it actually knows what you need. That, combined with the mobile app, is what turns early traction into a platform with genuine network effects.
If someone is reading your story today, what do you want them to learn from it?
That evidence beats intuition every time. Talk to people before you build. Listen more than you pitch. The best product decisions I made came from conversations with strangers who told me the truth about their frustration.
And that proximity to the problem is a competitive advantage, not a liability. Being Nigerian, building for Nigerians, living with this problem every day that is not a limitation. That is the deepest possible form of market knowledge. Build where you understand the pain. Build for the people you know. That is where the real solutions come from.
Is there anything people usually do not ask, but you think is important to know?
Nobody ever asks about the taskers. Every conversation about ProsHQ.io focuses on the client experience the convenience, the trust, the peace of mind. And those things matter enormously. But the story I am most proud of is on the other side. The electrician who worked informally for eleven years. The painter who could not prove his skill to anyone outside his neighbourhood.
The plumber who got paid in cash with no record, no review, no professional identity. ProsHQ.io gives them something the market never gave them before, a platform that says: you are a professional, your work has value, and you deserve to be paid fairly and on time. That is the impact that keeps me building. Not the app. The dignity.
