The Root Question is a recurring interview series. Same ten questions. New subject every edition. The format is simple: we find someone who has been building something quietly, for a long time, without the recognition that the work deserves, and we ask them the questions that other interviews skip. This month’s subject is a co-founder of a Nigerian telemedicine platform that asked to remain unnamed. The platform allows people without reliable data, without bus fare, without the luxury of a half-day hospital queue, to reach a real doctor from a basic phone. The work is five years old. The honesty in these answers is older than that.
1. What does it do in one honest sentence, not the pitch version, the plain version?
It lets someone in Mushin who does not have airtime, does not have data, and does not have the bus fare to get to a hospital text a code on a Nokia phone and talk to a real doctor. That is it. Everything else is plumbing.
The pitch version would say something about democratising access to quality healthcare through omnichannel digital infrastructure. The plain version is that we built it because the woman who sells pure water at the junction cannot take half a day off to sit in a General Hospital queue, and her child is the one who suffers for it.
2. What was the actual moment that made you decide to build this? Not the polished origin story. The real one.
The polished version involves market gaps and TAM and WHO statistics about doctor-to-patient ratios in sub-Saharan Africa. All of that is true. But it is not the reason.
The reason is small and specific and slightly embarrassing to say out loud because it sounds like a story you would invent for a pitch. Somebody we knew, a relative of a colleague, not even a close one, died from something that should not have killed her. She had symptoms for weeks. She did not go to a hospital because the nearest one she trusted was too far, and the one nearby she did not trust. By the time anyone took her seriously, it was septic and it was over. She was thirty-four.
The thing that haunted us afterwards was not the death itself. It was the realisation that she had a phone. A basic one. She was on WhatsApp. She had data sometimes. There were probably ten different moments in those weeks where, if there had been a way for her to just describe what was happening to someone medical, without it being a whole expedition, she would still be alive. That is the moment. Not a vision. Not a market insight. Just somebody we did not save who we could have, theoretically, with the right infrastructure in place.
3. What is the hardest thing about building this that nobody outside the work understands?
That trust is the entire product. People think the hard thing is the technology. The technology is the easy part. You can build a USSD shortcode in two weeks. You can integrate with a telco in three months if you have the right person making calls.
What you cannot build in a sprint is the willingness of a forty-seven-year-old market woman in Aba to dial a code on her phone and tell a stranger about a lump in her breast that she has not told her husband about. That is the actual product. Everything else is just the wrapper.
You cannot growth-hack trust. You cannot run an ad campaign that makes someone trust you with their body. It comes from showing up consistently, from the doctor on the other end not being dismissive, from her friend saying I used it and they were kind to me. It is built in increments so small you cannot see them happening, and then one day there is a thing where there was nothing, and you cannot reverse-engineer how it got there. People outside the work see the app, the website, the SMS flow. They do not see that the entire thing is a five-year exercise in not betraying anyone.
4. What do you do when the work feels pointless? And has there been a moment where you genuinely considered stopping?
Yes. More than one.
The one that comes back to me is a Sunday last year. I had been on calls all week. The previous month’s numbers were not what we had told a potential partner they would be. A doctor on our network had been rude to a patient and the patient had told her cousin and the cousin had posted about it, and we were managing the fallout. The team’s salaries were due in four days and the runway conversation was the kind where you start doing maths in your head about how many months you personally could go without taking your own salary.
On top of all of that, I went to see my mother. She asked me what I did for a living. I tried to explain it. She nodded the way she does when she is being kind but not really following. I went home and sat on my bed and thought: I am giving my one life to a thing that the person who knows me best in the world cannot describe to her friends.
What do I do when it feels pointless. Honestly. I open the dashboard. I look at how many consultations happened that day. Two hundred and something. And I think, two hundred people who otherwise would have done nothing, or self-medicated, or gone to a chemist who sold them the wrong drug, or waited until it got worse. Two hundred. Today.
That is the only argument that works on me when nothing else does. The number is not vanity. The number is people. I have not stopped. I have wanted to. There is a version of this where I quit, take a job at a multinational, and sleep through the night. I think about that version sometimes. But I have never been able to get out of bed in that version. So I stay.
5. There are easier places to build a healthcare company. Why here?
Because the easier places already have it. Because every functional healthcare system in the world was built by people who refused to leave a hard place. And because if we do not build it, the version that gets built will be built by people who do not know what it is to wait six hours at a General Hospital with a sick child on your lap. The system will be designed for someone else.
We are building it because we know who we are designing for, and the people designing it elsewhere do not. Also, frankly, because we are from here. That is a reason on its own. You do not need a thesis to want to fix the place you are from.
6. What is something you got badly wrong that you have not publicly admitted until now?
We spent close to nine months building a feature that almost nobody used. It was elegant. The team was proud of it. It demoed beautifully. We launched it, watched the usage numbers, and the usage numbers were essentially zero. We kept telling ourselves it was an onboarding problem, then a marketing problem, then a market education problem. We kept pouring resource into rescuing it because nobody wanted to be the person who said the thing.
The thing was that we had built it for ourselves. For the version of the user that exists in the room when you are designing, the one who behaves like you, thinks like you, has your phone, your data plan, your reading level. We had not built it for the actual person on the other end of the SMS. We killed it eventually. Quietly. No blog post about the pivot. We just stopped. The lesson I have not fully admitted publicly until now is that we are not as user-obsessed as we tell investors we are. We are user-obsessed until our own ego is at stake. Then we are like everybody else.
7. What do the doctors on your platform tell you when they think you are not listening?
That they are tired. That a lot of what they handle in a given day could have been prevented if the person had reached someone three weeks earlier. That they are frustrated by patients who do not finish their medication and then come back worse. That some of them think telemedicine is going to flatten the profession into a call centre, and they are not entirely wrong to worry.
That the pay is okay but it is not why they stay. They stay because every now and again somebody types in a symptom they recognise as serious and they get to be the person who says you need to go to a hospital tonight, do not wait until morning, and that person does, and they live. The doctor never finds out for sure that they saved a life. But they suspect they did, and that is enough for the week.
8. What is the most uncomfortable thing you will like to share with us on the root question about raising money for a healthcare company in this region right now?
That a lot of the rooms you walk into are full of people who have never used the product they are evaluating. Who do not know anyone who would use it. Whose mothers go to private hospitals or hospitals abroad. And you are sitting there explaining a USSD code to somebody who has not dialled one in fifteen years, and you can see their eyes glaze, and you know the deal will not happen. Not because the business is wrong, but because the business is invisible to them.
The uncomfortable thing is the realisation that the capital is not always located near the problem. You spend a non-trivial percentage of your time as a founder translating reality to people who are funding you to fix a reality they have personally been insulated from. It is not their fault. But it is exhausting.
9. Who on your team would the public never hear about, but without whom none of this exists?
The customer support team. There are three of them. They handle WhatsApp, SMS, and inbound calls. They are on every single day, including Sundays, including public holidays. They are the ones who talk a panicking mother through what to do at eleven at night when her baby has a fever. They are the ones who, when a doctor is late to a consultation, hold the patient on the line and keep them from logging off. They are the ones who hear the things the doctors do not hear, the family situation, the money worry, the husband who does not know.
If you removed the engineering team for a week, the platform would still run. If you removed the support team for a day, the trust we have spent five years building would start cracking by lunchtime. They are paid the least. They should be paid the most. That is a sentence I want on the record.
10. If you were not here to see it, what would you want the platform to have become?
The honest answer is not a household name. It is something quieter than that.
I would want it to have become the kind of thing that twenty years from now a Nigerian university student writes a thesis about, and the thesis is not about us. It is about a generation of women in low-income communities who started catching their health problems earlier, and the data shows an inflection point somewhere around 2025, and the thesis identifies several contributing factors, and we are one of them. Not the headline. One of the contributors. A footnote in a story about people living longer. That would be enough.
In the Root Question, each edition features a different practitioner, founder, or builder answering the same ten questions. If you would like to nominate someone for a future edition, write to us at Zanaposh.
