Building Disruptive Products by Harnessing Power Users (with Moustapha Seck, Founder @ Fluid)

An interview with Moustapha Seck. Moustapha is a seasoned product professional and entrepreneur who cut his teeth in Canada before being inspired to go back to Africa to use his product management skills to build solutions for the poorest Africans. He's doing this with his new startup, Fluid, which aims to help derisk financial inclusion for marginalised communities.

We speak about a lot, including:

• How he started out in engineering and moved into product management after finding that he got more joy out of working with & designing solutions for his users
• The core elements of product management, how they're not complicated individually but difficult to execute consistently, and how mentors can help you understand what's OK and what's not
• His journey from Canada to Africa to Canada to Africa and how the classic book Zero to One inspired him to tackle meaningful problems for Africa's poorest communities
• How Africa has a lot of opportunities to fix things as so many basic things don't work, how he identified the key problem to solve and the research he had to do to validate his idea
• The importance of leaving technology out of it when dealing with marginalised communities & how you have to do way more listening than talking in order to build trust
• His desire for entrepreneurs and investors to look across Africa, not just concentrate on the biggest markets and how to pick the right markets to enter into there
• Why it's important to enlist power users to build advocacy and help you co-create solutions in traditional industries that are not used to trying out new solutions
• The need to keep your power users close, but not too close as you try to work out how to build for the wider market and prepare to scale the business

And much more!

Check out Saeed Khan's episode

Moustapha called out some mentors that have shaped his product management career, including my good friend & previous podcast guest Saeed Khan.

Check out Check out Saeed's episode here!

Check out Fluid

If you're interested in Moustapha's company or the mission behind it, you can check out fluidfinance.co.

Contact Moustapha

You can find Moustapha on LinkedIn.