About Forward

Forward is a consulting firm that works exclusively with independent consultants to help startups build their engineering organizations.

About the Work

Company Stage: Seed

Keywords: API Design, Payments, Engineering Management

Term: 3-4 months

Rate: $150-$200 / hour

Hours per week: 10

Timeline: Targetting a late September start

Timezone Constraints: 3 hours overlap with CET

Geographic Constraints: None

Context:

We’re working with a Nigerian company that manufactures and distributes consumer packaged goods (pharmaceuticals, household goods, packaged food) to thousands of retail outlets per day via a network of sales reps. All of their sales transactions currently happen in cash which causes a wide variety of logistical and observability issues for them.

Virtually every retail outlet in the country is plugged into the country’s recently developed telephony-based agency banking system. They’d like to develop a next generation payments network on top of this system to support their day to day operations and eventually to enable folks in Nigeria, for whom 90-95% of transactions are cash, to move to electronic payments.

They currently have a small team of contractors working on a mobile app that you’d be working alongside and supporting. The mobile app is used by the company’s sales reps and currently has no built in payments functionality.

About You

Roughly in order of importance: