From Personal Pain to 1,000-Person Validation: How to Know if You're Solving a Real Problem

​Nathan Agama lost containers of goods in 2022. He could have quit. Instead, he went to Alaba International Market in Lagos and talked to 1,000+ traders.

​He kept hearing the same stories: suppliers disappearing with money, payments getting blocked, accounts frozen. Not edge cases. Universal problems.

​Those conversations became Brydge—now processing cross-border transactions across 12 African trade corridors, backed by Mastercard Foundation.

​What you'll learn:

• ​How to validate problems when your customers don't fill out surveys

• ​Questions that separate real pain from complaints

• ​Why Nathan's first solution (Compound Capital) failed and what he built instead

• ​Building for people who've been scammed and don't trust new platforms

• ​When 100 conversations isn't enough

​Nathan will walk through the actual validation process—what worked, what didn't, and how to know if your problem is worth solving.

​Speaker: Nathan Kosisochukwu Agama, Co-Founder & CEO, Brydge