So I Guess I’m a Vibe Coder Now?

If you’ve never spent money in Nigeria, you won’t understand why I lost a week of sleep over this.

Imagine if on Venmo or PayPal, every single payment required you to open your banking app, wait for it to load, manually type in a 10-digit account number someone called out to you, verify their name, enter the amount, send it, and then both of you stood there waiting for a text confirmation before anyone moved.

Now imagine that’s how every Nigerian pays for coffee, groceries, their Uber, street food, literally everything.

9 steps. Anywhere from 3 to 30 minutes. Every single time.

I’d lived in Apple Pay and Cashapp bliss most of my life until my recent trip to Lagos where I was now standing at a supermarket, waiting for over 45 minutes in silent frustration for an “alert” that actually wouldn’t come for yet another 24 minutes and 8 seconds. Yes, I counted.

That’s where Ding! started.

What Ding! actually is

A scan-to-pay trigger layer for everyday Nigeria. The vendor generates a QR code. The customer scans it. Both sides pick an account. Both sides confirm. Both sides Ding! 🔔

No new wallet. No bank switching. It runs entirely on the rails that already exist: NIBSS, Paystack, and Mono. The process is simply collapsed into three steps instead of nine.

The week itself

I built the first version of this overnight, mostly out of frustration and a refusal to accept that this was just how things had to be.

What followed was the most chaotic, humbling, and occasionally embarrassing week of my building life.

I didn’t understand half the error messages I was reading.

“DNS zone not enabled.”

“No pending offer.”

“Invalid redirect URI.”

Each one felt like a wall. Each one eventually became a doorway, but only after I’d stared at it long enough to actually understand what it meant instead of just wanting it to go away.

There were moments I genuinely questioned every decision that led me here. And there were moments, usually right after fixing the thing that broke, where I felt more alive than I had in months.

By Tuesday, May 26th 1:35 PM, something that had only existed in my head was live. Real people could scan a QR code, pick a bank, and watch money move between two test accounts in real time. Both sides dinged.

Where it is now

www.dingafrica.com is live.

We’re in test mode, using sandbox banking rails and two dedicated test accounts so anyone can experience the full flow without needing a real BVN.

Fifteen people found the waitlist without me even asking.

A feature went up on Bold Journey.

A real investor’s content found its way into my notifications at exactly the right moment.

None of this is finished.

Most of it is still held together by conviction and a few well-placed seed scripts in Supabase.

But it’s real, and it works, and fifteen strangers believed in it enough to type their email into a form.

Why I’m writing this down

I think founders are taught to only show the highlight reel: the launch, the funding, the feature.

But the actual texture of building something is 90% confusion and 10% breakthrough, and I don’t want to forget what that 90% felt like.

This is the first of what I hope is many honest entries about building Ding!, not just the wins, but the version of me hunched over a terminal at 2 AM trying to figure out why a payment offer kept disappearing into the void.

If you want to try it yourself, the waitlist is open.

And if you want the full test experience, two devices, real-time scan-to-pay, the whole thing, email me. I’ll set you up.

🔔