Note 0: Chasing Scale!
Scale is the inevitable consequence of desire meeting a well-communicated solution.
I shared the quote above with my friend Ibijoke Faseun when we caught up recently. The last six months have been a season of clarity for me, and I am grateful for the gift of amazing people and family.
We have been building Quick Leap for a while now, and we have experienced several consequential inflection points.
At inception, the idea was to build a platform where individuals and families could source and buy fresh food. As we went about implementing that idea, we quickly discovered that the smallholder farmers we sought to work with were mostly sparsely populated. This meant we needed to build an aggregating solution, ensure quality, put financial services in place, and handle last-mile delivery.
So we had farmers, processors, aggregators, logistics partners, banks as primary payment partners, and a team ensuring quality. It was a lot of moving parts.
To achieve the kind of scale that would make sense for everyone, we decided to focus on processors who needed harvests from our farmers at a scale worthwhile for them, the farmers, and of course, for us.
We found some success in the access-to-markets model. At that point, the mission of Quick Leap was to provide access to markets for smallholder farmers. In the first six months, we did a couple of tens of thousands of dollars in revenue. Then the pot went dry.
We learned that spot trading commodities is a game of slim margins and heavy seasonality. As we grew, we also realized the need to digitize the system. We essentially had the building blocks of a functional ecosystem, even though it was fundamentally spreadsheets and people executing in the field at that time.
Every initiative, business, nonprofit, etc. will grow to the extent of the growth of the individuals building it. Another way to say this is that the growth of a business mirrors the growth of the team, aided by the good graces of its customers.
As I grew, the mission evolved.
The mission became: Providing good food for everyone, everywhere, every time.
How we arrived here is another story on its own.
Remember when I said we had the building blocks of a functional ecosystem? One of the key insights I had at the time was that whoever could build this ecosystem end-to-end and scale market share would win the market. So from day zero, we were thinking scale.
Scale is an amazing goal if the desire is to reach more people with a well-thought-out and well-communicated solution. So I dusted off my design skills, picked up Figma, and began designing the initial interface for what would become our current ecosystem of solutions.
One thing about building tech for food is this, tech itself is a vehicle. It enables food production, capture, storage, processing, distribution, and delivery. Mostly, it carries the outputs of the system. The quality of what is grown is an entirely different conversation.
Good food is the intentional outcome of well-designed and well-implemented food systems. Every detail matters, from understanding the people the food is grown for (age distribution, nutritional needs, requirements) to the infrastructure that moves food from production to consumption while preserving its life and nourishment.
Tech enables and transports the inputs and outputs of food systems.
Our previous approach did not adequately account for food quality, not because we lacked quality checks, but because we had not been intentional about what seeds were planted, how they were grown and harvested, and how they reached the people who needed them.
Let me explain why this matters.
Sometime in 2021, I had a dream. I was in a lineup of trucks loaded with food, all moving in one direction. I stepped out of the truck I was in and walked in the opposite direction. I didn’t fully understand the dream until a few months ago, thanks to my friend Titi Oyekoya.
Our previous model aggregated what was grown, but we couldn’t be certain what was planted, what seeds were used, how they were grown, and under what conditions.
As we grew, we built a product called Collaborator, a tool for food system actors to source what they need to grow good food and sell what they produce in one place. We tied supply from this ecosystem to community-driven demand through Grow for Life, allowing individuals and businesses to source food locally and globally.
At one point, we structured communications to capture export markets and worked with an exporter. That experience taught us a lot. I’ll write about it another time.
We built a wallet that enabled food system actors to receive payments immediately after a sale. We added tools to improve the ecosystem experience. We began developing a community feature for Collaborator. At that point, I was heavy on tech and what it could do. I was optimizing for scale ⚖️.
On Grow for Life, we built subscriptions for weekly, biweekly, and monthly deliveries of good food. We accounted for household age distribution so we could recommend food with the right nutritional makeup for growth and health.
We even built a platform allowing independent logistics partners to receive orders directly from the ecosystem of farmers, traders, processors, chefs, restaurant owners, wholesalers, and retailers.
We did one thing right: we focused on nutrition from infancy to adulthood. This applied to food businesses too; they wanted raw materials of the highest quality.
Every product, feature, and decision optimized for scale — more food, more producers, more participants.
And that’s where I missed something.
I lost sight of the most important part of our mission: Good Food!
I also lost sight of the real needs of our food system actors.
It was like we had “the cone without the ice cream”.
Feedback is the pulse of any business that thrives. We gathered feedback through surveys and exhibitions. People loved the idea and the products, but scale didn’t come. In hindsight, I’m grateful it didn’t.
Another mistake was my belief that we needed all the infrastructure before executing. That didn’t happen.
In May 2025, I traveled to Abuja for a friend’s wedding and stayed longer than planned. God has a way of orchestrating clarity. I knew something had to give.
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One recurring piece of feedback stood out: access to affordable capital.
Food capture, production, storage, processing, and distribution require significant resources. The cost of money directly affects food prices in markets, compounded by how many times food is traded before reaching consumers.
Farmer → Trader → Market
Farmer → Trader → Wholesaler/Retailer → You
Time away brought clarity.
On an organic farm outside Abuja, one that demonstrated good food could be produced at scale without harmful chemicals and still be profitable.
I found the answers I had been seeking.
I realized I had been chasing scale without paying attention to the quality of the very thing our tech was meant to deliver: Good food.
Let me share a series of important moments;
In 2024, at the Africa Food Systems Summit in Kigali, Rwanda, I led a team in a global hackathon. We came second with a solution called AFMA — Agri Finance and Market Alliance. The idea stuck.
Accessible and affordable capital was such an issue globally as all the individuals on the team acknowledged, we explored interest rates for the food space across nations, the figures were intriguing.
In 2025, I spoke at The World Food Day Forum on Financing good food systems for good food outcomes.
I think earlier in 2025 at a brunch organized by Anuoluwa Somoye for people in the food space at UNILAG I had met the amazing PG — Gabriel Evergreen, he spoke with divine precision the things that had been on my heart.
The phrase “the cone without the ice cream” actually came from him, he described with divine precision in prophesy the gaps I knew we needed to fill to have the mission to produce good food for everyone, everywhere every time a reality.
I had left that meeting knowing we needed to finance the process as i had always known, but I did not know the how.
A good part of spending time away was reflecting on instructions and inspiration I had not attended to, this was how I got back to one of the very consequential ones “Pay attention to crypto”
By the way every instruction from God is consequential, I am a person of faith and this is seen and experienced in everything I do.
At this point I was no longer chasing scale, I was seeking alignment, looking to find where I got it wrong, and we have found a path to a clear solution, an assignment that gives meaning to everything we have done in the past.
I had been praying at home some months back and I was inspired again FOOD + DEFI.
At this point everything converged.
We realized we needed to finance good food outcomes.
That path led us here.
We are now building a financial layer on global food systems.
We developed The Food Finance Fund, a key component of Doughfi. We call this moment The Dawn of the Dough.
It is designed to deliver:
- Accessible and affordable financing for good food systems
- Supply chain transparency
- Unified payment rails across TradFi, CeFi, and DeFi
- Tokenized real-world food assets for retail and institutional investors
- World-class intelligence for winning in the future financial system
A supercharged vehicle to deliver global liquidity to food systems and finance the good food outcomes we all desire.
I’ll likely write more episodes of Chasing Scale.
But for now, I am running back to building Doughfi.
Thank you for reading, I will see you on the next NOTE.
Cheers,
Damion of Doughfi
