Your First Product Isn’t an App, It’s a Network

A Conversation with Mélanie Keita, CEO and co‑founder of Melanin Kapital

You don’t build a lender in Africa on vibes and a pitch deck. If your product is money, you either start rich or you start so deeply networked that other people are willing to lend you their balance sheet and credibility.

That was the uncomfortable through‑line in my conversation with Mélanie Keïta , CEO and co‑founder of Melanin Kapital, a carbon neobank financing SMEs in the green economy across multiple African markets. She’s blunt about it: in hindsight, she wishes she had been “rich first” before starting a financial institution at 27, because trying to build a lending business while broke is structurally stacked against you. Your whole business is trust around money, and both are in shortest supply when you’re starting from zero.

Mélanie’s workaround was to lean hard on social capital. Instead of pretending she had deep pockets, she leveraged relationships with development banks and impact investors to access low‑interest facilities that could seed her loan book. That early trust from institutions didn’t come from a cleverly worded cold email; it came from years spent inside the system, learning how it works and building credibility one relationship at a time.

This is where most founder advice falls short. We tell technical founders to “focus on product” and outsource everything else. Mélanie argues almost the opposite: yes, delegate modelling, marketing and even parts of product, but never fully delegate relationships. As a CEO in African financial services, she believes you should spend 30–40% of your time on what looks from the outside like “soft work”: coffees with bankers, lunches with regulators, long calls with DFI officers, and slow, patient conversations that turn titles into real human allies.

It’s not conference selfies and business cards. It’s the grind of understanding the head of SME at a local bank well enough that they’ll push your integration through risk and legal; knowing the civil servant who will quietly flag an upcoming regulatory change; building enough trust with a DFI programme officer that they will fight internally to get you concessional capital instead of a PR grant. In Mélanie’s world view, these aren’t add‑ons. They are features of the product. The quality of your partners, your cost of capital, your regulatory goodwill—these are downstream of your trust graph.

For founders who aren’t sitting on family wealth, that might be the most important (and uncomfortable) lesson: your first product isn’t your app, it’s your network. If you can’t yet write your own cheques, you need to be the kind of person the people who can write cheques are willing to bet on. That doesn’t happen by accident, and it definitely doesn’t happen from behind a laptop.

We go much deeper into all of this on the latest episode of The Grinders Table - how Mélanie survived multiple pivots, why she thinks “fake it till you make it” is a fast track to handcuffs, and what it really takes to build a carbon neobank in Africa’s current climate.

If this resonates, do yourself a favour and listen to the full conversation with Mélanie Keita here on the web 🔗 The Grinders Table podcast.