The invoice is a WhatsApp message

Before I built Brik, I looked at a lot of invoicing products. Nearly all of them assumed the same things: an invoice is a document, it goes by email, the customer pays by card or direct debit, and it all ends up neatly in accounting software.

Then I paid attention to how the businesses around me in Lagos actually get paid.

The invoice is a WhatsApp message. Sometimes it’s typed out, sometimes it’s a photo of a handwritten list, sometimes it’s just “Your total is 47,500.” The customer pays by transfer from their phone, usually while the chat is still open, and the receipt is a screenshot. When payment is late, the reminder is a “Good morning ma” you have to word carefully, because the customer might also be your neighbour, someone from church, or a regular you don’t want to lose.

This way of doing business works. It’s fast, it runs on trust, it works on any phone and it costs nothing. A lot of software treats it as something informal that needs fixing, and asks the business to drop what works for something that might.

It has its costs, though, and the people using it feel them. The records are buried in chats, so showing a bank your income is almost impossible. Who owes what lives in the owner’s head. Old debts are left alone because chasing them is awkward. The owner knows roughly who owes what, and roughly isn’t good enough when you need a loan, want to plan for growth, want to sell the business, or just want to know if you’re really making a profit.

So with Brik I never asked how to get Nigerian businesses to send proper invoices. I asked how to leave WhatsApp and transfers alone and quietly add the records on top. A Brik invoice is a link you drop into the chat you already have open. The customer taps it, sees what they owe and pays by transfer like they always do. Confirmation happens on its own, and the records build up from things people were doing anyway. Nobody had to learn a new way of working, and nothing changed between the business and its customer.

We saw this early. In the first builds, anything that asked people to change how they work didn’t get used. Anything that fit into what they already did got used. I’ve built with that in mind ever since.

If you run a business and you’re looking at software, or AI, remember that the vendor’s demo is built on the textbook version of your process. Start somewhere else: what do my staff and customers actually do today, with the tools they already trust? Go for things that fit into that. Be careful with anything that only pays off once your customers start behaving differently.

The gap between how business is supposed to work and how it really works here is useful. It tells you things for free, and most people building for Africa from far away don’t look at it. Products built around it look obvious afterwards. That gap is where I build, and it’s what these essays are about.

I’m writing one of these every week. If you’re dealing with that question of what your market actually does, they’re for you.