Odufa Oshiomah is a writer-turned-marketer and operator whose career is defined by scrappiness, community, and steady skill-stacking. From getting paid to transcribe recorded conversations for a brand coach’s women-focused support project to building income through small businesses, writing gigs, and marketing roles, her path shows how referrals and curiosity can compound a financial life, without chasing “money for money’s sake.”
The Beginning
Odufa’s first paid work started with volunteering. In 2020, fresh in 100L, a friend introduced her to a brand coach who ran a passion project supporting women navigating divorce and abuse. The coach would record conversations from her sessions, and Odufa would help transcribe them. “I transcribed…their conversations,” she says, describing it as “basically the first thing I did for money.”
It didn’t stay there. The coach asked her to take on additional tasks. “She reached out to me and asked me if I could do something extra… then… a little bit more,” Odufa recalls. It became her entry point into writing. The coach wanted to start an email newsletter and asked Odufa to draft the first edition. Odufa sent it in expecting heavy edits, especially because the coach had told her she’d block out time for feedback, but when the coach read it, she had no notes. Odufa remembers the moment clearly: the coach told her she was a “natural,” and that was when she realized she could write.
Not long after, the arrangement became formal. The coach placed her on a fixed monthly salary of ₦12,000 per month. It wasn’t life-changing money, but it mattered because she loved what she was doing
Early Hustles and the “Multiple Streams” Era
Around the same time, Odufa experimented with entrepreneurship. She ran a bag business, and when she earned her first pay, she thought she pushed it straight back into that hustle: “I had a bag business… I think I put it into that.”
The bag business didn’t last long, “about five months,” but she didn’t stop trying. In 2021, she added another stream: snacks. She was staying in a private hostel around UNILAG. She noticed a simple truth: people would pay for convenience, especially premium items. So she stocked higher-priced snacks and leaned into margin. “I was selling Pringles… all those big snacks that I could put like an insane amount of profit on,” she says. She wasn’t selling ₦100 items. “Most of my things started from ₦500 and above… because the people there could afford it.”
2021 became a blended year: her work with the coach, her bag business, and the snack hustle all ran at different points, and then life interrupted. Toward the end of 2021, she had an accident, and by the start of 2022, she deliberately decided to stop everything. “I really took January off, quitting her job and packing her bag shop.
Part of that reset was also structural: she moved from UNILAG to the College of Medicine, which made her want to slow down and heal.
Discovering Marketing
February 2022 became the turning point. She joined AIESEC (a community for young people focused on leadership), and then another strike happened, and school was paused again.
At first, she regretted the clean break she’d made in January by quitting her job, but that didn’t last as a friend introduced her to someone running a digital marketing agency. She completed her course and then began working with the agency, which paid an average of ₦15,000 monthly.
She also applied to write for a publishing company and got paid per word. Altogether, he earned ₦80k per month.
By late 2022, school resumed abruptly and intensely. She dropped both publishing and agency work, and in early 2023 she got more deeply involved in AIESEC, which changed her self-perception. Before then, she was doing lots of “small small” jobs like writing here, content there, but then AIESEC helped sharpen her marketing skills.
In mid-2023, she got a paid opportunity through the same network: community management for a client, which paid ₦50k per month. The contract ended quickly, and the next opportunity came: a real estate social media job. It paid ₦100k per month and ran through early 2024.
The Big Leap
In January 2024, she landed her current role at an aviation company, marking her biggest leap in purchasing power to date. In September 2024, after adding her full-time job, a former client reached out again with another opportunity: creative operations for a creative studio. For a while, she ran that role alongside her current role, but it ended.
At this point, she stopped taking low-fee work. “I wasn’t taking gigs of like 10k, 20k anymore… everything was starting from like 80k, 100k above.” She became focused on other interesting gigs that paid more.
The New Approach: Saving by Design
Odufa is learning financial literacy more intentionally because “nobody ever taught me… budgeting, etc.” And as her family’s situation shifted, she had to adjust. So her approach has changed: she saves aggressively and tries to remove temptation.
She describes it as a protective system because she knows her weakness. “I’m so bad with money,” she says. So she’s building guardrails now, while she’s still in school, still learning, and still preparing for a bigger professional leap later, and by her own account, her spending today is mostly essentials. “Just basic survival,” she says. No excessive luxury cycles, no pressure to show off, just a focus on school, skills, and stacking leverage patiently.
I’ve lived many lives, but one lesson ties them all together: money is only as powerful as its utility. Through my work, I share stories about money and create guides for Africans who want to get the best out of theirs.