ContainerDonLand
Turning a basic shipment-tracking tool into a product customers would pay for.
Why would anyone pay for this?
I was brought in to monetize OneTrack365, a simple shipment-tracking SaaS product for freight forwarders, importers, and exporters. Shipping lines already provided basic container tracking, so the product wasn't solving a sufficiently differentiated problem — customers could get the same core information elsewhere for free.
The job became bigger than monetization. Before I could price anything, I needed to find out what customers would actually pay to solve.
Found the problem worth paying for, then built around it
I treated monetization as a research problem before a growth problem — figuring out what customers would actually pay to solve before touching acquisition or pricing.
Researched before building
Spoke with internal stakeholders, ran customer research, and studied the freight and shipping ecosystem to find where the real willingness to pay was. That surfaced a much bigger problem than shipment visibility: demurrage — the charges that accumulate fast once a container overstays its free period at port, with no reliable system warning customers before costs increased.
Repositioned around cost avoidance
Moved the product from "track your container" to "stop paying unnecessary demurrage fees" — from a visibility tool to a financial-consequence tool. ContainerDonLand was built around this insight.
Built the pricing model around the value delivered
₦7,000 per shipment tracked, with a free trial covering three shipments before payment — a clear, low-commitment line between the customer's problem, the product's value, and the price.
Shaped the product, not just the message
Worked closely with the product team from user research through user stories, documentation, positioning, and GTM — so the product solved the underlying business problem, not just a better tracking interface.
The loop that kept the product honest
Acquisition wasn't a separate phase from product — it was how the product kept getting sharper. Each lap through this loop is what surfaced the ICP shift below.
Where the strategy became real work
The receipts — the specific campaigns, tests, and go-to-market moves that put the new positioning in front of the right people.
Rebuilt the landing page and messaging
Built the B2B landing page around the new positioning — leading with the cost of inaction ("Stop Paying ₦150k Daily in Demurrages") instead of the feature ("track your container").
Paid social to test demand
Used paid social to test the demurrage-avoidance proposition and validate demand before committing further spend or product effort.
Outbound via Apollo
Identified relevant freight forwarders, importers, and exporters through Apollo and reached them directly with the new positioning — segmented by industry vertical, with dedicated sequences run and monitored for open, click, and reply rates.
Signal-based targeting
Tested signals such as recently-funded companies to identify businesses with a stronger, more immediate need for shipping and logistics solutions — one of several audience hypotheses run through outbound.
ICP pivot to freight forwarders
Customer conversations and usage data showed freight forwarders — not the original importer/exporter assumption — were the more active, recurring users, since they track multiple shipments for their own customers. Acquisition, messaging, and product decisions were rebuilt around this segment.
What the work actually moved
What this project taught me
"Monetization starts with the problem, not the product."
The original product wasn't necessarily bad. It simply wasn't differentiated enough to justify payment — the fix had to happen upstream of pricing.
"Positioning can create a new market opportunity."
Moving from "track your container" to "avoid unnecessary demurrage costs" transformed the product's perceived value without changing the underlying tech.
"Your ICP is a hypothesis, not a fact."
We assumed importers and exporters would be the primary users. Customer behaviour showed freight forwarders were the stronger, more recurring segment.
"Customer feedback should feed the product, not just acquisition."
The work didn't stop at getting people in the door. Ongoing conversations continuously informed product, messaging, and GTM decisions.
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