Toluwanimi Onakoya and the Art of Steering Startups Through Change
As Head of Communications at Lingawa, formerly known as Topset, an African language-learning platform, Onakoya has carved out a niche as the person startups rely on when transitions are unavoidable. Whether it is a product pivot, a sensitive market shift, or explaining local nuance to a global audience, her career has been built around managing moments when the stakes are highest.
Choosing Passion Over Prestige
Onakoya’s path into tech communications did not begin with technology. It began with a deep interest in communication as a discipline. In secondary school, she recalls being teased for wanting to become a broadcaster. Rather than being discouraged, she committed fully to the craft, earning both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mass communication from Covenant University. She completed her master’s programme in 2021 with a perfect 5.0 CGPA.
It wasn’t that I had the highest IQ, she says. But it’s so much easier to do well when you’re excited and passionate about what you’re learning or what you’re interested in. And my career has followed that same trajectory.
That early commitment to passion, she explains, has shaped every career decision since.
Learning the Newsroom Before the Boardroom
Onakoya entered the workforce in 2021, joining RED Media Africa, a public relations and communications agency, immediately after graduating. She worked as a writer for YNaija, part of the RED Media portfolio, where speed and relevance were non-negotiable.
You had to churn out like three articles per day, and it was based on what was trending, she says. I was really always putting my ear to the ground, and you would find that all these things are such great building blocks to build your career. It taught me how to find a good story [and find] an angle that people would love to read.
Within six months, her performance earned her a promotion to content analyst. From there, she began pushing beyond her job description, contributing ideas in strategy sessions for global brands such as Lipton. Although corporate communications was not her formal role at the time, her consistent input made her presence in brainstorming sessions expected rather than optional.
When she eventually asked to transition into corporate communications, her team lead agreed without hesitation. Three months later, she was promoted.
I was very excited, she says. One of the things I remember was always communicating what I wanted to do next. When people see that you’re doing really well at something, sometimes they assume you want to keep doing just that.
Discovering That PR Is a System, Not a Poem
Corporate communications quickly taught Onakoya a different lesson: structure matters more than creativity. She recalls one of her first major assignments, writing a speech for a top executive at Access Bank.
Influenced by television dramas, she leaned into poetic storytelling, opening with a vivid narrative about an audience member.
The response was blunt.
It was very rejected, she says. I learnt quickly that there is a formula [to corporate communications writing]. That’s not where your creative juices need to be; you just have to follow the formula. It was very intense.
That moment reframed how she understood PR. It was not about flair. It was about discipline.
Translating Tech for Real People
While working at RED Media, Onakoya was exposed to the startup ecosystem through clients such as African genomics company 54Gene. Although limited, that experience revealed a sharp contrast between traditional corporate communications and startup messaging.
When she left the agency in 2022 to join OurPass, then a one-click checkout startup, the difference became clear. She realized that tech communications is fundamentally about translation.
A lot of tech startups don’t know how to translate their jargon in a way that the stakeholders, particularly the audience, would understand, she says. With tech, there is more verbose jargon that has to really go down to ensure that [the message] is being communicated as clearly as possible.
For her, the role was less about invention and more about clarity.
Pressure Testing Communications During a National Election
After eight months at OurPass, Onakoya moved to Stears, a financial data and research company, as communications manager. There, she faced the most intense challenge of her career: Nigeria’s 2023 general elections.
Her mandate was to position Stears as the primary destination for election data. The strategy worked. The platform surpassed one million signups and generated more than $6 million in earned media, appearing in outlets such as Bloomberg, the Financial Times, and CNBC.
But scale introduced risk. When technical delays occurred during vote collation, public sentiment turned quickly. Rumors emerged that Stears was being paid by political actors.
I actually cried, Onakoya says. But it was a big learning point. We realised we hadn’t planned for the worst-case scenario.
Ahead of the governorship elections, the team adopted a different approach. They conducted a pre-mortem, identifying everything that could go wrong and preparing responses in advance.
That way, she explains, the narrative wouldn’t get ahead of us.
Managing Pivots With Empathy
That experience shaped how Onakoya approached later transitions at Stears, including the company’s shift from a B2C to a B2B model and its expansion into East Africa.
Closing consumer-facing products was especially delicate.
We had to close the B2C products, and we had to transition to B2B, she says. There were still people who loved the product, but this was a business decision. How do you communicate that without alienating your audience?
She treated the announcement like a relationship shift rather than a corporate update. The result was a 70 per cent positive sentiment score.
That reputation followed her. When Lingawa needed to pivot from a broad edtech platform to a focused language-learning product, Stears’ CEO recommended her for the role.
Read More: Meet Adedamola Samuel Adeloye, an Emerging Voice in African Fintech
Setting the Narrative or Losing It
A recurring lesson in Onakoya’s career has been the danger of allowing public perception to move faster than internal communication.
As a comms person, you have to have the foresight that whatever is happening, she says. It is important that you are setting the narrative for the organisation.
At OurPass, that alignment was missing. The company moved rapidly, shifting from one-click checkout to POS systems and then to microfinance, often without involving communications early.
She describes the experience as reactive rather than strategic.
I think it’s one of the reasons why [my work there] wasn’t a very long-term thing.
Eventually, she resigned without another role lined up.
You cannot do good work if there is no alignment with management, she says. As a comms person, you can’t be the last to know. If the narrative gets ahead of you, you’ve already lost.
Selling a Feeling, Not Just a Product
At Lingawa, Onakoya’s work focuses less on features and more on emotion. For her, expansion is not simply about entering new markets but about understanding identity.
She describes her approach as cultural arbitrage.
When you’re selling a local product that connects two values, she explains, a local commodity becomes rare. You create meaning, and then you put a price on it.
For Lingawa, that meant framing language learning as reconnection for diaspora communities rather than education alone. At Stears, expansion had been positioned as the only reliable way for global audiences to access accurate African data.
A Call for Integration, Not Decoration
Reflecting on her journey, Onakoya’s message to founders and operators is direct. Communications, she says, is not an accessory.
My advice to tech people? Listen to your comms, people. Lord, listen to them. We aren’t just here to make things look pretty; we are here to ensure you don’t lose the trust of your stakeholders.
In an ecosystem defined by speed and uncertainty, her career is proof that how a story is told can be just as important as the story itself.
