Digital entrepreneurs say they frequently conceal or alter their IP addresses so funders and would-be foreign customers can not instantly identify that they are working from Nigeria.

“Our standing is a serious issue,” says Bayode.

Nigeria’s internet sector is booming, as evidenced by the hundreds of social networking specialists, entrepreneurs and technology business insiders which have flocked to the city for Social Media Week Lagos 2015. But a lot of the businesspeople in attendance say the blot of Nigerian e-mail scams — so omnipresent that they deserve their particular entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica — is not easy to shake as they court customers and investors that are critical from America as well as Europe.

And while its East African counterpart, Kenya, found a 40 percent increase in foreign direct investment this past year, Nigeria saw only 19 percent.

The very first time he got a job working remotely for the U.S. ecommerce business Nomorerack.com, he was requested to leave the content curating endeavor after only a week.

“Someone made a remark about ‘the man they hired being a Nigerian,'” he says.

“I have had about a couple of scenarios where I need to convince my customers about the matter of trust once they saw that I’m from Nigeria,” he says. “Everyone believes it is all some sort of foreign scam.”

But one crowd member cut to the greatest hurdle Nigerian startups face:

“But how do you convince a whole lot of white people to trust you?”

Some experts in the company have found strategies to deal with the difficulty. And e-mailing investor cold or an expected customer, with no link, does not generally go nicely.

“We must address trust issues a lot,” says Olufunbi Falayi, cofounder of Passion Incubator, an application which supports early-stage technology startups in Lagos. “Individuals must handle lots of scams, and we’ve to slowly convince them.”

Others and Bayode acknowledge that Nigerians breaking into technology also face other prejudices.

“Folks believe should you do not speak like an American, you’ve no location,” he says.