Skip to main content
Hold on — a quick thing before we start 👀 You don’t need an app. You don’t need a smartphone. You don’t need a data plan. If you have a phone that can dial a number, you can sign up. Everything else (WhatsApp, web) is just a different door into the same building.

​
The three doors

Dial the Guild number from any Nigerian phone. Tola picks up.“Tola, I dey find work.”First time? She checks if you already have an account. If not, she asks three things: your name, your location, and what you do. That’s it. She confirms back: “You be Musa Bello, bricklayer for Modakeke. I go set am up?”You say yes. Tola creates the account on the backend with your caller-ID phone as the identity anchor. A welcome SMS lands in your phone two seconds later: “Welcome to Guild. Your account is ready.”That’s it. You’re in.Voice is the Job Seeker rail. Employers and traders who call get a polite deflect — their flows live on WhatsApp and the web. Voice exists because a bricklayer in Modakeke on a Tecno Spark doesn’t open dashboards. He dials.

​
What “same identity record” actually means

This part is important. You can start signup on voice. Continue on WhatsApp. Finish KYC on the web. The system treats you as one person. We anchor on your phone number (E.164) and write everything to the same User row in the identity Postgres schema. The session you have on web doesn’t conflict with the conversation state Tola is holding for you on a call. Two examples:
1

Musa signs up on voice on a Monday

Tola creates the account. Tier 1 only — phone + OTP. He gets work alerts by SMS for two weeks.
2

On a Wednesday he gets a smartphone

Sends a WhatsApp message to Guild. The intent engine looks up his phone, sees the existing user, picks up where Tola left off. “Welcome back, Musa. You have three new jobs you haven’t seen yet.”
3

A month later he visits guild.com.ng

Enters the same phone number. SMS code. Lands inside the same dashboard. His job history, his wallet balance, his standing tier — all there.
One person, three rails. One ledger underneath.

​
Tier 1 vs Tier 2 vs Tier 3

Signup gets you to Tier 1. That’s enough to receive payments and browse work. To do more, you’ll fill in more. You can stay at Tier 1 forever if you want. Most Job Seekers move to Tier 2 in the first week, the moment they want to withdraw earnings to their bank. Tier 3 is for when you decide to use Guild as your credit identity with a lender — see Standing score for why that matters.

​
What happens behind the scenes

A few details if you’re curious about the plumbing.
  • Your phone is the identity anchor. We store it in E.164 format (+234812...). All routing keys off it.
  • Sensitive fields are envelope-encrypted. BVN, NIN, last name, address — none of those sit plaintext in our database. They live inside a ChaCha20-Poly1305 ciphertext bound to your user ID. A database leak alone gives an attacker nothing readable.
  • Sessions are opaque. When you log in on web, you get an httpOnly cookie containing a ULID. There’s no JWT, no claim payload, nothing readable in your browser. The session is a key into a server-side store.
  • OTPs are single-use, time-limited, and rate-limited. OPay SMS sends them. The phone-to-code mapping lives in Redis with a short TTL.
If you ever want to delete your Guild account, you can do that from the web dashboard under Settings → Data. We retain ledger entries (required for audit and lender obligations), but they’re anonymised — the link back to you is severed. NDPR-compliant data handling throughout.

​
Next

Find work

Now that you have an account, here’s how to actually get hired.

Get paid

How money lands in your wallet and out to your bank.