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Building a High-Growth Startup in an Emerging Market with Shola Akinlade of Paystack

Episode #072

Shola Akinlade (@Shollsman) knew that the online payments process in Nigeria was broken, and that he was in the perfect position to help fix it. However, numerous challenges stood in his way, including broken financial infrastructure, unreliable internet, and users that had little experience making online payments. Learn how Shola overcame the odds to build and grow Paystack — Stripe for Africa — to over 17,000 merchants processing over $20M per month.

  1. 2

    Wonderful interview.
    I am from Nigeria, and paystack is an inspiration to me and a lot of other people. Hope to meet you some day @Shola Akinlade

  2. 1

    My Main Takeaways:

    • Shola’s business is like Stripe but for Africa

    • Shola grew up and studied in Nigeria

    • While in college studying Computer Science, Shola liked to make stuff. He considers himself to be a Maker.

    • Shola got a job working at a beer company after college, and continued making stuff in his spare time, but he wanted to do it full time, so he quit and started making stuff full time.

    • Listen to the problems of the people around you: One of Shola and his friend’s first ideas was to build something like Dropbox, but for businesses in Nigeria who had little to no internet (based on the problems people around them were saying). They both built it, and launched it for FREE, and were getting downloads and emails immediately. They tried to sell it, but had no success. Soon, people from companies started asking if they could PAY to use it because their companies would only use paid software.

    • Soon Dropbox took over their market share, but banks still wanted Shola to work with them to make patches to their software. And while working for these banks, Shola identified a problem with payments in Nigeria, the process was outdated, and his next business idea, Paystack, was born.

    • After developing a prototype, Shola went back to the banks and people that he worked with, and asked them if they would be interested. Soon these people started telling other people, and he grew a waiting list of 300 leads who were interested.

    • Shola built custom websites for free for the first 3-4 or so customers who were interested in using his payments service Paystack, because didn’t have their own website.

    • Leverage your network: Shola got in touch with key people in Y Combinator because one of Shola’s friends emailed the YC people and CC’d Shola in. (He eventually got into YC).

    • By the time Shola started working on his payments service business Paystack, he had 5 years experience talking to customers, and building world-class software.

    • Shola says that Lagos, Nigeria is almost like San Francisco. There are hubs, funding opportunities, and internet connectivity.

    • Shola took about 5 months to make the first version of Paystack. He was the only developer in the beginning. Until his co-founder whom he met at college, joined him.

    • Believe in yourself: Shola didn’t believe he would get into YC, because he was a Nigerian company. But he did, and Paystack was the first Nigerian company to get into YC. Then within 2 years, 11 other Nigerian companies got into YC.

    • Shola was moving slowly with his company Paystack, until he got into YC, he then accelerated.

    • YC says: Talk to your customers, and build your product.

    • You don’t need to be the smartest person, there are plenty of those. You just need to have focus, and be consistent. That’s the hard part!

    • After getting into YC, they hired a designer who was a good friend of Shola's, and a very good designer. They grew to over 30 people over 2 years.

    • In their first month, they processed $2,500 in revenue. A month prior to this interview they processed $26,000,000

    • Have the courage to take on a big problem. And have focus on the main problem.

    • Have a good support system: Shola was able to focus on his vision and not divert from it because he had a good set of friends who would help keep him focused.

    • Shola has heavily studied all payment companies that he has come across.

    • Start small, and scale.

    • Share the story of your company: Letting people know of his progress (Shola), enabled people to feel more connected to the company.

    • Shola feels like he can’t dedicate too large blocks of time to things other than work, because he is so busy.

    • The way you know that you’re working on something big is to ask yourself: if you take it down for a day, will your users notice?

    • Michael from YC told Shola that it takes about 7 years to build a successful company.

    • Advice for beginners: Stay focused, hire people better than you.

  3. 1

    Awesome interview

  4. 1

    I love the energy from Shola, and how he started just doing it. Thanks for sharing

  5. 1

    Great Interview....

  6. 1

    Inspiring!

  7. 1

    The fact that YC reached out is a strong validation for building a fundable solution. Many useful insights here.

    As you may already know, paying out from Nigeria to businesses in other countries is not a problem at all. But receiving money for legit products/services with Nigerian identity is still a big issue, especially for legit hustlers in here.

    Recently, a client in Australia initiated a transfer to my account via Transferwise, but they declined the payment and returned his money without explanation of the reason. Even when Nigeria is listed on their website.

    So i want to ask @Shollsman, do you have a solution for receiving money (USD/EUR/GBP) into Nigeria or is it still in the works?

  8. 1

    Truly inspiring... I commend you for your effort Shola. I am also threading the part, well most of us here are in someway creating solutions to problems and It is stuff like this a creative needs to fuel for going the long haul.
    I am currently working on a couple of projects that will benefit from your solution. I for one have languished from the sparse online payment technology we have here in Nigeria.
    I got a lot of insights from this... thanks for sharing.

    Guess I'll be seeing you around.

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