Brand Owner of Hago Femina, Baderinwa Omobolade Ibukunoluwa

Kindly introduce yourself and your brand

My name is Baderinwa Omobolade Ibukunoluwa, my brand constitutes of everything that boarders around indigenous fabric craft. Our mission is to create indigenous pieces that ensemble; no matter the outfit pulled off. Our major target is to ensure that while trying to imbibe the indigenous style, women stand out.

 

Educational background?

I am a graduate of Obafemi Awolowo University with a Bachelor of Science and education degree in Economics.

What does your brand do?

We produce handmade fabric pieces; these pieces range from shoes, clutch bags, neckpieces, earrings, hair accessories, wristwatches, bangles and bracelets

How did you start your brand?

I took a paid course in fabric crafting and because I generally have a passion for hand crafting; in one week I presented my first set of pieces.

How do you make your products?

The pieces are totally handmade, we make use of chains, fashion wires and proper finishes, and we also incorporate ornaments to our finishes. For the shoes some customers bring their pairs to be refurbished, customers are also allowed to bring their fabrics for us to work with.

 

How lucrative is the business?

As long as your creativity is evident such that your pieces are unique, of topmost quality and durability, and affordable; just like the sale of fashion pieces people would consistently buy into the product.

Price range of your products?

It depends on what product and service you are purchasing, some people prefer that we work with their fabrics and/or ornaments.  However, some stand alone earrings go for as low as a thousand naira.

 

What makes your brand unique from others?

I incorporate the use of fashion wires and chain into my fabric pieces, and I work very hard at making my finishing neat and decent…. Making it look just like the industrial pieces.

What has been the response from customers?

So far, all my customers have loved their products; as a matter of fact, for every product there is usually at least one referral.

What are the challenges that you are currently facing?

I have to combine it with my regular job and since for now I have no staff; it has been a major challenge.

Where you see the brand in 5 years?

My very hope is that we would go viral with our brand selling worldwide; we would have a school to teach interested entrepreneurs and also a foundation to support women; especially single mothers, widows and the less privileged ladies and women.

How can prospective customers reach you?

hago.femina@gmail.com

Be realistic in your ideas –Kolawole

Kolawole

Twenty-nine-year-old Temi Kolawole is the Chief Executive Officer of Antigravity, a web design and development company. In this interview with COMFORT OSEGHALE, he shares his thoughts on the Internet business in Nigeria and why he quit his first job at 22
 

What informed your decision to start Antigravity?
 

My company started off as a hobby. It was a side business at the time. I had over the years learned how to design websites, carry out internet marketing, advertising and social media campaign. I had done all these for fun before I had the idea of establishing a company.

Even while I was working as the Chief Information Officer of a real estate firm in the United States, I was already running my business informally. My job was a very good one; I was well paid and worked with smart people who also saw my talent. After working for three years, I quit in 2008. I decided this was what I wanted to do. I wanted to run my company formally so I got it registered in the US.
 

Were you scared when you quit your job?
 

Of course I was; it is not easy to decide that you want to stop getting paid salary. I just had to look at the bigger picture and realise that I was aiming for something much more than a salary. Even though it might not materialise immediately or might take a longer time to get there, I knew what I wanted to do. For the first one year after quitting my job, I didn’t tell my family. If they asked how work was, I would just say it was fine.

When you are an entrepreneur, you are either making continuous money from sales if you are consulting or you are waiting for your clients to pay if you are into web design. If your clients don’t pay, it is almost like you are not eating. It was a bit rough at the beginning but when I moved back to Nigeria in 2009, things balanced out and the company was able to hire people and pay stuff.

When I moved back to Nigeria, I lived in Abuja at first and started out with some contracts for the Economic Community of West African States alongside a few other projects. I later moved to Lagos because I wanted to expand my team and get more talents for my business. So in Nigeria, Antigravity took off in 2009.
 

Did your choice of study in school prepare you in any way for what you are doing now?
 

Yes, in the sense that as a person, I am able to plan and meet deadlines. Apart from general life preparation that school gives, I didn’t learn any of this in college. I am a graduate of computer engineering which is more of electronics, circuits and hardware. Meanwhile what I do now is strictly software internet. Most of what I know, I learned on my own through individual practice. I am a little bit of a geek; one of the things I do for fun is that I write codes. Sometimes I just take my laptop and start playing around with stuff and have fun. Even now, I am still learning; each new project I take on becomes a new challenge and teaches me new things. I am learning every day.
 

Was it difficult building a customer base in Nigeria as there are so many web designers out there?
 

It wasn’t; from the US we already had some very good and popular clients. We built the very first version of Bellanaija which only just changed recently. We built some music websites like Notjustok.com. We have our own website Sturvs; we built netng.com, and several more in the entertainment industry. We have done works for BankyW and Dare Art Alade.

By the time I moved here, building a customer base was not a problem because the work we had done in the past spoke for us. We did not have to do any marketing; all our businesses came from referrals.

Bellanaija didn’t need to tell anyone that her website had been built by Antigravity; our name was already at the bottom of the site. So people knew us once they clicked on it. That brought quite a lot of referrals. It just stamped the reputation for us very early as a good website company. We equally did our best not to compromise that our work stood above the regular.

Before this industry became saturated with practitioners, we had already made a name for ourselves. That pushed us high into the corporate and public sector. So now we have a higher profile. We have done quite a number of works both in the public and private sector.

In the public sector, we manage Osun State’s website; everything from the design and maintenance. We also send out daily news letters to subscribers on the website. In the private sector, we handle all of Tony Elumelu’s websites; his group of companies, his foundation, and a few other subsidiaries in his group. We built and maintain the websites on an on-going basis.

We also just launched a new website for the Honeywell group. We are currently working on a website that never existed for Super Eagles. There has never really been any good online presence for them before apart from Wikipedia.
 

Did you require much start-up capital?
 

Not really. It is only when you are running a commerce website or a payment platform that you would need to spend more money to get the word out. However, for this business, you don’t really require much. Your basic needs are laptop and internet connectivity. Lots of people are starting to realise and appreciate that there are opportunities in this business.

Because this business does not require much capital, we started making profit almost immediately. The only investment I had to make was my computer and from the contracts, I made my money back
.

What were the challenges you experienced?
 

First is finding good talents that are loyal enough to work for somebody else; it is hard. Because this is an industry that does not require too much capital, everybody believes that they can do it on their own. Once you have a laptop and internet connection, you can start this business. So the average graduate who has a computer wants to start his own web design company. I am not saying that there is anything wrong in that but there is a growth process required. I didn’t just wake up and start this kind of business; I grew, I learned.

Another problem which is getting a lot better is the infrastructure – our internet connectivity and electricity supply. There was a time years ago, my employees used to come to my house to work. This was before I got married. Now I can’t do that anymore. Then we were either having issues with the generator, the internet, etc. Although the situation has improved now, there is still downtime once in a while.

Next is the level of appreciation from the target market. Some people don’t understand the full scope of work involved when it comes to information technology. They think it is just like writing a power point presentation or word document. When you bill them, they would ask why they had to pay so much. Some don’t even see the importance of having a website for their business especially when they are already making so much money.

What they don’t realise is that you have to spend money to make money. They don’t know that a website is an online office; always open 24 hours. People need to appreciate the importance of having a website.

As a result of this mentality, it was hard to really charge such clients. Although corporate clients would always pay more but these other clients would ask if you could not build a website for N50, 000.
 

What advice will you give youths who want to be self-employed?
 

They need discipline; that is the most important skill. When you become an entrepreneur, you are just like a worker without a boss. You have to learn to be your own boss and enforce your own rules. You have to give yourself a realistic time to get out there and go ahead.

You might be working at a job that you don’t like and you have some ideas. I wouldn’t say quit your job and start suffering because every business has got its own take-off time. Establish your business while you are still employed and see where it goes.

I started my business while I was still employed until I got to a point where I knew I had to get to the next level. That was when I took the leap of faith. You never start learning from your mistakes until you have made them.

You might think in your head that things would go a certain way but in reality, they wouldn’t. Also be realistic with your ideas. The ideas that become profitable are ideas that meet a need. There is no way you will not be compensated for meeting a demand.

For those going into web development, I will advise them to build a team very early. Don’t try to do it all yourself. Two or three people are enough. And to do this, you look at people you know; perhaps your classmates or your friends – people you can trust.
 

Is there anything you wish you had done better when you started?
 

If I could have done anything better then, I would have stayed focused on online payments. We are working on a product that is similar to PayPal. The Nigerian online space is a huge market; billions of transactions are going on online every day. When I first started out, I focused a lot on the online content space, which had to do more with blogs and entertainment. I learnt a lot from it but if I could change anything, I would have gone back and focused on the payment space.

 

Culled from punchng.com

Know what you want, work towards it –Ajebeku

NOVEMBER 16, 2014 BY TOBI AWORINDE 1 COMMENT

   

Ayoola Ajebeku

Ayoola Ajebeku, the 25-year-old Co-founder/Chief Technology Officer of Nearest Locator, a mobile application, shares withTOBI AWORINDE his innate passion for information technology, as well as some start-up challenges in the industry

Did you always know you would be a part of the information technology industry?

Yes. My interest in information technology started when I was in secondary school, watching documentaries on television about how technology was being used to create amazing things in Japan. I began telling my friends that I would become a technologist. Unfortunately, there was no Nigerian university offering that as a course.

Later on, when I finished secondary school, I was privileged to meet some amazing young adults that mentored me. One of them jokingly used to tell me to become a programmer because I’m often quiet and like staying indoors, meditating.

I took his advice and when I told my brother about it, he was like, ‘Why would you spend four years in the university to study a course that can be learnt in two months at a roadside computer school?’

Eventually, I went to the National Institute of Information Technology to learn software engineering, thanks to my supportive single mum, a school teacher, who believed in me and sacrificed 50 per cent of her monthly salary to pay my fees.

Later on, while going for extra classes, I was privileged to meet a savvy business developer, Andrew Ogbewele, few years later. We formed a partnership and, together, we founded the company.

Tell us about the company.

We got the idea to build Nearest Locator in 2012, after a friend walked around for three hours in search of a post office, only to find out that it was just five minutes’ walk from his office. So, we built Nearest Locator, a mobile application that helps you find places or points of interest around you with ease. It is currently available on iPhone, Nokia, Android and Blackberry devices.

The app uses global positional system to determine your location, and then tells you where you are, which you can share with your friends. You can then find places like banks, Automated Teller Machines, restaurants, hospitals, hotels, petrol stations, pharmacies, and you can also search for places of your interest.

So far, what has been the biggest stumbling block?

Nigerians use smartphones, but don’t understand the capabilities of their phones. To make matters worse, Internet is not affordable for most people, and so their mobile data is often turned off. Considering these challenges, we went the extra mile to ensure that the app is simple to use and also uses very little Internet data.

Another major challenge is raising funds from local investors. Most local investors are not so patient; they are looking for quick returns, rather than considering long-term gains, while some just want to grab as much as they can get of your shares. However, I try to understand their plight because the Nigerian technology start-up scene is quite young and volatile too.

What role does mentoring play in your business?

Building a successful start-up involves overcoming several challenges. There were times we thought of quitting, but, thanks to our Board of Advisors, we’ve been able to leverage their experiences and mistakes to build a powerful team.

Mentoring cannot be overemphasised. It’s the quickest and simplest way of learning from other successful men’s mistakes and experiences. To fully maximise the benefits of mentoring, you need humility and patience, because the mentors are often busy. But with a little patience, you will be able to draw from their deep wealth of experience and knowledge.

The technology industry may be viewed as overcrowded. What is your company doing to stay relevant?

Technology is still young in Nigeria, considering the adoption of, usage of and access to information and communications technology products, compared to other parts of the world. But that is no excuse to play small because other companies are moving in fast from developed countries, making the market more competitive.

We have a strong, innovative spirit; we do more and expect more from ourselves, which makes us to stay relevant, despite the competition. We pride ourselves in research and development, spending resources to build next-generation products for today’s market with the global industry in mind.

We are currently working on some services that will boost our market share.

Are you open to the idea of a franchise deal?

Franchising is a very good way to scale up with limited financial resources. Currently, what we do is a version of franchising, whereby we make some part of our system available to third-party firms to use at a fee, through our application programming interface.

What is the biggest lesson you have learnt as an entrepreneur?

The biggest lesson for me, so far, is that, if you really want to be successful as an entrepreneur, you must know what you really want, and go all out for it. Leave no room for second-guessing yourself; it’s either you are in for it or out.

Many times, you will have many distractions and even challenges that would make you want to quit, but the most important thing is to always know what you want and ensure you are working towards it.

You will need to always retrace your steps from time to time, appraising yourself to ensure that you are still on the right course. At the same time, you shouldn’t be too rigid. Be open to change.

How successful have you been in the aspect of marketing and winning over new customers?

We have over 300,000 downloads and over 20,000 users monthly, both locally and internationally. Interestingly, we also have active usage from places like India, South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, to name a few.

We’ve gotten several messages from different parts of the world, telling us how helpful our app has been. A certain user from Uganda recently told us about how our app helped him find his way when he was lost.

How should a young entrepreneur balance work and leisure?

Some say work and leisure are not the same thing, but not me. Work, for me, is leisure; it’s all about doing what you love and ensuring that it pays the bills – that is the challenging part.

It’s only recently that I reduced my late-night working. Everyone around me knows I can call at 2am just to get things done.

Apart from this form of leisure, I take time to exercise regularly; you will always catch me doing aerobics on Saturday morning. I also enjoy watching science fiction movies and having hot pepper soup. That’s the height of pleasure for me.

Any awards or milestones?

So far, we’ve won some awards like the Samsung Ideas Challenge. We also got to the finals of Venture Out – a platform for start-ups to receive mentoring and investment – to pitch in Europe and I’m a Leap Africa Social Innovators Programme Fellow.

Where do we see your business in the next 20 years?

By 2020, our vision is to become the largest location-based service provider in Africa.

Culled from punchng.com

Four Reasons My Startup Failed

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This week’s #FounderTalk Guest Post was written by Roger Huang. Roger is an entrepreneur, startup advisor and writer whose thoughts on technology and startups have been published on Techvibes, The Next Web, VentureBeat, and TechCrunch. He’s recently published, “Entrepreneur Blackjack: 21 Startup Buzzwords Defined.”

Getting involved with startups requires a healthy amount of delusion. It’s usually why you’re the last person to know that your startup is dying.  That didn’t happen for me. When I finally made the phone calls to thank everybody for their involvement, it was with cold sobriety.

Every good story has a context to it, and this is mine. I started my first startup, ThoughtBasin, while I was still in university at McGill. I juggled economics courses, a part-time job at a pharmaceutical firm, and trying to jump-start ThoughtBasin at the same time.

At the beginning, I had nothing more than a cofounder, a set of ideals, and something that vaguely resembled a good idea. I hadn’t even thought through how we were going to get so many students in the first place. The economics of it all collapsed once you thought about how it expand beyond one university. I didn’t think about it because I was doing all of the work, and I figured everything would work itself out. It never occurred to me that it would take more people than me to do this thing, and that no, a founder doing all of the work for free is not something that can go on forever.

Time is money: you have a set of opportunities you are giving up to work on your own thing. I’ve tried to never forget that. Paul Graham is on record as saying that you should do things that don’t scale—but spare a thought for how they will, and remember to value your own time. ThroughtBasin didn’t survive long enough to do that. Here are the biggest mistakes I made:

1. I hired way too many people, and didn’t know how to communicate to them.

I thought the larger your team was, the more successful you were. Huge mistake. I ended up chairing meetings with 15+ team members, each one of them as confused as I was about their role in the startup. Takeaway: Hire great, top-caliber people with a purpose in mind. I approached recruitment like a game, and it killed my startup.

2. I had no idea of what could be scaled and what couldn’t. I forgot that time is money.

Our sales model for ThoughtBasin was turning student ambassadors into salespeople and giving them a commission on each case placed on our platform. There was no way we would have scaled that because I hat I was at fault for it all and I had to work harder, and somehow this would inspire everyone around me to join in once they realized my bloodshot eyes and somber mood were just a reflection of how hard you needed to work for this thing. Unfortunately, it led to stress that led me to lose sleep, sales, and people who believed in the idea. None of the work I was putting in was actually achieving any results—in fact, they often made the situation worse. I was applying for incorporation, and shopping for lawyers before I even had a cent of profit, distracting the rest of the team. I was stressing myself out, telling myself that I had to work even harder to make it, so I made work for myself and others. In truth, I wasn’t working to build anything. I was working because I thought I should be working more.

Takeaway: Pride yourself on working smart, not hard. Move your startup forward, but don’t forget that the startup’s most important parts are the people inside: yourself prominently included. A startup needs founders who care deeply about what they do—but being a martyr will lead you and your startup off a cliff. Sleep, eat, exercise well. Your startup depends on a healthy you capable of doing amazing things.

3. I forgot to take care of myself.  

That whole forgetting time is money thing? It degenerated even further. I started seeing faults in the startup as my own fault, and resolved to work even harder—trying to will the team around me to greater heights by spending huge amounts of my energy. I told myself tWe wanted to crowdsource the solutions to societal and corporate problems by relying on student input. ThoughtBasin was supposed to highlight great students with brilliant ideas by running them through real-world cases.

4. I was a slow learner who argued a lot.

I spent a lot of time on work, sure I knew things. The truth was, I didn’t. If I’d spent more time listening, and correcting mistakes, rather than arguing and committing to them, ThoughtBasin would have been in a much stronger position. A startup is a nimble experiment, a race to learn as much as you can about your users, your market, and the demand out there for new innovations. Refusing to learn quickly is a death sentence for any David trying to take on a whole raft of Goliaths.

Takeaway: Listen more, argue less, never turn down an opportunity to learn.

In the end, me and members of our team realized that we weren’t the ones to execute on this particular idea—and there was no shame in that. We could spend our time building out other ventures, and learning other markets. That’s why when I made the calls that ended ThoughtBasin, I was saddened—but very rational about the whole process. I was cool: I had internalized all of these lessons and wrote them out. There was meaning in the venture even if it didn’t succeed. I started pitching publications around me for my story, hoping that it would help me hold these lessons to heart, and help others learn. I was accepted for one, then using those credentials, I was able to get guest posts in a whole host of others. I’ve written a book that helps explain the knowledge I wish I had.

People who worked with me have gone on to great things. One of my co-founders is in law school, one of his dreams. The experience he gained from starting ThoughtBasin helped him get there. One of my engineers took the experience she had with our startup and is now working for Rent the Runway in New York—ThoughtBasin was one of her first corporate programming experiences. I learned so much from the venture, and vow to learn ever more.

If there’s one takeaway I want to leave you with it is: be deluded. Aim to build great things. Take the time to learn from your mistakes. You’ll have room to make a lot of them, so get ready to learn and move on from them, and make something out of each one. Entrepreneurship is one the quickest platforms you can use to learn things about yourself and the world around you: take advantage.  

Culled from FounderDating.com