Lessons from building a software resellers marketplace for Nigeria

Right after working on the dating app for older people, around late January, early February had to move onto a new business and this time round, I entered the realm of software reselling. Truth is, for the second business, it was very hard to get into this problem space given our lack of experience working with resellers, but also my new team initially, had gone into the real estate space. Specifically, the problem at hand was prospective house owners constantly get irritated by real estate agents who take these homeowners to properties they know the homeowners for sure wouldn’t purchase just in a bid to gather as much agent fees as this is their primary way of making income. (this is in Ghana)

Our goal initially, was to build a virtual and augmented reality platform for homeowners to visit their prospective homes virtually and check them out without being taken advantage of by agents. ⓘ But there were a couple of issues with this idea which I’ll write about later. Back to the focus of the discussion today.

My new team and I were wondering to ourselves how can tech startups grow into new markets quickly. Every tech founder in Africa is always thinking about this, how can they achieve rapid adoption and growth of their technology products? Through discussions with other founders and entrepreneurs, we realized most of them typically hire sales agents who go around spreading their products to customers. But one entrepreneur told us a method that he used that we thought to ourselves was very interesting. In Nigeria, there are these people called software resellers who move around from one organization to another selling software products such as Quickbooks, Sage and Microsoft Suites. ⓘ On further research, these resellers usually take on these jobs to make extra income, so they use tactics that yield very high conversions, and this is Nigeria we are speaking of.

ⓘThe biggest issue when trying to work with resellers from Nigeria is that you need to speak their language (just like in any African market). As a foreigner, you can't simply go to Nigeria and speak to these resellers directly as it will be close to impossible for this to happen, and that's even without taking into account the cost of flying into Nigeria and setting up. And that is why most people haven't worked with resellers on scale. There are some physical offices in Nigeria to which you can go and request for a group of resellers to work with you, usually very expensive to the entrepreneurs. With the business potential that Nigeria has, it was only prudent that we had to enter into this space.

Let’s open up Nigeria to the rest of the world, we said to ourselves. Let’s make it easy for a South African software entrepreneur to roll out their software products into the Nigerian market. How? By providing the entrepreneur with these resellers to work with. All that entrepreneur had to do was to request for several resellers on our app, provide us with the details of their software and then we simply gave this software to the resellers. Of course, we had to first pool several resellers to join our program to have a sales force ready, that will go out and start selling the software right away. This was the hardest part to get right as we terribly failed at onboarding resellers. ⓘ Partly because these resellers needed assurance of good software products as they can never waste their time selling a product that wasn’t solving a huge Nigerian problem. ⓘThese resellers can’t risk their reputation selling sub-standard software meaning every entrepreneur that wanted to work with the resellers needed to have a very well-built solution which isn’t the case for most startups.

And then, there is the issue of monetary compensation. Most of the resellers worked for the big companies the like of Microsoft, Sage, Quickbooks simply because these were companies whose users’ behaviors are pretty known, so it’s easy to predict the number of customers that you can sell to.ⓘ Establishing this fact is crucial as the more customers the reseller can get and sell to, the more money they earn, take and negotiate for bigger commissions. Our promise, as Kuseka (the online marketplace that matches software resellers to entrepreneurs) was that we are giving these resellers more products to sell that will enable them to make more money, but until we had a serious client who was ready to pay the resellers, they weren’t sold on joining the program even if it costs them nothing (of course they ⓘ needed to have a smartphone).

We tried to get our first big client such that we have these resellers going out to sell the software. The first client we were able to get was Kaspersky, and this was through their own reseller’s program. ⓘ The resellers would earn part of the subscriptions made by the customers but for this to happen, they need to sell software and at least we believed that we could ride on the social proof of Kaspersky and use this to get resellers and also entrepreneurs interested.

But then again, Kaspersky is a big company, most of the startups don’t have the budgets or even the liberty to reduce their top line by giving out commissions early on in the rollout of their product. So understanding this also was one thing we had to keep in mind as we went to market. However, again, 6-8 weeks into this new venture, we pitch to the founder of MEST and after that discard the product and business and start a new one. If you are thinking, this is counter-intuitive, it is and can throttle the performance and motivation of a business but that’s the MEST way of doing things, the hope is you learn a lot to be able to enter into any industry without worrying much about your levels of experience in the specific industry you want to go into.

We did have the opportunity to continue with this product because after doing the first two capstones you can then move into newco (new corporation) which will be the business you run and graduate with from the MEST training program. Despite finding the software resellers’ problem space interesting and one I could see the business viability, I didn’t believe in the problem-founder fit. It’s a product I would probably have to spend 2 years getting myself acquainted with deeply, which was hard for me to settle with.

But I do think that being able to access software resellers within a country you want to expand into when you are in a different part of the world is the true definition of expanding into new markets, its fast, cost-effective and has a very high return on investment compared to generic awareness and download ads and campaigns. All you need to ensure is entrepreneurs have quality software and well-motivated resellers. How it should be done, well, the entrepreneurs should do their thing and come up with interesting ways to ensure both parties, the resellers and the entrepreneurs are happy.

I can't of course forget to send my appreciation to my team members who made it easy for us to work in this space and also persevered through several pivots. Starting with our team lead, Priscilla Arthur, she's probably the most critical person I've met, keen on detail and will always remind you of something that we might have missed out during market research or even testing. I'm super grateful for getting us to work together. Also, I'm super proud of you. Being the CTO in the team put me in a place where everyone on the team had to write some code for the product and given you had no experience in tech, you did fantastic. She's currently a founder at Pinzera and you can check out her profile here

Our marketing lead, Joel Bill was very instrumental in reaching out to our customers and the resellers, when it came to onboarding resellers, this man was able to talk to the resellers, selling them our vision. Whatever he did or say to Kaspersky that landed us that partnership, was simply magic. Currently, he is the team lead at Mino, which is a business that is adding some spice to how we have traditionally given out gifts. You can check out Mino here

And lastly, our product lead, thanks to her designs, Ifunanya Marriet made our platform easy to use and very intuitive. As CTO who enjoys the backend, having a person like Marriet is a no-brainer as she helped with designing all of our platforms, both the reseller and company applications, letting me focus on the key business logic. Her Nigerian perspective as well helped us to build right for the market, as she immersed us into the shoes of a Nigerian which also made it easy for us, non-Nigerians to have proper business talk. She’s passionate about making sustainable business and desgin. Currently, she’s making impact by delivering key medication to hospitals and pharmacies at Medford

Special thanks to our Startup mentor, Bright Ahedor for the guidance and support you rendered and the direction we were able to take. Your words of wisdom shall forever resonate with us.