A big business starts small and as a startup ourselves, we do not despise the days of little beginnings. We are super conscious of the growth driven by the mistakes, the experiences and the lessons.
For start-ups, one major setback experienced is a lack of access to funding and Investors. Our CEO, Quadry Olalekan, sat in a one-on-one interview with Expert DOJO, an investment company to have a conversation titled, "Art of Startup War". In this article, we’ll walk you through a summary of the interview
Interviewer: How did the journey of SHiiP start up till today?
Quadry: The journey started around 2016. We started with building a marketplace that provided people with data on any African company. We observed there was one stop for shopping, logistics and payment in Africa and that observation birthed listbuy. On the then listbuy, a feature was implemented for users to get a list of various logistic companies after shopping. However, as time went by, we realized that users were more interested in the logistics sphere of the product and many returning users would only make use of this part, so in 2021, we decided to take it out and make it a product on its own. At the time of conception, we only had a compilation of seven different logistic companies but as of now, SHiiP has over 51 different logistic companies and couriers.
Interviewer: What was the problem with logistics in Africa that made the logistics part of listbuy so significant for the customers?
Quadry: First of all, I’ll like to point out that the majority of our observed logistics are more into infrastructure for the logistic company compared to engineering the process itself. Having realized the availability of these infrastructures, we decided to come into the picture to connect all of these logistics companies and create an aggregator layer for this industry. If a user needs a courier for a small item or perhaps a swifter delivery or a more affordable one, they get to access all of these options on the SHiiP platform instead of reaching out to each logistic company to inquire and compare, they can just do all of that at once on our platform. We initially started out with last-mile couriers and now, we have several bigger companies onboarded on SHiiP and several companies now outsourcing their logistic responsibilities to SHiiP.
Interviewer: Talk us through the process of bringing together the solutions of these logistic companies and building them into the algorithm of your product.
Quadry: The building and compilation of the product were quite difficult. This is major because each of these logistic companies has a different pattern of operation and pricing. As a matter of fact, a good number of them don’t even have APIs and we had to build for a few. However, we were and are still very cautious about which logistics company was worth working with in order to avoid wasting our time. In addition to that, we are actively collating data based on real-life addresses and shipping information that we have worked with into our database. So we’re not just focusing on the present, we are actively looking into the future as well.
Interviewer: Do you think the gold is in the data?
Quadry: We believe and know so. The data we have right now is what would give us directions into what’s needed to be built or implemented. One of such product that we're building right now is called shop-and-ship. We noticed a lot of Africans missing out on deals like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and many more and this is because these wholesalers don’t ship to Africa so we are trying to fill that gap by facilitating the shipping of the item from the US, UK, Canada and many faraway countries to Africa.
Interviewer: What do you think is the road to growth for SHiiP. Is it through partnerships, building APIs or is it through one-to-one enterprises?
Quadry: The growth is in enterprises which centre on partnerships with companies like Instagram, flutter wave. We want these enterprises to build our software into their solutions.
Quadry Olalekan went ahead to shed more light on the journey and activities of SHiiP as a startup in Nigeria in the interview. You can watch the entire session here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xf17bcJhZI&list=WL&index=2&t=629s
Over 2000 users trust SHiiP in Nigeria and we’ll want you to be one of them. Join the winning team and get on your delivery A-game. We are not just a delivery company, we are a delivery aggregator platform and with us, you can get the burden of stressful deliveries off your shoulders.
Come aboard the SHiiP. Visit https://linktr.ee/shiip to set sail with us.
Do you need more information? Send us an email at hello@goshiip.com
