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Indie Hackers

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

Indie Hackers

Courtland Allen and Channing Allen

Startups, Entrepreneurship, Makers, Indie, Bootstrapping, Online, Technology, Business, Founders, Bootstrappers, Ideas, Tech, Indiehackers, Hackers

4.9 β€’ 606 Ratings

πŸ—“οΈ 19 October 2018

⏱️ 63 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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 β€” Stripe for Africa β€” to over 17,000 merchants processing over $20M per month.Transcript, speaker information, and more: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/072-shola-akinlade-of-paystack

Transcript

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0:00.0

What's up everyone? This is Cortland from NDHackers.com and you're listening to the

0:11.5

IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet businesses,

0:15.4

and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How do they get to where they are today?

0:19.5

How do they make decisions at their companies and in their personal lives, what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal here, as always, so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own successful businesses. Joining me today in person and my dining room is Shola Akkenla, the CEO of Paystack. Welcome to the show and thanks so much for agreeing to swing by for this interview, Shola.

0:38.7

Yeah, cool, thanks for having me. Really excited to be here.

0:42.3

Yeah, I'm excited to have you. So why don't we start with you explaining what exactly is Paystack?

0:48.0

Paystack is a payments company. So we are like striped for Africa. We help merchants in Africa accept payments from their customers.

0:55.5

We currently have over 17,000 merchants, and we help them process over $20 million every month.

1:02.0

Wow.

1:02.5

And I take it that your customer base is similar to Stripes.

1:06.3

These are people building largely online businesses.

1:09.1

Do you have any brick and mortar businesses using Paystack?

1:11.4

Actually, yes. We have one of the biggest boss tickets and companies moved from just selling tickets offline to just selling via their app.

1:23.3

So, yeah, things like that. Yes. Nice.

1:25.3

God is good motors. So Paystack, Stripe for Nigeria, Stripe for Africa.

1:31.7

What's the ultimate vision here?

1:33.0

It's going to be Stripe competitor in the entire world?

1:36.1

That actually, we used that at YC just to get Americans to get people at YC to understand

1:42.3

what we were doing.

1:43.1

Right.

1:43.7

But very, very quickly into the business, we realize that this is, this is, Africa is very

1:49.3

interesting.

...

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