SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Nigerian Founder Uses WhatsApp Group to Go $0 to $60k in 5 Months for Testing Tool
01 Sep 2023
Chapter 1: How did a Nigerian founder generate $60k in sales using WhatsApp?
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
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It's an automated testing tool. They've already got 30 paying customers doing five grand a month in revenue or 60,000 ARR. He already had an exit under his belt. AZ is his name. It's based in Nigeria. He used 45K of his own money to help kickstart this one with his co-founder and put in a bit more. They split it 151.49, hoping to launch and get more customers.
Their first 30 customers came from a WhatsApp group of founders in Nigeria. Hey folks, my guest today is AZ. He's a serial founder who harmonizes his background in technology and product development to build several startups.
With over 10 years of experience in product management, business development, software leadership, he successfully designed, built, and scaled valuable tech-driven companies out of Africa. AZ, you ready to take us to the top?
Yeah, how are you doing?
I'm doing well. Okay, so you're working on a company now called GetScandium.com, a no-code test automation tool. Tell me a customer story of how someone's using you today.
Okay, so maybe I will share my own story. I literally was running a dev shop at some point. So we have to build multiple products. And, you know, when you build this product, you also want to maintain and keep them alive. So you need a QA unit. Ideally, you want to first explore getting humans to do testing. And trust me, it's not sustainable. So these guys have to then start to write scripts.
to automate test cases. Unfortunately, it's also the fact that writing scripts using Selenium and maybe Cypress, they are tedious and not so friendly when you need to collaborate. Hence the reason I needed to come up with a NOCO tool that aids collaboration across all stakeholders across the product value chain.
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Chapter 2: What is GetScandium and how does it automate code testing?
Yep, $200.
And when did you launch the business? What year?
So, business started January this year. First version of product was launched in April. And we've been doing fine. The adoption rate has been quite impressive.
What's an impressive adoption rate? Can you give me hard numbers?
So today we have less than 100, about 80 plus people using the solution. And we have quite about 30 plus paying customers.
30 paying customers.
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Chapter 3: How did the founder bootstrap his startup and what was his investment?
Okay. So can I take 30 paying customers times an average of 200 per month? So you're doing about 6,000 a month right now on revenue?
Within 5,000 and 6,000 month to month.
That's really great. I mean, so you've basically gone from launch this year to your first 5K of MRR in seven months. That's really impressive. How did you find your 100 or 88 to 100 users? And AZ, what do you look for in that user base to figure out who you can convert into a paying customer?
Chapter 4: What strategies did the founder use to acquire his first customers?
Okay. So first is how do I find these customers? The first thing is I've built startups in the past. So I'm friends with a lot of startup founders. We're in communities. So we actually, we literally launched in a community. Which one? So there's a popular community in Nigeria, Africa called Premier BN.
Premier BN?
Yeah.
What's the website? PremierBN.com?
Correct, correct, correct.
Okay.
It's popularly called PBN, PBN.
Wait, I want to make sure I get the website right. It's PBN.com?
No, PremierBN. Let me double check that for you. PremierBN.com. That community is so valuable. One sec. So, okay. I think you're not spelling Premier well. It is P-R-E-M-I-A-N-B-N.com. I'll just drop it in the chat for you. Great.
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