Akan Nelson, Founder & C.E.O. of Evolve Credit, Nigeria’s no 1 online loan market;
Tell us briefly how you started Evolve Credit;
In the beginning, I was working at the United Bank of Africa,so I had a humble salary and Daniel was a student, from his Scholarship, he had a student stipend. Between the two of us, we had some resources and we were able to gather a little bit of money from family and friends. It was rough in the beginning, but once we built our prototype, an MVP, that allowed us to start talking to investors interested in early stage startups.
How long did your funds last before you needed external funds from Investors;
The first $20,000 check lasted us about 10 months and that’s because we really stretched it. For those 10 months, I was working a day job and Daniel was in school. What that meant was, we were really working at night so we weren’t sleeping. When we decided to raise additional funds when we had a clear sense of what we wanted to do, and realised what we had learnt over the last 9 months. The funds were to help us scale and pivot off the back of our experience and skills over the months.
How did you get your first investor?
Our first investor was Micro-traction. Once we realised we really wanted to do this tech thing in Nigeria then I started connecting with a lot of people who I looked up to in the industry, who were around the same age, had started companies but were maybe one or two steps above and had raised money. These were some of the people who helped me, they helped with the very early stuff, how do you get a pitch deck, how are you raising money and more. With these, I was able to pitch and answer questions when meeting with investors, plus, I got very strong recommendations.
You’ve mentioned Micro-traction, but are they the only ones backing you?
Of course not! We have a host of brillant investors who came on board during our pre-seeds round of which Ingressive Capital is one of. We ended up raising $300k even though our initial target was $200k.
How did you go straight from bootstrapping to VC money?
Once you have achieved something there is a tendency to think it is easy or underestimate the work that went into it. Yes, we went from bootstrapping to VC funds but between the time of raising $20k from Micro-traction in the beginning, for the next eight months, I was trying to raise and couldn’t. I probably got over 50-100 no.
Listen to the rest of the conversion here.
