Cracking the Nigerian Rosetta Stone in a Simpu fashion:

The awe-inspiring story of Collins Iheagwara.

Building a startup is hard, and building one in Nigeria is even harder. SaaS startups, in my opinion, are the most challenging. Why? Because you can't rely on vanity metrics. It's a matter of making money and making it continuously.

I recently spoke to a founder, an Apple fanboy, and someone not unfamiliar with the American Silicon Valley style of building businesses. I think Job’s influence on him has prevailed over Silicon Valley as his mantra of taking designing seriously, selling intentionally and charging from day one has seen his startup get to a 6 figure MRR in less than 2 years. His explanation sounded simpu but not easy.

For today’s piece, I will share lessons from Simpu's CEO. 

Oh, the wordplay on “Simpu” and “Simple” is intentional. Collins Iheagwara is the CEO and Co-founder of Simpu, a B2B SaaS that simplifies communication and customer engagement for businesses in Africa and across the world. 

Simpu provides a  single dashboard for companies to send and receive messages across multiple platforms like email, Whatsapp, SMS, iMessage, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. 

Collins got the idea for Simpu in 2020 and launched private Beta in 2021, the startup came out of stealth after raising a $1 million preseed round. 

You will find out how Simpu went from an idea that altered Collins' career trajectory to a startup now doing 6-figures in monthly revenue.

Tell Me About Yourself

I consider myself to be extremely cerebral. I grew up with the mindset that to succeed in life, one has to be the smartest kid on the block. I was the typical nerd. I got familiar with computers from a pretty young age. I got a personal computer from my mom when I was in secondary school. Although, I only played soccer with it. In the university, my dad got me a laptop yet again and I used it for entertainment, and movies.

In University, I learnt about the Apple company and its maverick co-founder, Steve Jobs. In no time, I became a Steve Jobs fanboy. I began to learn about design and app development for the iPad. I also learnt Ruby on Rails. I was able to combine these different skills to provide more value overall. There were not many people at the time who could think about products and design them in a way that engineers would easily build. 

I pursued design and became one of the biggest product architects in the country. I have some notable works including something for Sterling Bank, and Shell’s Employee Management System which is still in use. What sets me apart professionally is my ability to think about a product, design it from scratch and communicate the implementation to engineers.

During the early days of Devcenter, I met Akin Falomo. He was looking for a cofounder and I fit the bill. Devcenter started with about 100 persons and we built it into a community of 13,000 developers that we provide jobs for. At Devcenter, I helped build one of the first job centres.

I did great work at Devcenter, but I wanted to devote my time to a single product and that was when I decided to simply build Simpu.

How Did The Simpu Journey Start?

In 2020, at Devcenter, my cofounder and I decided that we would find an idea that works. The first idea was to build a fractional trading platform. I designed the first app and we found a company called Drivewealth that acts as a broker. 

ARM just launched as an accelerator, so I applied, put in our idea and we got yanked off the slack channel. Afterwards, the Drivewealth team stopped speaking with us. It felt like they shared our idea with another team. I felt very bad about it and it made me stop filling out forms for accelerators for a while.

I told my cofounder that I am not a finance guy and we need to build something that we have total control over. Kola, my co-founder, had been building telecommunication software for over 11 years. I suggested that we build something that will allow people to send messages. We decided to build an API. I had done some research and found that there wasn’t a publicly accessible API for communications the way you have payments.

We built an API in 3 months and we quickly found out that our target market already had a full-fledged solution. So I went to the banks and found out that they already had a solution.

We didn’t get much traction and paused the business. We had to find out how to make money, we had spent our personal funds, I was supposed to move into a bigger apartment but spent it all on building the initial product. I found out that the only way to sell a communications product was to build a platform on our infrastructure.

We provided a full-stack experience along with the option of leveraging the API. 

How Did You Approach Product Discovery?

When you start out, you need to discover anchor companies that have built similar products. We looked at Intercom on the omnichannel side, Twilio on the infrastructure side. Airtable for data integration. These products helped us shape the first version of Simpu. 

Once you build a good enough version, you need to go and sell to someone who already uses similar or substitute products. Once you secure a customer, they’ll test and initially get frustrated by certain things but they won’t churn because they have made a card commitment. This first set of customers will force you to improve your product.   

Simpu’s Private Beta

Our Private data was a phase for us to build quickly by going to our customers’ offices, watching them work, and making quick adjustments to the product. We were in closed Beta for over a year monitoring the usage of our product by observing the daily lives of our paying customers. 

From the onset, we prioritised revenue. Building SaaS is like building a Ferrari, you have to be obsessed with talking to pro race car drivers, and you need to understand what components will work well for the pro driver before moving to amateur drivers. 

Simpu exists in a highly competitive space with decade-old global players like Microsoft and Hubspot. We are a small team, we had to clear out any product frustration. We had to build Simpu with the right features &  integrations to avoid churn. 

Perfecting certain features helped retain customers, even though we don't have the complete feature stack from established products like Zendesk. We delivered the 20% that our customers can’t live without, we built those really well and promised to build the remaining 80%. 

For instance, our users can connect emails to our Omnichannel inbox. Existing alternatives don’t have this because it takes months for Google to run penetration tests on your infrastructure. We worked on it before launch because we knew it would be sticky. 

Another strategy we adopted was to take payment for a year, so the customer wouldn’t leave and we would have time to provide value that would make them stay with us for the long term.

How Does Simpu Handle Free Users?

On Simpu, you put your card in from day one. If advertisement is part of your monetization plan, then it makes sense to have free users but if you are building a product where people use it every day and it racks up your server costs, then you should charge a fee. 

What frustrates me the most about free users is that they bring no value. When we launched on ProductHunt, we were the fourth-highest trending app of the day globally. We had people from Germany, Hong Kong, and the UK, but a lot of those guys were hobbyists. 

We were not going to make money from them. 

Instead, you will make money from the guy that has 20 support reps. It's a job for them to manage multiple messaging channels and talk to customers. When you tell them to pay for software, they see it as a necessary business cost. Don’t track the number of free users, track the number of paying users. 

What’s Simpu’s Approach To Product Distribution?

When I started building Simpu, one of the questions I asked myself was how big is the Nigerian market? We found out our TAM was small because we are a product that works for small businesses but if you check Nigeria, there are more Microbusinesses. 

These micro-businesses already have WhatsApp, so there was no use for a solution like Simpu. We decided to launch in Nigeria & finetune the product for global adoption. 

Once we figured out the market size, we had to figure out whether marketing or sales was the best approach for distribution. 

Making your first sales hire can be gruesome because salespeople are not always used to working with a product that requires constant improvement and iteration. After letting go of 3 salespeople in 3 different locations, I decided to own Sales.

Marketing helps you create an identity and position that businesses are familiar with. Marketing helped us avoid coming out as a completely unknown business trying to onboard a bank. You can’t force marketing impact with money, you can’t rush it. Marketing takes time to convert. 

We decided to build enterprise software from day one and because of that we had to invest in compliance and security, we had to get a SOC 2, Type 2 which costs thousands of dollars. That’s not what you typically think you’ll do in your first year but when you go to the Banks, they’ll ask for these certifications. If the sales guys can’t talk about all these requirements, they’ll have a hard time selling. 

We took a product-led approach where we did all we could to get Simpu in front of a lot of companies, get them to sign up and build a funnel within the product. As we keep building, we work with companies that have similar problems, which is basically me talking to the founders, hand-holding them, and getting them to adopt the product. 

How Did You Approach Pricing With Simpu?

For pricing, I have the yardstick to be 30% more affordable than what exists in the market. I don’t like to compete on Pricing but Simpu is 30% cheaper than Intercom, Hubspot and other existing alternatives.

The most crucial thing is that you can keep your costs low, so it makes no sense that you are paying salaries in dollars and trying to cut costs. Also, when we charge in dollars at the black market rate we are not losing any money. So even if you are going to pay us in Naira, we change the equivalent at the market rate and make sure we keep the money in dollars. 

Getting A Role At Simpu

When hiring, I look out for raw intelligence and drive. I suffered a bit from going after people that are seemingly polished but they were usually too lazy to put in the work. So, I go for people that actually want to build. They may be a bit younger, but if you can guide them, they’ll deliver results. 

If you run a business and currently pay for multiple customer engagement platforms and multiple CRMs, you should get on Simpu. They have a free trial for you to try out the product till you make a buying decision.