Stories That Are Ours To Tell
Part 1: Young, Fearless College Girl
“I don’t know what I want to do yet but all I know is that I am not going to work a regular 9–5 job at a bank.” This was my 16-year old response to questions about what I wanted to do after my 4-year study of Political Science at the University of Lagos. I’d always loved politics, but being a student of it in a society like Nigeria meant there was no clear path to postgraduate growth like other specialised courses offered. At the time, I never understood why I always responded with such confidence, but life has a habit of giving way to people who speak their preferred realities into existence.
In 2019, I launched Frugirls — a fashion resale business — with my partner in purpose, my sister, Onyeka Nwobu. Frugirls was a business that made it easy for women to access sustainably-sourced clothes. Our strategy was simple: to build a distinctive brand and community. In our first year, we had gathered an active community of over 2000 women who ensured that every drop was “sold out” in minutes. Rigorous logistics and complexities in operations soon became a frequent nightmare.
In 2020, I took up a new role as Growth Lead at a company called Scrader. What was really captivating was not the role itself, but how much of a shift it was from my previous efforts in fashion. I had imagined that somehow, I’d be able to juggle this with running my business, but it became clear soon enough that I had to prioritise one over the other. At Scrader, we built technology that helped ~5000 SMEs optimise and maximise their business operations. The company had no institutional funding at the time, and I remember singlehandedly cold-messaging hundreds of businesses everyday, some of which eventually became our first set of active users.
By 2021, we noticed that most of the businesses we onboarded on Scrader mostly used the logistics feature, so we applied the rule of doubling down on what was working. The problem we tried to solve became much more streamlined, and so did our goal. Businesses need to batch-deliver, but at the time, express deliveries had gained more popularity and acceptance. However, for commerce in this part of the world to thrive, it was clear that businesses need(ed) an advanced alternative. Businesses with high-volumes need an efficient way to send a stack of deliveries out at all once, and gain visibility on each one in the process. So, Sendstack was born. As someone who’d previously run a smaller scale business that suffered logistically, this was more than just business for me; it was a new kind of passion to solve this mind-boggling, back-breaking problem that just would not go away.
In my time at Sendstack, I quickly learned to prioritise one thing: people. Logistics in Africa is largely a people and infrastructure problem. “People” in this case could be governments who pay no attention to primary infrastructural issues that make it unnecessarily cumbersome for innovation to take place and be sustained. “People” could also mean the millions of Africans who are not literate, and therefore end up at the lower ends of the supply chain, yet again making it difficult for penetrative innovation. For me, it didn’t ultimately matter the amount of groundbreaking technology being built, my firm belief was that if the people weren’t right, the business was never going to be.
In our first year, we experienced frequent employee exoduses for no other reasons but the nature of the industry making it slightly difficult to attain work-life satisfaction. Logistics has a way of making erratic monsters out of beautiful people. And it was a piece of the problem I was excited about. My solution was to design end-to-end hiring, onboarding, training and management processes. I created and made iterations for standards of doing practically anything that had to do with the operations of the team, to ensure we were always ready to handle precedented and unprecedented moments of scale. One big result of this was going from frequent exoduses to about 70–80% of teammates joining the team and growing with the company for no less than 2 years and counting.
Another process that thrilled me was building partnerships. I particularly found it interesting that potential “investors” always worried about the high rate of competition in the industry when we all just collaborate behind the scenes. I led business partnerships with other “competitors” like FEZ, Terminal Africa, Topship, ShipBubble, Chowdeck, TruQ, and more — some of which translated to longterm technical partnerships, while others fell quickly by the way side after a few test runs.
To add to this, learning the intricacies of fundraising was exhilarating. Although we’d always been moderate about the need for institutional funding to sustain the business, we did so when necessary. I had gotten slightly accustomed to rejected applications, but something about applying for the Norrsken accelerator and getting accepted in the 2023 batch struck a nerve for me in a good way. Learning to pitch became as intuitive as breathing. I already had a knack for speaking about anything at all that I am deeply passionate about, and my pitch on demo day at the Norrsken Accelerator was the litmus test. To say that I am proud that it has become a reference material for other founders who want to become “pitch perfect” would be an understatement. However, I understand why this would be so; I am the same woman who can sell to a bee, the dangers of honey.
The beauty of being a founder is that I can do anything, and I no longer have a mere cerebral knowledge of my abilities. I have ambidextrous proof. I have obtained — through blood, sweat, and tears — irrefutable evidence of the innumerable solutions and immeasurable impact that my hands and heart can produce. I say it with every sense of pride that any uncertainty about what I can or cannot do has been stripped away and replaced with yearnings for what I want to do, or what I like to do. To have wants and preferences, rather than needs and necessities, as bases for the work I get to do now is a privilege; one that changes everything for good in more ways than words can describe.
Part 2: It is well.
The year is now 2025. If you asked for advice on becoming a successful entrepreneur in this day, you’d hear something along the lines of “build in public.” But a society who encourages builders to be public figures of some sort, without training the public to treat the lives of real people with empathy; to not hijack personal stories and poorly try to summarise them in quick news updates is a society we should all be terrified of building. To me, it’s like putting a person in a cage with a wild animal and expecting the animal not to make a feast of them.
Personal transitions are rarely ever prompted by outward signals. It is rather unfortunate that too many of us choose to ignore our internal alarms. We’d rather wait to be fired, or for a business to hit an irreversible roadblock that leads to its shutdown, or to be burnt-out before we make semi-permanent changes that already began within us. What if we just learnt to investigate the incessant tingles in our guts until we got real, raw answers? What if we listened to the still, small voice our hearts instead of always waiting for external whispers to validate the choices we’re already well aware that we should make? What if we got so comfortable making positively radical decisions for ourselves even when there’s no presently available data to back these decisions up? I’ll tell you: we would all live more meaningful lives. Pushing past socially and personally-constructed plateaus will become second nature.
The one thing that sets exceptional people apart from people who are comfortable functioning at average capacity is that the former group are willing and able to build divine structures that help them identify when the clouds have moved, as moving with your clouds is the only guarantee that you will be right in the middle of the downpour. I wish more people would be more proactive rather than reactive, in seeking newness. And not just newness for the sake of it, but newness for the sake of stepping into a divine higher calling. I wish more people, especially “professionals” who work for petty blogs that assume they’re cut of the same cloth of a mighty cabal, recognise time for shifts in their personal careers as well. Maybe then, we’d read of fewer hijacked stories of real people being shared with a sheer lack of thoughtfulness and the levity of a “quick” news update. Stories like these; that is, stories like mine that have absolutely nothing to do with founder feud or financial fraud or some high level threat to humanity as we are mostly inclined to assume, are first and foremost the owner’s to tell. There’s rarely ever anything “quick” about stories like these, ones that are usually backed by deeply innate convictions that require time and carefulness to unpack and unveil. What kind of attention-seeking indiscipline, click-thirsty entitlement, flesh-gratifying impatience would make a person so desperate to share a story that is not theirs to tell, in an amateur slapdash style? We can refer to this repugnant display of opportunism as “media professionalism,” but it doesn’t make it any less a godawful opportunism that fuels cheap gossip.
Part 3: Where My Feet Are
If every brilliant and hardworking person became successful by virtue of their brilliance and hard work alone, the world would only have billionaires. It takes a village, it always will. I cannot begin to thank every single person who has been a pillar in this yet unfolding journey of mine, but it would be unusual of me to not try.
To my co-founder, Emeka Mba-Kalu, we built this. From the bottomless pits right up. This is a fact that history cannot rewrite. Thank you for the opportunity to express this side of me, for the privilege to build and to serve. I wish you and the company well, because to insinuate that I do not is to wish that the fruit of my own labour be in vain. This narrative that people must have gotten to points of irreconcilable damage to make such a decision is the norm, I understand. But nothing about my progression is normal. History reveals that I somehow always find myself right in the middle of exponential growth, and then make the very best out of it. For uninformed third parties to expect any less is simply them having a small view of a big world, which I believe might be what most people are accustomed to, but this particular problem is not my burden to bear.
To my family and close friends, thank you for holding me, shielding me, and showing up for me. How can I say that I have never experienced the beauty of real love when I have you all on my side? You respected the peace and solitude that I preferred to enter into a new phase with. You made sure I did not feel the least bit insane about my decision to exit, when it was in fact an insane thing to do, especially with no clear definition of next steps. I honour you all with every drop of blood that flows through me, because you honoured me first.
To every investor, customer and well-wisher, thank you. Your trust has made a strong woman out of that young college girl. I’m not one to make boasts of immature future plans, but I can boast of this: there is always more where any of what you’ve seen came from.
If I achieve nothing else, I want you who are reading this, to believe that you can do many great things. Your sole aim should be to die empty. Leave nothing behind. Max out every potential, every talent, and every gift that you have been blessed with. Give them the diverse expressions they deserve — some as businesses, some as jobs or mere obligation, many as hobbies. In a world that teaches you to do just black and white, always fight to be a weaver of colour. In fact, make a rainbow.
So, am I okay? Why wouldn’t I be? When you are an entrepreneur who builds in public, there are subtle yet loud expectations to be someone who can thrive in ambiguity, but also somehow be someone who has an unfailing knowledge about what next, how next, and when next. In a time like this, I dare to be different. I choose to lean not on my own understanding of what tomorrow should look like. I do not control outcomes as much as I never bypass process. This is the skin that great entrepreneurs are made of; to be able to bask in the gift of uncertainty and not battle with it or try to force a way out of it. The truth is, there is a realm where a million pictures of my tomorrow are already known. I do not exist in this realm, but I trust in the One who undoubtedly holds it firmly in His hands. I don’t have a direct answer to questions like, “What next?” but I am comfortable in this level of ambiguity. One thing I do know is that I’ll always be the 16-year-old student who says, “I am not going to work a regular 9–5 job at a bank.” Today, “a bank” represents any thing, thought, or any one who tries to place inutile limitations on how much more can be done through me. At the core, I’m still the same girl who’s always at the right place, spreading the right ideas. The girl who builds and builds resiliently. The girl whose hands always make gold out of the ordinary. Today, I am simply choosing to be where my feet are.
