Improving your money saving skills

Crowdyvest is a fintech platform located in Nigeria. This week we caught up with their co-founder & CEO, Tope Omotolani to learn more.

What challenge does Crowdyvest solve?

Crowdyvest is an impact-driven tech company that creates opportunities for our members to save, invest and earn towards achieving financial freedom while facilitating impactful growth in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. 

What were you doing before founding the company?

I co-founded Farmcrowdy, the leading agtech company in Nigeria focused on providing tools and technology for farmers and agribusinesses. As COO, I coordinated all farm operations across 14 states in the country with over 25,000 farmers.

I founded my first start-up when I was 16, called ‘Gifted Hands’ a make-up business that ran for 10 years. At age 19, I founded a cleaning services company known as ‘Fínífíní’ enterprises.

In 2012, I built a product that focused on the buying and selling of agricultural produce from the rural areas and sold to the urban parts of the city of Lagos with over 18 million people, through offline crowdfunding. It was called ‘Ojawara’.

How did you get Crowdyvest off the ground?

Crowdyvest started off in January 2020 as a crowdfunding platform, partnering with businesses (impact-partners) to make impact-driven opportunities available for users to sponsor and earn good returns.

How much money have you raised so far?

We have not raised any money thus far.

What went into building the early stage product?

A lot of hard work, sacrifices and commitments. However, more importantly a great team effort to ensure the business got up and running productively. Crowdyvest is built on multiple contributions from the different team members. 

What’s your tech stack?

PHP Laravel Framework, Vue.js, AngularJS and Ionic.

Where do you currently operate?

We are currently based in Lagos, Nigeria with members from all over the world saving, investing and earning on our platform. We intend to expand to other African countries within the next 2 years. 

What’s your business model?

Crowdyvest operates a cooperative business model where opportunities to save, invest and access profits are opened to members only, and these opportunities are drawn from different sectors.

Becoming a member is free, since we strongly believe in democratizing savings and investments. The Crowdyvest platform is easy to use and profits/interests earned are very good. In addition, we take customer satisfaction and feedback seriously.

We currently have over 60,000+ members and our members grew by referrals, word of mouth and social media. Early users of the platform who joined when Crowdyvest was into crowdfunding went all out to spread the word about the platform.

What metric do you use to measure success?

The goal for Crowdyvest members is financial growth and freedom. We want them to achieve both of these through the savings and investment plans we have available on our platform.

When the numbers of our members increase, and they continue to take advantage of the opportunities on our platform, that is success.  

What’s the most useful tool you use in your business?

Mixpanel Analytics. It helps us monitor all of our products key performance indicators in one place. Unlike business intelligence (BI) dashboards, it’s easy to customize and the data updates in real time, so our whole team can make decisions with the latest numbers.

What do you love most and least about running Crowdyvest?

Impacting the lives of our members is what I love the most about Crowdyvest. Policies and regulations is what I least like about running Crowdyvest - it sometimes kills creativity.

What companies do you look to for inspiration and why?

Revolut and Monzo. They provide a modern financial lifestyle at your fingertips and really speaks to what financial services should aspire to be.

What’s the most important lesson you’ve learnt so far?

Value people and they will in-turn make magic happen for you.

How do you see the African tech ecosystem evolving over the next 10 years?

The African tech ecosystem has always been exciting and the future couldn’t be more promising. Recently, payment processor Paystack was acquired by Stripe and Flutterwave is now a unicorn.

We will see more of these stories over the next 10 years and I want to say that as a business, Crowdyvest is ready to make the next leap forward.

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