KingJesse

A food vendor once told me he didn’t need to do anything online. His food was good, and people would taste it, tell others about it, and his business would keep growing. At the time, he had 300–500 walk-in customers daily. Today, he barely gets 30. I have been building NowNow in Calabar for 8 years. And I don’t mean 8 years as a startup founder. Eight years ago, I didn’t even know what that term meant. We were just a delivery business that started with one bike. Today, we have over 100 bikes doing deliveries for us. In those 8 years, I have seen at least 100 delivery businesses come and go in this region because they couldn’t handle the complexities. And man, it is complex. What makes it complex isn’t the delivery itself. That part is easy. It’s the coordination. Manually coordinating vendors, riders, and customers is a war you have to fight every single day. You have vendors who feel they’re doing you a favour by letting you sell their food to your customers and would never hear of paying commission. One vendor once told me he had nothing to lose. If he instructed his sales girls to stop selling to NowNow, they’d be fine. But we would lose customers because his food was good. (Yea, I know) You have riders who prioritise their own deliveries over yours, deliberately delay your orders, and tell your customers to contact them directly if they want faster service. Basically, they’re asking your customers to bypass your brand. You have staff who don’t stay for more than 6 months, even after you’ve invested hundreds of hours training them on your operations. And you have customers who want the best service and the fastest delivery but aren’t willing to pay the price for that convenience. I have seen it all. Faced it all. Gone to war with these complexities. And after 8 years of pure struggle, we’re finally having some of our best months since we launched, completing hundreds of deliveries daily with over ₦1m in daily turnover. Vendors now come to us asking to be signed up because they see the value we bring. They’re accepting our terms, including commissions. Riders are lining up to work with us. We now have a waitlist. Customers trust us, sing our praises, and place multiple orders daily. And after 8 years, we’re finally moving from manual coordination to automation, thanks to AI. It’s been a long, tedious 8 years. I would have given up a long time ago, and nobody would have blamed me. But I believe tier-2 African cities deserve the same convenience that big cities like Lagos and Abuja enjoy. And I’m going to build the infrastructure that makes that happen. Cheers to the next 8 years. 🍻

Road to Delin 01: I have been running NowNow for 8 years alongside an incredible team, most of whom joined 5–7 years into the journey (they came in at the fun part 😂). In that time, we have completed over 120k orders. Half of those have come after 2023. Our customers love us, and 89% of first-time customers use us again within 60 days. Our insight in all this is that customers often know what they want but don’t know where to get it or how to get it done. That’s where we come in. We have the best vendors and substitutes for everything. It also helps that we are operating from Calabar, a tier-2 city. 😊 A typical order comes in like this: “I want fresh Egusi soup, the one they cook with Bitterleaf, not pumpkin.” (As you can already tell, pregnant women love us 😂). We take the request, give a price, delivery and service fees, and 28 minutes later, the order is delivered. We do thousands of these orders monthly, from errands to food to market runs. That insight is why we are building Delin. It will be able to take those types of orders, no matter how niche they are. Delin is an AI that takes requests via conversations (text, voice and image), understands them, plans, coordinates and delivers to you in minutes. We are not building from zero. This isn’t a typical idea that might work. This is us using 8 years of knowledge, thousands of completed orders and insights to create something that we believe will be one of the top 5 most-used AI agents in Nigeria by 2028. An AI that connects you to the physical local economy and solves real-world pain. We’ve already built the first part, the pickup and drop-off flow, which is currently in beta testing. We should be able to add the food and errands flows this month. So… it begins 😁

This is the worst update so far. If something isn’t broken you don’t have to fix it. The previous UI was better!

If you want to talk to me come through the front door.

The stress of raising capital is something I would rather live without if I could. I am a builder! I was born to put rivers in deserts. I had no idea that I had to convince strangers with money into believing the mission too. I probably skipped that class in founders school.

One of WhatsApp’s best feature is the ability to text yourself. Once you’ve pinned that conversation, it becomes the best to-do list in the world.

I have never been this mentally stressed in my life

Challenge accepted

It’s also the investors who are only backing fintechs even when a bunch of them are now vitamins.

You forgot wigs?

With the business model we are operating on we won’t need to raise again after seed.

Fintech guys like to show off. The clout is part of their ROI. We in commerce don’t work like that, each naira spent need to have a clearly defined ROI.

I walked like the Israelites man.

National Theatre was the best venue for moonshot. Just improve navigation for next year though.