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Cross Border E-Commerce in Africa: Mall For Africa CEO Chris Folayan (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How much money did you raise?

Chris Folayan: We don’t disclose the details, but it was a seed round.

Sramana Mitra: When was this?

Chris Folayan: This was four years ago.

Sramana Mitra: So 2012.

Chris Folayan: Yes. >>>

Getting to Velocity: TeePublic Founder Adam Schwartz (Part 7)

Adam Schwartz: We don’t really know what to expect. Even if you’re a $4 million company, you’re still not that big. You don’t know how far this is going to grow. Are we going to grow 100% again or is it not going to scale that way? We’re just going three months at a time and just reinvesting profits into the business. We’re staying profitable and tight, and trying to use the same lessons we learned through BustedTees in terms of building something that is sustainable.

We could certainly take venture money. We could have taken it for BustedTees and we have been in a great position in TeePublic to take money. I’m an operating partner for a venture firm. Josh is a partner at a venture firm. We just feel like we want to do this in a different way. We were profitable in 2015 and we continue to invest. >>>

Cross Border E-Commerce in Africa: Mall For Africa CEO Chris Folayan (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Besides selling some of your incubated projects and shutting down some others, you said the web development company’s journey was about 10 years. I take it around 2010, you moved on from it. Was the company sold or did it continue and you moved on?

Chris Folayan: It continued till about a few years ago. I left the company to start Mall For Africa. Mall For Africa was a company that came out of OCFX.

Sramana Mitra: Was it one of your incubation projects?

Chris Folayan: It was. It’s obviously become the biggest one so far. The reason why I left OCFX was, once Mall For Africa was taking a life of its own, I saw that you can’t be the captain of two big ships. You have to pick one. VCs require it. No VCs want you to be the CEO of two different companies. >>>

Getting to Velocity: TeePublic Founder Adam Schwartz (Part 6)

Adam Schwartz: Through this marketplace, we started doing three things. One is, we invested heavily in improving the platform and the technology behind the store and product creation. There were some pretty serious technical challenges in taking a high resolution image from designers and turning that instantly into a ton of different product images. It’s a data challenge and an image processing challenge that we started working on.

We started nurturing the community of designers that we have and trying to expand it. We built a community team that’s out there talking to designers one at a time. They’re basically curators who are finding amazing art online. They were reaching out and bringing people to the site. We’re saying, “We have these new machines. They can do incredible things on-demand. We guarantee you’re going to be satisfied with the quality. We have insane QC processes in place.” >>>

Cross Border E-Commerce in Africa: Mall For Africa CEO Chris Folayan (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What else did you do in that incubation mode? What other company or projects did you do?

Chris Folayan: We were in the incubation mode throughout OCFX. We did Guru Country and we had an auto dealer’s website where dealers could create their own site for their dealerships. It’s more of a template model. You didn’t have to know how to do any HTML but you could create your own website for your auto dealership. I worked on that. We ended up having about 450 dealerships on that platform. It was also acquired.

Then we have some tiny ideas here and there and created software for major corporations. OCFX was also a software development and design company. Companies will come to us and say, “Can you build this for us?” We also come up with ideas for those companies and say, “We think we could do this for you. Are you interested?” >>>

Getting to Velocity: TeePublic Founder Adam Schwartz (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: If I got it right, you bought BustedTees at $4 million in 2011 and got it up to $8 million in 2013.

Adam Schwartz: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: You sold it at that point?

Adam Schwartz: We were growing through this customer acquisition program. We had done a lot of work to get our retention rate up. We had done a lot of optimization on a marketing level. I thought that we were reaching the ceiling of what we could do. There’s only so much optimization that can be done. At some point, there needs to be an engine for growth that is the top of the funnel. We were just wasn’t sure how much longer we could do this. At that time, Josh and I started talking about it. >>>

Cross Border E-Commerce in Africa: Mall For Africa CEO Chris Folayan (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You were based out in the Bay Area?

Chris Folayan: I was based in San Jose.

Sramana Mitra: What was the duration of the web design company?

Chris Folayan: I was with it for 10 years. We worked for pretty much all the Top Fortune 500 companies in the Bay Area. We also worked with the US Government and major banks. OCFX started many different startups because I was privileged to own a company that was not just a software development company, web development company, and a design company, but we also had our own ideas and our own products.

We were able to think up and drum up ideas internally to see if we could make money. In brainstorming sessions, we would just go to town on it and see if we >>>