When you think about small businesses and local merchants, you know that they are the engine that fuels economies all over the world. This is true everywhere you look, including in Africa, where Anu Adasolum works as the founder and CEO at Sabi, a company that is helping informal merchants and businesses reach new heights. For too long, the tens of thousands of small, local merchants in Africa have operated without much help, credit, or access to technology. But while they have stayed the course, the world has moved forward toward a more digitally-focused future. To succeed long-term — in Africa and everywhere else — all businesses need access to opportunities to build credit, digitize their operations, and connect with suppliers and buyers everywhere. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Anu explains how Sabi provides those opportunities. She also discusses how B2B companies should be thinking about helping their clients succeed by focusing only on a narrow set of goals. Plus, she dives into what it takes to navigate through scaling a company. Enjoy this episode!
Main Takeaways:
- The Pain Point is Access: For too long no one was doing the work of helping small businesses in Africa gain access. Small, local merchants were out on their own, and no banks or other creditors were even trying to lend to them, which has stunted their growth. By granting access to these merchants, they have an opportunity they never had access to before.
- It’s Not Just About Digitization: Sabi is really about understanding the network of traders, building profiles, and then helping small businesses establish themselves and build trust in a way that allows them to succeed. Small businesses and informal traders have often been seen as a risk for investors, and in order for them to grow, a middle party is needed to de-risk the opportunity to build up these businesses.
- Focus On What Matters: When you think about how you can improve sales and reduce costs for your customers, then you start to eliminate the tendency to force users into apps or channels or to use tools that don’t serve them. When you avoid that pitfall, you create a much better experience for your customers and you force yourself to focus only on what will help your company grow.
For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.
Key Quotes:
“It’s really difficult to profile these [merchants] because a lot of their business is not going through their bank accounts. So people just give these crazy interest rates so that if there’s a default, they can cover it. And also because if someone doesn’t have a choice, what are they going to do? I think why that’s is, is just in general, the informal sector, although it’s 80 to 90% of most African countries economy, it’s just neglected because it’s very hard to deal with. So you know how businesses work generally, you want standardized off-take. You want people to consume from you in a way that you can manage. And the informal sector does not work that way. You can’t get someone who has been used to doing business one way their whole life and just give them an app and they’re just going to start using it.”
“Sabi is actually a business that focuses on understanding the profile and network in informal trade. A lot of the time when people look at a business like Sabi, they think, ‘Oh, these guys are basically digitizing supply for informal traders.’ That’s not what we’re doing. We’re not necessarily a digitization play. Digitization is part of what we do. But what we really do is understand the network of the traders — who sells to who, who buys from who, who’s reliable, who is not — through different sources of information and using those profiles and our understanding of those businesses to tell third parties who trust Sabi as a business, like, ‘Hey, you know what, why don’t you extend credit to this guy? Hey, you know what, it’s worth making goods or products available to this guy.’ And because it’s not just about one business, it’s about to traunch of businesses. So what they’re accessing through us is basically de-risked off-take to the largest sector of the economy.”
“We don’t do anything directly. We don’t do logistics directly. We don’t buy directly. We don’t supply directly. These are all businesses supplying other businesses, but what we’re doing is tracking what each business is doing in this system. So first of all, we have the sales data, the inventory data that they track on our system and then it’s more, what are you buying through the system? So if you’ve bought consistently from us, you’ve received on time, very basic e-commerce profiling. So is this a reliable customer? Do they take what they order, et cetera, et cetera. Then we know you’re already a reasonably reliable person… so basically it’s more a matter of building that history and that profile, and then using the data that we get to understand who’s reliable and make recommendations based on that”
“The key thing here in this market is while digitization is extremely important, it’s really about understanding what the market needs is like, you know, the market doesn’t really care about your marketplace. They don’t care about your app. They care about their business. And so for us, like every time we’re trying to design a product, or we’re trying to think about what we’re doing for the market. We think about teaching too, is everybody we work with. We want to be achieving one of two things. Either we’re helping you increase your income, increase your revenue, or we’re helping you reduce your costs. If we’re doing something that’s not achieving that for the users, then we have a problem.”
“We haven’t really commercialized our insights and that’s what we’re focused on doing. So it’s really working with bigger, larger corporate style businesses to grow out that piece. I’m making sure that in delivering those insights, they’re better able to provide our baseline merchants and our users with more services on help them grow their businesses.”
Bio
Anu Adasolum is Co-Founder and CEO of Sabi, Africa’s leading B2B tech marketplace serving the continent’s informal sector.
Prior to founding Sabi, Anu was the COO of Rensource; a leading provider of energy and payment services to SMEs in West Africa. Rensource was the 2019 winner of the Financial Times / IFC Transformational Business Award for Climate and Urban Infrastructure Solutions.
Prior to Rensource, Anu was Head of JForce Transformation at Jumia Group and also a Business Analyst at KPMG. Having worked in diverse industries ranging from Manufacturing, Private Equity, Real Estate and E-Commerce, Anu has carved a niche for herself in Organizational Management and Transformation.
She holds a Masters in Management, Organization and Governance from the London School of Economics.
Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce
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Transcript:
Stephanie:
Hello and welcome back to Up Next in Commerce, I’m your host, Stephanie Postles, CEO at Mission.org. Today on the show we have Anu Adasolum, who’s the CEO at Sabi. Anu, welcome.
Anu:
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
Stephanie:
Yeah. I’m excited that you’re closing out your day with us. I feel so touched. So I’d love to hear a little bit about Sabi. What is it and how did you come up with the idea?
Anu:
Okay. Sabi is a platform for traders in the informal space, which basically means the cash economy, I think is an easy way to think about it. We facilitate all sorts of supply to them, goods and services from third parties. And how I came up with it, that’s actually a bit of a story. So I used to be COO for an energy company, actually called Rensource.
Anu:
It’s a distributed energy, which basically means we generated power essentially and distributed it to several small SMEs, basically in these large open air markets. And as a result of that, we were keenly aware of the needs of these SMEs. And these SMEs can be really small kiosks that sell to just a neighborhood or they can be pretty sizable traders. And as we built out in my former company Rensource quite a network.
Anu:
I think we were at 30 or 40K SMEs. And we were trying to figure out how to sell them other services basically, but we wanted to do it in a standardized way. And we never really had time to get into it properly because building energy infrastructure at that scale is also quite challenging. And then COVID came. So we had all this downtime, all the markets were shut down because they’re very people dense.
Anu:
And so we had all this downtime on our hands and then we started working on what was then the value added services play, but because everything was shut down, we could take it anywhere. And it grew into Sabi. And then I don’t know if you’re familiar with Infrastructure Investors?
Stephanie:
Nope.
Anu:
But they were like, “What is this thing? This beast here growing, consuming cash?” And so there was a decision to spin it out. Very, very different business. There was no customer overlay because, it started at a time that Rensource’s primary markets was shut down. And so we basically started last September and here we are.
Stephanie:
Cool. Okay. So what were some of the biggest needs that you were solving for? What was your first offering at Sabi that started to grow really quickly?
Anu:
So in September we started with just free tools for the merchants. So that’s enabling them to record their sales and track their inventory. So we call it a mini ERP. And that’s what we started within September. So we grew that out for three months. Well, three and a half months. And then we got to about 70,000 merchants by the end of the year. And then in January we started monetizing a bit by basically opening up a marketplace for physical products. And then mid this year we started offering credits and some financial services.
Stephanie:
Why wasn’t this being offered before? Why did these merchants maybe not have access to ERPs or credit? What was holding that up?
Anu:
That’s a good question. Firstly, it’s not that they didn’t have access to anything, it’s more in the way they had access to it. So free tools, they didn’t have. So we were, I think about the first in markets with that. In terms of the availability of products, I mean, they’ve been buying products, they’ve been selling for a while, but it’s more a matter of the full assortment and actually having access to a full assortment of products because the way it usually works is they buy from…
Anu:
So manufacturers or distributors will have agents going around and then you have to buy separately from everyone else. From everyone you’re negotiating separately, you’re trying to get access to products. It’s a real headache. Or they have to go to the market themselves. I think in terms of… Okay, and then credits.
Anu:
So you can’t say especially in Nigeria and Kenya, even that merchants don’t have access to credit, it’s just that the credits is very expensive. I mean, you’re talking like 15% a month.
Stephanie:
Wow.
Anu:
It’s very expensive. And the reason for that is it’s really difficult to profile these guys because a lot of their business is not going through their bank accounts. So people just give these crazy interest rates so that if there’s a default, they can cover it. And also because you can, if someone doesn’t have a choice, what are they going to do?
Anu:
I think why that is, is just in general, the informal sector is, although it’s 80 to 90% of most African countries economy, it’s just neglected because it’s very hard to deal with. So you know how businesses work. Generally, you want standardized offtake. You want people to consume from you in a way that you can manage.
Anu:
And the informal sector does not work that way. You can’t get someone who has been used to doing business one way their whole life and just give them an app and they’re just going to start using it. There’s a whole process around that. And so most of the time you have a scenario where corporates businesses who have the resources, who can aggregate financing, et cetera, stay on their side of the world. And then the informal guys are just trying to figure it out.
Anu:
And so, for us for a long time, so I did offline sales. I was head of offline sales at, do you know, Jumia.
Stephanie:
Mm-mm (negative).
Anu:
Jumia is the largest e-commerce player in Africa. It’s listed on the New York Stock Exchange actually. My last role there was, I was head of offline sales. And then obviously I ran, so I was also dealing with a lot of informal traders and very quickly you realize that pain point is access. It’s no one is really doing the work to ease the burden of access to resources that actually helps them grow their businesses.
Anu:
And so when we were growing out Sabi, we were kind of determined to change that dynamic. And so that’s, our aim is more, how do we bring products to the markets in collaboration with these more corporate businesses that actually serve the informal businesses?
Stephanie:
So what does that collaboration look like? Because I could see, larger corporations being like, we’ve always done it this way and we don’t want to play in this riskier area. So what did that look like to actually get them to play with you guys?
Anu:
So that’s the thing. Our job is actually really around that coordination, and that product definition, and profiling. So Sabi is actually a business that focuses on understanding the profile and network in informal trade. So what that means is, a lot of the time when people look at a business like Sabi, they think, oh, these guys are basically digitizing supply for informal traders. That’s not what we’re doing.
Anu:
We’re not necessarily a digitization play. Digitization is part of what we do. But what we really do is understand the network of the traders. Who sells to who? Who buys from who? Who is reliable? Who is not? Through different sources of information and using those profiles and an understanding of those businesses to tell third parties who trust Sabi as a business like, “Hey, you know what? Why don’t you extend credit to this guy? Hey, you know what? It’s worth making goods or products available to this guy.” And because it’s not just about one business, it’s about a tranche of businesses. So what they’re accessing through us is basically derisked offtake to the largest sector of the economy.
Stephanie:
Got it. So you’re like this layer of middle person layer of trust that allows-
Anu:
Exactly. It’s a layer of trust.
Stephanie:
Got it.
Anu:
Exactly, exactly. Right.
Stephanie:
So what are you maybe asking the businesses for that are informal? I’m guessing maybe they don’t have the traditional tax returns and all the documents that-
Anu:
They do not.
Stephanie:
… we’re used to.
Anu:
Yes.
Stephanie:
What are you asking for to try and determine their trust level?
Anu:
So it’s very relationship based and history based. So it’s almost to an extent, if you think social media, one person is connected to another and the recommendation engine on Facebook or whomever, right? They’re recommending to you based on their understanding of your network. It’s something like that, except this involves commerce.
Anu:
So first of all, every business we’re working with, we start off in a very controlled way. You can’t just come in and access $100,000. Right?
Stephanie:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Anu:
No. It’s, you could probably access $200.
Stephanie:
Yeah.
Anu:
But the idea is that the more you do with us, the more you’re able to access. And also, especially depending who you’re doing it with. So we don’t do anything directly. We don’t do logistics directly. We don’t buy directly. We don’t supply directly. These are all businesses supplying other businesses.
Anu:
But what we’re doing is tracking what each business is doing in the system. So first of all, we have the sales data, the inventory data that they track on our system. And then it’s more, what are you buying through the system? So if you book consistently from us, you’ve received on time, very basic e-commerce profiling. So is this a reliable customer? Do they take what they order, et cetera, et cetera?
Anu:
Then we know you are already a reasonably reliable person. And then if you were referred, so there’s a lot of referrals going on. If you were referred by a reliable player, then your stock also goes up. and then if you take a small amount of credits in the form of inventory financing, not out and out loans, but inventory financing, then the more you turn that money around and you return it, then the more you’re able to access over time.
Anu:
And so basically it’s more a matter of building that history and that profile, and then using the data that we get to understand who’s reliable and make recommendations based on that.
Stephanie:
Wow. That’s really smart and amazing. So can the merchant see their score? Or it’s gamifying a bit of, your score is going up as you’re doing a better job?
Anu:
Not yet. Not yet. They can’t see their score yet, but it is part of what we’re releasing next year. This year for us has been more about… Because we actually just started the monetization part. What I think of as the hardest piece, the physical goods part in January. And a lot of what we’ve been doing is basically growing out our ability to coordinate, because it’s really difficult actually to automate coordination at that level.
Anu:
If you think about it, every single thing that runs through our system is from a third party. So aggregation is through a third party. Supply is through a third party. Logistics is through a third party, sales is… Everything is through a third party. So making sure that you can coordinate all of that and it’s received as though you supply directly. It’s still a good customer experience, is actually difficult.
Anu:
And so building that out has been our focus for the past year and building that out, growing at the pace we’ve been growing is, has been a real dance. And then we’ve layered on different parts. So now what we’re working on and going into next year is really the introduction of more and more engagement and automation. More and more automation around the scoring and the triggering of the access to different actions or different services so that merchants can more readily control their own journey in our system.
Anu:
So in terms of things like our recommendation engine, the discovery of different products, those kind of things is what we’re focused on for next year. Just to give you some perspective, because you’re dealing with the informal traders, you have to have many different channels. It’s not as though you can just give them an app or a call center.
Anu:
Some merchants are comfortable with WhatsApp. Some merchants are comfortable with the call center. Some want an app, larger merchants need a more supplier center style product. And so making sure all those channels have a consistently good experience, making sure all those channels are targeted correctly. And that merchants have not quite a customized experience, but a more personalized experience is what we’ve been doing over the last year.
Stephanie:
Wow. Sounds difficult. Figuring out all those channels and how to optimize it correctly for each different merchant. I mean, when you’re talking about moving to the monetization piece, what part are you monetizing? I know I saw, I think over a billion dollars or more of sales has been going through the platform, which is amazing. Are you monetizing the sales, or are you now going to charge subscription pieces? Or what are you thinking?
Anu:
So it’s a billion of sales records, which is we don’t monetize our SAS at all. Sorry, not SAS, our software. So we don’t have a SAS model. It’s not software as a service. It’s just free software. So all the sales that run through in terms of records, et cetera, we don’t monetize them. But then in terms of products, that’s ordered from other suppliers, from suppliers through our system, we monetize that with a fee.
Anu:
So we crossed a hundred million dollars in annualized GMV in about, it took us I think, nine months. And so we earned commission on that, those sales through our system, and then we also earn… We share income with the credits providers on our system. So we work with different FinTech microfinance banks and banks to provide accredits to our users. And then we income share with them on the interest or the fees that are paid depending on the nature of the product.
Stephanie:
Got it. That’s awesome. So I read somewhere also that you were operating in stealth mode for a while. And I wanted to hear, why? I mean, a lot of people operate in stealth mode, but specifically for you, what was your motivation there?
Anu:
It was really about focus. We knew the need for the product and we knew how fast it would grow, but sometimes you know something, but you don’t really know something. And so when we released it, it started growing really fast. And I think for us, a big issue was that customer experience piece. Are we building this out correctly? Is this something that can scale? And we really just wanted to focus on that.
Anu:
I think, of course you’re familiar with the startup world. Once you’re out there, you’re out there.
Stephanie:
Yeah.
Anu:
And even now, so for instance, we’re going into the market for our series A and that in and of itself is a time consuming process. So the second we were out there, people start messaging you, your LinkedIn, your email, your team. everyone’s getting job offers. So it was really just about staying focused while we built that foundation. And that’s why we stayed in stealth mode for a while.
Stephanie:
Got it. Have you received any kind of pushback from, industry experts or government, or any issues around that once you came out and told people what you were doing? Have you had any backlash from that?
Anu:
So we’re very fortunate in that government, is not really interested in us. Because we don’t do anything that has a huge amount of compliance or regulation. So while a lot of credit flows through our system, we ourselves are not the providers of the credit and we are not the takers of the risk either. So we’re not subject to banking or credit regulations.
Anu:
And then on the physical goods piece, we’re also not the supplier. We’re basically coordinating a bunch of supply. So in that way, I think we’re fortunate in the structure of our business model, but on the pushback, I think because of the nature of our business, a lot of people think there are competition.
Anu:
So you have all these players that are basically digitized distributors, who I think are worried about us, but we’re really not the same thing. So in that sense, there’s been a lot of focus on the team itself. And I think people are very interested in our team members, but-
Stephanie:
Always. Always.
Anu:
Yeah. But in terms of the actual model, no. We’ve been fortunate on that one.
Stephanie:
Yeah. I could see government wanting to see your data though, wouldn’t they? Because this is probably one of the first platforms that’s actually tracking income coming from the informal economy where they’re like, “Okay, we want to see what’s actually happening now.”
Anu:
I mean, yes, but again, timing has been fortuitous in the sense that last year, or was it early this year, the tax for small businesses income was lifted. So if you earn less than a certain amount, you are not subject to tax.
Stephanie:
Got it.
Anu:
And so therefore that piece of attention is off our backs. But in terms of just the possibilities of insights, et cetera. Yeah, there’s a lot of attention from organizations and agencies, government agencies that work with small businesses and of course we’re always open to working with those guys because it’s, our aim is to enable these businesses.
Anu:
And then on the flip side, a lot of interest from credits providers and insurers that have been basically locked out of the markets because of the difficulty of figuring out how to scale in it. So in that way, I think coming out of stealth mode has been helpful.
Anu:
And then finally, a lot of how do I say? Would I say investor on foreign interests, which is helpful in the extent that you know that as you grow, you continue to have the supports you need. So all in all it has been, I think, more beneficial than I expected.
Stephanie:
How do you feel about taking on foreign investors? Because to me, I think one of your current investors said, “You guys know it so well, it’s a very unique dynamic here in Africa.” We need to let the team do what they know is best. And I can see outside influence coming and being like, “Wait, this is how we do it here. We already had this already set up.” And how do you feel about bringing on people who maybe don’t fully understand the dynamics in Africa?
Anu:
So I think we’ve been very lucky in that we have a super good set of investors. So we have investors who understand Africa very well, I think. And especially since we came on of stealth mode, a lot of the businesses, sorry, investors contacting us, this is kind of, they’re an early foray into Africa for them.
Anu:
So like any good startup, and I think we’re a bit fortunate in that we’re a reasonably experienced team. We kind of know what makes a good investor and what doesn’t. And in that way, we haven’t been distracted. We don’t have any investors that have tried to take us away from our primary focus. And I think we’ll continue to maintain that in terms of all the investors, even as we get ready for our series A, some investors have been contacting us directly, reaching out to us.
Anu:
And thus far we’ve been fortunate in that I think all of them kind of understand the uniqueness of this space and the difference in what we’re doing from the other players who are more standardized digitization place. So in that way, and I think also there have been one or two lessons learned from some bigger e-commerce players that have been in the market, but haven’t scaled as much as people anticipated. In that you can’t really bring a standardized model developed somewhere else into this market.
Anu:
So if you even look at markets that are similar, so some might compare to China and early day Alibaba, and there’s truth in that, in that if you look at Alibaba, what they really did and still continue to do is support other businesses growth, really. But also China has a much more enabled infrastructure side than us.
Anu:
If you look at India where there’s been explosion recently, a lot of that explosion is due to this huge growth in basically internet, since geo entered the market. With us, there’s growth in internet, there’s growth in infra, but there’s still this fractured value chain.
Anu:
And so if you try and come in with a standardized e-commerce plan, and say, “Hey, just do the offtake like this.” You’re going to have that kind of initial crazy burn. That is very, very dot com start off field, but not sustainable. And we’ve tried very carefully to always be unit economic positive. So I think our investors respect that and they’ve given us space to kind of grow out in the way we think is best.
Stephanie:
That’s great. The other thing I was reading is that, and you can tell me if this number is inaccurate, that of the informal economy within, women make up a lot of that. I think 90% women are within the informal economy and maybe that’s a little bit over inflated, but made me think of how big of an impact you’re having on their lives. Being able to do business in a better way. What are some stories around that of you, going out and meeting these merchants? What are some stories around them?
Anu:
Sure. So, I mean, 90% is high. But yes, the vast major of these businesses are women, because they’re the ones who can. You need a lot of flexibility in your life as a woman.
Stephanie:
Yes.
Anu:
Because of childcare and [inaudible]. And in terms of, so something really interesting happened, I think it was last month. There’s this lady, her name is Mama Betty. You call someone mama when they’re elderly. So got it. That’s why she’s called Mama Betty. And she got our head of commercial, our CCOs number from one of our agents. And then she just called. And then shes like, “Are you Khafe?” And he is like, “Yeah.” And then she’s like, “I’m outside your office. I want to meet you.” And then he’s like, “Who are you ma?” And then she’s like, “I’m one of your suppliers. I sell on your platform and I want to know how you people are doing it.
Anu:
How are you doing it?” And so he went to meet her and she was so excited because, so I think she’s about 68. And she’s a second generation wholesaler. And she’s never sold so much.
Stephanie:
Wow.
Anu:
Because we have this huge… So we have 170,000 merchants. So basically if you’re pricing right, you’re going to get a lot of traction. And so she just wanted to know, what are you people doing? How does it work? Because we have different channels that you work with us. If you are not a digitized business, you can still supply us through things like, we have some tools that just feel like either calls or WhatsApp.
Anu:
So she’s not familiar with a standardized computer or interface where she has to put her stock. She’s just like sending WhatsApps. As far as she knows like she sends to other businesses she deals with, but she’s just seeing all these orders and she was super excited. So she wanted to meet the person responsible. And she’s been sending Khafe all these prayers. So every Monday she sends him these prayers. She’s like “My son, how are you? Are you doing well?” And Khafe has been super happy about that. I think he’s been high off that the whole month.
Stephanie:
I bet. I would be too. I want some of her prayers.
Anu:
Yeah. So-
Stephanie:
What does she sell?
Anu:
She sells FMCG products. So milk. If I remember correctly, she’s a distributor for Friesland WAMCO, which they sell a lot of milk and dairy products.
Stephanie:
Okay.
Anu:
Yeah.
Stephanie:
Now it’s wild thinking about her using WhatsApp to tell people her inventory and be able to sell that way. That’s cool, but that she can still kind of plug into your platform and see the benefits from it.
Anu:
Yeah. I mean the key thing here in this market is while digitization is extremely important, it’s really about understanding what the market needs. It’s like, the market doesn’t really care about your market’s place. They don’t care about your app. They care about their business. And so for us, every time we’re trying to design a product, or we’re trying to think about what we’re doing for the market, we think about it in two ways.
Anu:
Everybody we work with, we want to be achieving one of two things. Either we’re helping you increase your income, increase your revenue, or we’re helping you reduce your costs. If we’re doing something that’s not achieving that for the users, then we have a problem. And so the question isn’t really about my interface and my application, I mean, we want the app to be as hot as it can. We want to have maximum engagement there, but it’s more about, are these businesses being positively impacted by what we do?
Anu:
Are they able to get more access as a result of that? Is that access leading to more turnover for them? Them buying through one of our guys, does that mean their costs are going down? Et cetera. And when you think about it that way you won’t force the users into any particular form of offtake. Instead, you kind of tailor your business to what those users need.
Anu:
And I think we think that’s the best way to look at it.
Stephanie:
So when you were growing up, did you see opportunities everywhere? Because it seems like you’ve been kind of on a similar path, at least with Sabi and then the prior company of giving access to people, whether it’s energy, whether it’s e-commerce activity, whatever it is, you’re giving access to people who don’t have it. Did you see opportunities as you were growing up through life, being like, “Oh, I could solve this. I could solve this?”
Anu:
I would say yes. Because so I come from a family of, a business family. My mom is a business woman. My dad is a business woman. And so I basically grew up in their businesses. Right?
Stephanie:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Anu:
And kind of because of that, I was trying to run away from those businesses. So first of all, I wanted-
Stephanie:
What did they do? Why did you want to run away?
Anu:
It’s just business, business, everything business. And I was good at drawing and painting, so I wanted to be an artist. And then I won’t say which parent, but one of them truncated that. So then I was like, “Okay.” I was very interested in economics. So I was going to be an economics professor.
Anu:
And I was actually going to do my masters in economic history. And then for some reason I was on LSE’s website and I saw this course called management organizations and governance, and I thought, “Oh, that sounds so cool.” So I changed last minutes. And then after that, so we had this project and a VC judged the school project. And so they invited me and my team to start a bootcamp in Copenhagen. And after that I got stuck down the business hole, to my dad’s delight.
Stephanie:
Yeah. [inaudible] dad’s probably like…
Anu:
Yeah, he was pretty happy.
Stephanie:
That’s what I wanted.
Anu:
I had told him I wanted to be a professor. He was looking at me like, “Professor?”
Stephanie:
Interesting. That’s great.
Anu:
I kind of reverted to the family norm.
Stephanie:
Yeah. Well now you all can share the same kind of conversations over dinner, so-
Anu:
Pretty much.
Stephanie:
It probably makes it much easier.
Stephanie:
All right. So what has been the hardest thing while growing Sabi? Or was there ever a moment where you’re like, this might actually not work out?
Anu:
I don’t know. This sounds like a humble brag, but it’s really not. The growth has been so difficult to deal with. It’s like you know, especially because, so a lot of me and the team worked together before either in Jumia or Rensource. And so we’re familiar with businesses that grow fast. You know what happens, right? You know that there’s a risk of the business outgrowing the team. You know you need to keep recruiting, you have to change your structuring constantly, et cetera.
Anu:
But actually experiencing it at this pace, so early in the year we were doing 100% month on month. It’s actually extremely difficult because you are trying to keep your team skillsets up. You are trying to keep people motivated. You don’t want them to work on healthy hours, but at the same time, if you’re not working those hours, it’s you can’t meet this demand. At one point, we were only monetizing 5% of the business because, basically growing at that pace, was getting a bit crazy.
Anu:
And so it’s really that balance. So for instance, one thing when you’re growing at this pace is you have to make sure you don’t run out of firepower, right?
Stephanie:
Yep.
Anu:
And so fundraising is a whole dance. I’m fortunate in that my co-founder is focused on that. And so I don’t have to do that much in fundraising, but of course, I still have to talk to investors and do some things. And it’s a lot to balance out. So managing that growth cycle and anticipating the business’s needs is really something else.
Anu:
Something that happened to me last week was, I went into someone’s office and I was like, “Hey, why aren’t we on higher numbers?” Just like where I think at that point we’re about 20 or 25% into the month. And we weren’t trending what I expected.
Anu:
And I was like, “What’s going on?” And then he turned his screen to me and he points at last month’s numbers. No, sorry. He points at, were in November, he pointed at September’s numbers. Which the whole month’s numbers were the same thing as what he needed us to do in a week.
Anu:
And he’s like, “Well…” He didn’t say anything, [inaudible]. And then we just started laughing because it’s a very ridiculous. I remember when we hit that number in September, we’re like, “Yeah.” You’re the king of the universe. And then this month, is it like one week in, we’re here? What is this? What is this number?
Stephanie:
Yeah. Come on. Speed it up dude.
Anu:
So making sure your team feels appreciated, making sure they’re growing with you, especially for culture, you don’t want to grow and just bring people on top of people’s heads, making sure people feel rewarded, et cetera. I think that’s my current focus. Yeah.
Stephanie:
Yeah. Amazing. All right. Then the last question, where do you want to be in the next one to two years? What are you aiming for?
Anu:
So over the past year, we’ve really been focused on physical goods and financial services and that coordination piece, I think we’ve had… So we have something we call a commerce graph, which is really the center of our data and profiling. Where we layer not just internal information, but information from external sources that help us profile the businesses better. And then also local based information.
Anu:
So these parts of Kenya, this kind of resources are available. These are the dynamics, these parts of Nigeria. We haven’t really commercialized our insights and that’s what we’re focused on doing. So it’s really working with bigger, larger corporate style businesses to grow out that piece and making sure that in delivering those insights, they’re better able to provide our baseline merchants and our users with more services and help them grow out their businesses appropriately.
Anu:
So we’re looking for that connect between the informal space and the more formal space, connecting them through data and insights and also commercializing that.
Stephanie:
Cool. That’s amazing. Will be very fun to watch you guys do just that as I can tell you’re already on that path. So very, very cool.
Anu:
Fingers crossed.
Stephanie:
Yeah.
Anu:
Thank you.
Stephanie:
All right. Let’s move over the lightning round. The lightning round’s brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready?
Anu:
Okay.
Stephanie:
All right.
Anu:
I try to be.
Stephanie:
[inaudible]. First one. I can tell you still have your inner artist in you. So when you want to get creative or even just creatively think, what do you do? What do you go out and do? Or how you-Anu:
I go to the beach.
Stephanie:
To the beach?
Anu:
I’m a big beachhead. And Lagos is a beach city. So I take a book. I go to the beach. A notepad and a book, and I chill by the ocean.
Stephanie:
Amazing. Sounds beautiful and relaxing.
Anu:
It is.
Stephanie:
What’s one thing you don’t understand today, but you wish you did?
Anu:
Something I don’t understand. Whoosh. What a question? Something I don’t understand. I don’t know if I have a good answer for that. I guess if I could understand culture dynamics better, that would be good. Sometimes you just have these funny elements crop up in your business in terms of, team dynamics or some kind of issue. And it’s like, where did that come from? And I wish there was some kind of science to anticipating some of those behaviors and the psychology behind of it. Behind it.
Stephanie:
Yeah. That’s a good one. I’m sure many people are like, “Yeah. Okay. Yeah, me too. When you figure that out, let me know.” Tell me about a time when you made a powerful choice?
Anu:
A powerful choice.
Stephanie:
It can be life or business.
Anu:
Life or business. I think one of the best decisions I made was, so Rensource, the business I was in just before this, that kind of birthed Sabi, during COVID, had to undergo a pivot because the markets shut down. And it had to be done really quite skillfully and abruptly. So they moved into commercial and industrial solar. And I’m very much a big distribution, large operations, coordination kind of skill sets.
Anu:
So it was less obvious why I should stay in the business, but I think Demi, my co-founder and I were like, “Okay, you know what? Let’s at least make sure this pivot happens successfully.” At that time, I had a lot of job offers. And it was also after startup thing, I was thinking, you know what? Maybe I should just take it easy.
Stephanie:
Yeah.
Anu:
Play with my kids a bit more. Hang out at home at bit more. But then, at Rensource we had started this thing about access for informal businesses and improving infrastructure and the lives of these business people. And I think I made a decision to continue to do that. And before it was clear, before Sabi really came to be. And I think I was fortunate to make that decision and I’m really… Yeah. That has turned out, I think really well.
Stephanie:
I’d say so. Yes. Well Anu thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all about Sabi. Where can people find out more about that and you?
Anu:
So please go to sabi.am or sabiam, so S-A-B-I-A-M, _africa on any of the social media platforms. In terms of me, my LinkedIn. I’m not very social, but if you’re on sabi.am, you’ll probably find out something about me.
Stephanie:
Amazing. Thanks so much.
Anu:
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
