Ijoma Blessing is the founder and CEO of Hourspent Incorporated. Blessing is a tech expert that offers services through her platform to earn dollars. Her tech business, Hourspent, is a fast rising technology business that redefines tech business in Nigeria.
The 25-year-old Blessing has co-founded two tech start-ups (Oxhib and Hourspent) that are collectively serving thousands of users and clients. Blessing has always had passion for tech, an attribute that drew her to the industry.
A winner of the Entrepreneurs Organisation-Global Student Entrepreneurship Awards (EO-GESA), a finalist of University Startup World Cup and BDL Accelerator, she is currently a 400-level Computer Science student of Michael Okpara University of Agriculture, Umudike.
Blessing started her business as a freelancer. She created a folder named Hourspent, where she kept brief videos on the amount of time spent on doing transactions.
In 2015 Christmas, she shared the videos with some of her clients; the feedback she received inspired her to start her own business, prompting her to improve her computer skills.
“The feedback I received inspired me to make it my online portfolio but I quickly realised it will be far more efficient and more inspiring if other skilled people do the same as it attracted more prospects and user engagements. This was how Hourspent started,” she said.
What was Blessings initial capital? Blessing started her business with $64, which is currently valued at $200,000 based on the codes running on it, revenue and active users.
But Blessing is not having it rosy. Most of the clients of Hourspent platform are foreigners who pay for Blessing’s services in dollars. Blessing has had the exchange rate fluctuations to contend with.
According to her, the business is supposed to have made huge profits since naira depreciation but the reverse has been the case as it gets its dollars in naira value, owing to the Central Bank of Nigeria directives to that effect.
In her words, “the exchange fluctuations would have been an advantage to us since we earn dollars and spend in naira, but it wasn’t. First, owners of an online payment gateway we were using stopped Nigerian businesses from integrating their payment API on their websites. They said they stopped us due to the current Nigerian laws.”
“So, we started using a local online payment gateway which, according to CBN, must be remitted to us in naira. Basically, they automatically remit users’ funds with the current naira official rate. At N305 to 1$, we have to buy at N400 to $1 from third parties to transfer to users when they request for withdrawal. We lost a whole lot then,” she said.
But this has not discouraged her. Blessing incorporated her business in Delaware, United States, and now uses stripe payment API and Silicon Valley Bank to guarantee payments for her services in dollars.
She urges government to look into Nigeria’s foreign exchange policy. “Whatever policy that prevents foreign payment providers from operating in Nigeria really needs to be amended or at least we need to allow local payment providers to accept, process and remit the exact same currency they collect,” she said.
Blessing has drunk from the fountain of knowledge of renowned entrepreneurs and has not taken any loan from an external source.
On the role technology can play in Nigeria’s quest for diversification, Blessing said, “The stretch is tremendous, the dream is far reaching. All the technology industry needs is government support in terms of right policies and infrastructure.”
Josephine Okojie
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