BLESSING IJOMA is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Hourspent – an organization accelerating the future of work with access to top freelancers and tools to manage teams, clients, and projects, among others. In this interview with JOSEPHINE OKOJIE, she speaks on how Hourspent operates from Nigeria to target international talents, teams, and businesses.
Since the COVID outbreak, how have you been building Hourspent from Nigeria, to target international talents, teams, and grow businesses?
Having worked with US tech companies remotely for seven years before starting Hourspent, I understand the chaos they deal with daily. Most platforms and search engines display information based on one’s location and that may be my Achilles heel when targeting the international market as search results will always show my locality. We need to understand our target audience better, learn more about our competitors, among others. A VPN comes in handy at some point.
We could not have grown Hourspent to this point, let alone build it to be “The World’s Work DNA” if not with the help of our distributed team. We could have experienced a lack of a diverse set of ideas, values, maybe shut down operations. Being distributed in the USA and Nigeria is helping us build innovative products our audience needs, tackle problems more efficiently, and attract new markets. Hourspent cuts across the talent, business and productivity software industry. Hence, there is a need to focus on specific businesses and talents that will most likely need our services. One way we get to do this is by defining the type of talents and businesses that need Hourspent, identifying the platforms they’re mostly on, going in there, connecting, and engaging with them on a large scale. One thing is to define our target audience, and another is to have them reciprocate.
Doing business in Nigeria takes guts on a whole different level so I don’t focus on the challenges associated with the Nigerian environment. I focus on how to overcome them
What about local independent talents and businesses, how are you building Hourspent to help them get work done?
There is this growing trend on Hourspent; our local talents working with international clients and our local businesses hiring international talents on Hourspent. The mission is not to connect our local businesses to our local talents. The mission is to help people run every aspect of their work and businesses from anywhere, breaking boundaries without limits.
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You mentioned working for several years with some US tech companies remotely, attending workshops and conferences. What did you learn from these experiences, and how is it helping you scale Hourspent?
There are quite a few but I’ll highlight two of them. Stripe once invited me to their event at the PayStack office. I had a one-on-one discussion with some other entrepreneurs that came for the event. I listened to a few tell me about their startup. It was like a screen with their products displayed and their price tags to order. I couldn’t feel a connection. I discussed that with my team and we believed that we may be focusing too much on sales too.
So, we tried something different. We put relationships first, and as a result, we started building relationships with talents and encouraged them to refer their clients. Their clients came, found Hourspent easy to use, and brought in their teams among others, and that’s how our growth started skyrocketing. I was at “Sterling Bank Meet the Executives”. During one of those break times, every one of us wanted to talk about our startup, plans, and others. At each table, almost everyone was talking. When I represented Nigeria during the EO GSEA Award, I had a deep discussion and listened to some of us. Even to this day, I still remember much of those discussions. That taught me something about listening.
Digital solutions like the one Hourspent is providing are blossoming amidst the pandemic. What sets yours apart?
How work is done has changed over the years. People set appointments on Zoom, collaborate with teams on slack, etc., search for talents to hire on freelance platforms and even on social networks. The one big issue? Using too many tools and platforms to get work done scatters work. It’s inefficient at best; chaos at worse. We fix that.
On Hourspent, you can onboard your teams, manage projects, among others. If you need an independent talent for a project, no need to search on freelance platforms. You can simply switch your project to “Public” or create a new public project, and Hourspent will notify independent talents that match your criteria. Basically, you can work with your teams and freelancers together to reach your goals faster, and save time and cost, all in one place. We eliminate the idea of talents bidding tirelessly on projects.
If business leaders can onboard their teams to Hourspent, how can they transition their teams from declining roles to work of the future instead of firing them?
It all starts with our mindset. We need to change the way we think about our workforce as talents are our greatest resource. The first is to move from being talent takers to talent makers. Investments in learning, career journeys, and cultivating a growth mindset within organizations should be put in place. The economics of knowledge changed ever since online courses, Q&A platforms, etc. sprung up helping people create a career that matches what living means to them. Team leaders are in a better position to spot potentials in their teams and give them opportunities to reskill within their capacity to perform new tasks.
How would you evaluate Nigeria’s tech industry from when you launched Hourspent in 2017 and now?
We started before 2017, but there was no payment gateway or products a Nigerian startup could integrate to process payments made for talents and transfer them in USD, Euro, or GBP to them. We had to watch talents exchange their PayPal email id to get paid after work was done. Some get paid, many do not get paid. We had to turn the internet upside down for months in search of a solution until we found Stripe, partnered with them and a few other technology companies, and re-launch in 2017. What we could have achieved in a few months, took us three years to do. I believe it’s a lot easier now than then especially in the area of talent acquisition and payment processing.
What is your assessment of the Nigerian business environment and why do most start-ups fail in less than five years?
Doing business in Nigeria takes guts on a whole different level so I don’t focus on the challenges associated with the Nigerian environment. I focus on how to overcome them even if it means incorporating our startup in other countries and setting up teams there or nurturing our local talents. However, that does not guarantee we’ll succeed. Most startups I know couldn’t succeed because they run out of money and investors have no interest in funding them.
Raising funds from investors is a smart move. It may be easier if investors reach out instead. Most investors fund startups that have some traction. We received a few investments and acquisition offers from well-known individuals but the story was different when we started with $64 and without revenue. We had to contact investors hoping to raise funds, and that didn’t work. Currently, some investors are contacting us, and it all started when we started generating revenue. I believe if startups manage to generate revenue and keep increasing it while spending less, their startups won’t fail.
A former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt often says, “Revenue solves all known problems”. He is right, especially in Nigeria where startups have little or no support. Our problem wasn’t that we couldn’t process payments and transfer earnings in USD, Euro, or GBP to talents. It was that we couldn’t generate revenue and to do that, we needed to first help talent get paid in the currency of their choice. Startups that have eyes towards revenue will likely not fail. By having eyes towards revenue, I mean if they research well and execute enough for their customers to spend money on their solutions, they’ll likely not fail. Although most startups cannot generate revenue once they launch, not knowing their break-even point and putting plans in place to reach it is likely a red flag. There are several other reasons startups fail. At some point, startups need a bit of luck because some startups had everything done right but still had to shut down.
