Dimeji Falana Discusses Edtech and what Foreign Investors Look out for in African Startups

Dimeji Falana was in his first year at the university when he realized he could become a successful tech entrepreneur. Following this realisation, he dedicated time, energy and resources to honing his coding and design skills. About a decade later, his edtech startup, Edves, is playing a huge role in revolutionising the education system in Nigeria and across Africa. In this interview with Business Elites Africa, the young entrepreneur recounts his growth trajectory and gives important business advice to other entrepreneurs. Enjoy the conversation. It’s nice to meet you, Sir. Tell us how your journey in tech began.

Dimeji: It all started in early 2007 when I was just a 100-level student at the University of Ilorin. One Saturday, while visiting with my cousin at his hostel, I remember him telling me about one of his professors who was preparing for an inaugural lecture and was in urgent need of help with his PowerPoint presentation. I stepped in and handled the PowerPoint for the professor and he was very impressed.

He later told me that he had never seen a PowerPoint design and display that good before. His commendation gave me a lot of boost and helped me to realize that I could actually do so much with the skill in terms of making money. So, I started doing exactly that.

One of the first major gigs I did afterwards was NTA’s animated logo design. Again, I used PowerPoint to design that logo. Then, I started looking at what other systems I could work with. I began looking into Excel and soon learnt how to add two cells to arrive at a factor or an answer. That gave me the knowledge of logic. And fortunately for me, the lecturers in school taught us a bit of programming. Alongside my budding career, I kept practicing with my Excel. That’s how the whole thing started. And here I am today.

Tell us how you went from designing and coding to owning an edtech startup.

Dimeji: As I kept working with Excel, I was also thinking of how to use Excel to build a Grade Point Average (GPA) calculator for students. And then by my second year at the university, I went on a 3-month industrial training. I was posted to Oak Computers in Ogba, Lagos.During the three months I spent there, I was moved across all the departments there. This afforded me the opportunity to learn so many new skills.

I was also opportune to meet a couple of guys who were really good at programming. They gave me books to read and assigned me lots of projects to review. Before long, I started designing websites using micromedia fireworks and other tools.

When I returned to the campus after the industrial training, I started noticing lots of website design opportunities for different student

organisations. This was around 2008/2009. Everyone was building websites. But first, I pulled back a little so I could finish my project on Excel for the GPA calculator, using PHP to now build a proper website. When I finished that, I took it to my HOD and he was very impressed.

Around this same time, I had just joined Facebook. One day while I was browsing through a Facebook page, I noticed something that said ‘Facebook. com/home.php’. Right then, it dawned on me that Facebook was actually built with PHP. It was a very unexpected discovery. And then I realised that if they used PHP to build Facebook and it was as good as it was back then, then I needed to get to the depth of PHP. That’s how I began researching more about the subject matter. I learnt C-language and began using it to build PHPs.

As at the time I was graduating, I had already built a lot of products and amassed quite a number of clients. I also had this friend who used to be very popular on campus and had a lot of friends outside of campus. One of these many friends of his was the daughter of a school proprietress in Ilorin. The young woman told my friend about the problems they were having in the school, one of which was the fact that different teachers were using different grading systems to prepare students’ results. Their accountants were struggling to keep proper documentation of tuition fee payments.

Take for instance if the fee per term is N150,000 per student and a student pays N100,000 at first to balance up later, the accountants could not keep proper account of what has been paid and what is left to be paid. Instead, they had to flip through booklets and do a lot of calculations, often making errors in the process. After hearing all these, my friend was like “okay! This is a problem that can be solved”. He then told her he would get someone to build a software solution for the school to manage all these problems. That person was me. He assured me that this is a business opportunity and he was right.

Our approach was to make it a oneoff gig. So, we decided to charge N80,000 which right now is nothing, but back then was a huge deal for two students. We built the product for the school and everyone was excited. Unfortunately, after we deployed the product, it failed the following week. We then apologized to the client and explained that we didn’t do the requirement gathering very well. So, we did everything all over again and got it right the second time. And that was how we found ourselves in edtech.

For the benefit of those who do not know Edves, tell us a little bit more about what the company does.

Dimeji: Edves is a B2B file product for African schools. What we do is to digitize and automate school operations from student enrollment all the way to graduation. Our product eliminates every bottleneck associated with enrollment, payment, engagement with parents, generating reports and others. All of these can be handled by our technology while teachers focus more on what’s most important, which is preparing lessons and having quality engagement with students.

When a school moves from paperwork to digital infrastructure, data becomes easily available and there can now be better collaboration between parents, teachers and administrators on learners’ education. This way, the strengths and weaknesses of students can be discovered and necessary interventions initiated in a timely and efficient manner. That’s what Edves is all about. We didn’t set out to become a typical edtech company. We just decided to focus on solving the problem of paperwork and tedious operations in schools, from nursery school all the way to the end of secondary school.

Do you have any plans to expand the business and perhaps do more than what you are doing currently?

Dimeji: We had a plan to do so many things. However, in the course of participating in several accelerator programmes, understudying about 20 African countries and their actual needs for education, we took a stand to just function as an infrastructure for schools as against being a typical school. We believe that the teachers only need the capacity to do what they are supposed to do. Likewise, the parents need the capacity to do what they are supposed to do. Same thing applies to school owners and administrators, both public and private.

This model of ours was put to test during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many schools turned to Edves to be their main infrastructure. We actually beat Google Classroom in Nigeria in terms of usage. The schools found it easy to launch on Edves for all their payment, admissions, learning and report activities.

We have all the essential administrative features/infrastructure every modern school needs. Between April and August last year, about 14,000 videos were recorded and shared on Edves by students. That’s one reason we are focusing mainly on building capacity for schools. I feel like that’s more needed in the education space right now.

Tell us how your company generates revenue. Is it the students that pay you or the schools?

Dimeji: We charge the schools and that’s all.

Do you think Nigeria’s education system is ready for digital revolution?

Dimeji: Yes, the Nigerian education system is ready. There has already been a technological revolution that makes it possible. Virtually every household in Nigeria today has access to the internet. On this same internet, teaching and learning is happening at a steady pace. So, Nigeria cannot afford to be left behind. We are ready.

Sometime last year, Edves raised some funding. Are there some more funding rounds on the horizon?

Dimeji: We are raising now. We will announce it very soon.

Based on your experience so far, what do you think investors look out for when deciding which tech startup to invest in?

Dimeji: There are numerous theories on what investors look out for when deciding which startups to invest in. One of these theories, which is generally accepted, posits that investors invest in founders, not necessarily the companies. These founders must be good at what they do and possess vast industry knowledge, a trait that will enable them to turn around the fortunes of their companies and ensure profitability. So, investors basically look out for such founders and invest in them.

Nowadays, we see a trend whereby venture capital (VC) firms now make use of their own tailor-made investment thesis when it comes to deciding where to invest. These investment thesis are based on different factors such as demography and location. There have been instances where promising fintech startups in Kenya were denied investment opportunities simply because the investor’s Investment Thesis prohibits them from investing anywhere else other than Nigeria. Another good example is when an investor refuses to invest in a really promising edtech startup, simply because its investment thesis only recommends investments in healthtech startups.

There is another trend around investment that I have seen in recent years. Sometimes, investors will only invest in you if you attend certain accelerator programmes. I won’t mention any names. Also, some investors will only invest in you if you have a foreign degree from European or North American universities. Other investors look out for entrepreneurs who have successfully exited a company because they want to put money in whatever such entrepreneurs plan to do next.

Generally, every investor wants to invest their money on entrepreneurs who are capable of successfully running a company from the scratch to a certain stage before exit. And the products these founders come up with must be bankable.

What are some of the biggest mistakes you’ve made as an entrepreneur and what did you learn from them?

Dimeji: When we started, we were based in Ilorin and quickly got almost all the schools in the city on our system. Afterwards, we started making in-roads into the Lagos market. All the while, we weren’t even asking ourselves the important question of ‘what do investors want to see?’. We weren’t going after the investors with the hope of raising money so as to expand the business. Instead, we focused too much attention on solving the problems we were in the marketing to solve; selling the brand to users. At the time, we had 60 schools in our portfolio and they couldn’t believe how we were able to achieve that without any external funding. Apparently, we couldn’t have achieved that with the assistance of external investors because we knew very little about raising capital. It wasn’t until 2016 that we started looking for how to raise capital.

The following year, we started doing some competition before we got a $50,000 grant from Switzerland. Eventually, we got our pre-seed round in 2018 and more fundraising since then.

So, the mistake is that we did not pay attention to learning about how to raise capital. It is actually something every startup founder needs to learn.

What does it take to start a successful edtech startup in a place like Nigeria?

Dimeji: In order to become a successful edtech entrepreneur, you must be an ‘education person’. And this does not necessarily mean going to school to study education. No. But you must understand the basics of how a school is run, and how the brain functions in the course of learning. There are so many edtech platforms out here today with very horrible products. I know it may look like someone is trying to bring them down, but that is the truth. They do not even understand the problem they want to solve. And That’s unfutunate.

I remember during the first accelerated programme we attended, somebody told us ‘you guys look really experienced already. The traction you guys have put forward is really crazy. How did you get this?’.