After watching the 8-part documentary on “The Men that Built America” on History Channel, I realized how important entrepreneurs are to the society and how reading an interview or story from an entrepreneur has affected some of my business decisions. I decided to go back and re-read an interview I had with Seun Osewa in 2006 and the words remain ever-green. Since 2006, Nairaland.com has become the most visited site in Nigeria (according to Alexa.com) using a three-month index. There has been a lot of improvements on the site like the ad formats and designs but the simple approach remain the same, Hear the words from Seun:
1. May we know your full name?
ANSWER: Oluwaseun Osewa
2. May we meet you; primary, secondary, and university, background, where you come from, etc?
ANSWER: I’m a capitalist, and I come from Nigeria.
3. Would you say your educational background influenced your present dispositions?
ANSWER: No.
4. Who (anyone that influences you) would you regard as your source of motivation?
ANSWER: Milton Friendman, the Nobel Prize winning economist. I admire his
well-researched views on the role of government, which is to maintain
law and order only.
5. What inspires you?
ANSWER: A strong desire to be financially independent and achieve good things
that will affect millions of people and last even after I’ve died of old age.
6. When did the idea of Nairaland come to you?
ANSWER: I learnt that one could make money by starting a popular website and
placing adverts on it, but I couldn’t make my blog popular enough to be profitable, so I decided to start various forums where people can post on various topics that I have no personal interest in.
When the offtopic forum of my mobile phone forum proved popular, I decided to start a new discussion forum named Nairaland which would cover all topics that Nigerians care about. I was able to get enough traffic on this new forum to earn a decent income.
7. What challenges did you face and kindly give strategies adopted to overcome such challenges?
ANSWER: Spam and scammers are a constant nuisance on the forum. I try my best
to remove members who engage in such acts and their posts. I also have private messaging disabled so spamming and scamming can’t be done covertly.
Well-intentioned members who ignore the rules of the forum are also a problem. I find that I have to ban them frequently to convince them to either follow the rules or stay away.
The ‘best’ problem I experience, as the administrator of Nairaland is that sometimes, during peak periods, there’s so much traffic that my web server can’t keep up. This is very frustrating because it prevents further growth of the Nairaland Forum. After upgrading my hosting plan once, I’ve resorted to constant modification of the software behind the forum to make it fast enough to run under my current hosting plan.
8. Before Nairaland, what other projects have you undertaken? Would you say they were successful?
ANSWER: All my business projects before Nairaland were failures, except the
one that became Nairaland. My web hosting business failed after just 3 months because I ran out of money, while I couldn’t execute many other projects I researched due to shyness and lack of capital. My blogs and the mobile phone forum that preceded Nairaland were successful but not profitable. However, it was on that foundation that Nairaland was built.
9. Would you say your passion and strength as a programmer helped you create a world-class forum that Nigerians can be proud of?
ANSWER: All the programming I do today involves modification of PHP scripts and SQL queries. And you know what? As a programmer, I looked down on both languages and ignored them! My programming experience wasn’t very useful. Even if I wasn’t a programmer from the beginning, I’ll have learnt just enough PHP and SQL to make Nairaland a reality. My determination was and is much more important.
10. Nairaland has been a sort of refuge (information, knowledge sharing, escapism, etc) to Nigerians especially Nigerians in diaspora. Would you say you foresaw this when building this project?
ANSWER: Yes. Before starting Nairaland, I noticed that other Nigerian websites had more Nigerians abroad than Nigerians at home as members.
In fact, I sought to reverse this trend, and to a certain extent I succeeded. The country with the highest number of Nairaland visitors at this time is Nigeria. Earlier this year, it was the USA, as it is for most Nigerian websites.
11. I remember speaking with you five years ago and you spoke of developing software that will beat Windows? Are you still holding that vision?
ANSWER: No. It was a foolish vision. Linux has already beaten Windows and few
people care.
12. I also remembered how much you loved Linux that you refuse to install Windows in you computer. Do you still have that passion for Linux?
ANSWER: Even though I still use Linux from the command line on my web server,
my desktop operating system is Windows. I want to experience the Nairaland Forum the way others experience it, so when they have problems I’ll be able to help them.
13. What has been your driving force?
ANSWER: Survival, a strong desire for independence, and a desire to be influential.
14. The job situation in Nigeria is getting worse and worse? Secondary School Students are dreaming of universities and avoiding polytechnics. There is a great imbalance in the system. Jobs are few compared with the job seekers. Would you advocate entrepreneurship?
ANSWER: I always tell job seekers to create their own jobs, because nobody
owes them a job.
“Look for a painful problem that others are facing, and then devise a way to make people pay you for the solution. Look for problems that don’t require much capital to solve. In a developing country like Nigeria, there are so many problems waiting to be solved. One man’s problem is another man’s profit! Competition is often weak which means you’ll make a lot of money. So what are you waiting for?”
Unemployment is a problem of highly regulated and unionized countries
where politicians and labor leaders make job creation difficult. Nigerians should not be talking about unemployment at all. There are so many obvious opportunities around us waiting to be exploited. Being jobless in Nigeria is a big shame indeed.
15. Taking Nigeria into consideration, you have been successful as an entrepreneur. What secrets (strategy) would you share with would-be entrepreneurs?
ANSWER: With only one success so far, I am yet to prove myself. If I am able
to start 2 or 3 other business projects and they succeed, then I will feel confident enough to teach others how to succeed (I’m currently looking into movie production).
However, one thing I know is that as a businessman, you have not failed until you run out of capital or give up on your business. Hence, one should be very careful not to spend money unnecessarily. And one should keep trying until one succeeds.
16. Just one word, phrase, clause, sentence for youths in Nigeria
ANSWER: Create your own job today.
17. What’s the address of your website?
ANSWER: www.nairaland.com
