The rate at which businesses are shutting down in Nigeria is very worrisome especially when the reason (s) for the liquidation of the company is not economic. In recent months, we have reported the end of Gloo.ng, etyres.ng, Careers24 and DealDey.
Today we report that another business this time from the fintech/digital payment sector has joined the list.
OyaPay has closed after just one year – or as the CEO Abdulhamid Hassan puts it: “Our grand experiment is at an end after 365 days.”
Hassan said the decision to shut down OyaPay was not informed by issues around the product itself or the market.
“When I moved back to Nigeria from France in January 2018, I had a goal in mind to not raise external capital until we’d attained a market fit and by so doing not hustling to get investor money. Instead, it would be on a neutral ground where we all (OyaPay and participating investors) need each other,” explains Hassan.
In a lesson for us all, he warns of family involvement. He had earlier taken a small seed round from a senior family member (an uncle) and at the point of product market fit where the need for investors kicked in, the said family member pushed back on the idea of diluting his investment.
“For months we couldn’t resolve it, I became frustrated and decided to call it quits,” Hassan says. Hassan adds in a blogpost: “We will be making wallet refunds and disbursing merchants balance by 18 Feb 2019 and shutting down by February.
