InnovationVillage recently met up with serial Founder, Oo Nwoye on his new startup, Fonenode.
Oo Nwoye is a co-founder of Fonenode, a telephony company that creates communication tools and services to make the lives of businesses and developers easier. He was previously a founder of a Music startup, called GBEDU.FM. Before then he was a co-founder of OnePage; an online business card platform.
Oo attended Kings College Lagos, studied Electrical Electronics Engineering at the University of Benin and his Masters degree was in E-Business management at Warwick University, UK. His passion is to help inspire a new cadre of Nigerian Internet Entrepreneurs through education and mentoring.
The Interview
Oo Nwoye: Fonenode is a telephony solutions company that empowers developers and businesses via the tools we create. Our first product (which is the foundation of the company) is the Fonenode API which gives developers a way to extend the services of their web/mobile apps to the telephone network
InnovationVillage: Do you see the need for this kind of service in Nigeria?
Oo Nwoye: Of course! One of the fundamental things Fonenode does is to ‘connect’ phones without access to the internet. So for instance, with Fonenode, it is possible for an ecommerce company to automatically take orders on their website via phones that do not have internet access. Another use-case would be a Pastor sending out voice prayers to the phones of congregation early in the morning just by dialing a number and recording a message
InnovationVillage: Who are you targeting with this service and how do you hope to promote it?
Oo Nwoye: Fonenode as a company creates tools for developers and small businesses/organizations. So our target market is actually well defined. Specifically though, we see the internet based small businesses as a primary target marker. Since “software is eating the world” we definitely know internet enabled businesses will end up being a large percentage of all SMBs.
I am presently promoting it by directly pitching those I see would find it useful. It is still early days so it is not overwhelming at the moment.
InnovationVillage: In your recent post “Another roll of the Dice”, you said you had niggling feeling that this “fonenode” is it. What makes you think so?
Oo Nwoye: I have done quite a lot of projects/startups and made a lot of mistakes. This time around, I knew what not to do. From choosing the idea, to the programming language of choice and when to start charging (from day one in case anyone wants to know). It was also important that it was instantly useful.
Here’s a little secret, Fonenode made more money in the first week than all my previous startup atempts put together. Why? Because this was the first time I was charging. Other times, the ‘plan’ was to get to a million users before asking for money. That is a really hard model to pull off especially in Nigeria.
I also saw people willing to deposit money with us so we would prioritize a feature they wanted. Not to talk of numerous inbound offers to be given seed money. Most importantly, I have a great co-founder in Ope (whom I courted for almost 3 years) who not only is extremely competent but 100% focused on Fonenode.
It is definitely different this time around. Definitely different!
InnovationVillage: When did you catch this “start-up” bug and what is in it for you?
Oo Nwoye: I caught the entrepreneurship bug a long time ago (about 10 years ago) while hanging out with my senior cousin who started running his Architectural/Building firm straight out of University. The tech startup bug caught me sometime in ‘07 when I stumbled across Techcrunch. The way Arrington chronicled the lives of those making it happen in San Francisco and Silicon Valley as a whole made me want to become a part of it.
Since then I have made a lot of attempts at creating a successful internet company. Though the startups failed, I learned a lot and made a boatload of contacts
For me, I definitely want to make a positive impact in my world (Nigeria/Africa) and hopefully a lot of money would be made as a byproduct of creating value
InnovationVillage: What do you envision for the start-up space in Nigeria?
Oo Nwoye: I envision that one day in the not too distant future, our entrepreneurs, especially the young ones will make a mark on the global stage hopefully surpassing what our friends in the music industry are doing. It will definitely bring a lot of positive change to our country and reduce the unnecessary employment and poverty we see here right now.
