Grayson Julius is the Co-founder and Business Development Director at iPF Softwares, an award-winning digital transformation company headquartered in Dar es Salaam.
Led the development and launch of digital solutions deployed in over 15 African countries, driving economic growth and technological advancement across the continent.
His extensive background in product management, Agile software engineering, and design enables me to lead cross-functional teams in conceiving, developing, and deploying web and mobile applications across diverse sectors.
Grayson Julius shared with Today Africa about his entrepreneurial journey.
Could you please tell us a bit about yourself and what iPF softwares is all about?
My name is Grayson Julius. I’m a founding partner and business development director at iPF softwares. He has a background in software engineering with over 13 years of experience in building digital products.
Founded a company while still at the University of Dodoma, Dodoma in Tanzania. And it has been quite a journey, an interesting one in building a small set of companies starting from university to where we are now. Looking back, I’m a proud partner at iPF.
What convinced you to go into this partnership with your co-founders?
We were not that smart to look at what type of founder we have but I think it was more black in chance. It started us out of friendship and sharing the same passion of code and engineering.
And I think that got us together and when we started, we did not even know the word startup existed or that it was a vocabulary. We didn’t even know what I meant and also the word, founder. So we just knew about business partners. It was not really a thing of like carefully in choosing a partner.
What’s the inspiration behind starting iPF Softwares?
I’ll say it has been from the beginning, transforming businesses digitally from small to large to medium, transforming the way things are done manually. I think it was out of curiosity in terms of seeing something that people are doing in a manual process. And how can we be able to create a solution around that to be able to do the process.
It really started with the passion of creating products ourselves. It did not start off as a service. The service came in later. But it really started as ourselves building SaaS solutions. And initially, in the early days, that did not go very well.
We failed with a couple of solutions to then venture into doing services and then back into building solutions and sort of a hybrid model, doing services and producing solutions. But it has always been the eagerness of transforming African businesses with digital transformation. Right now with artificial intelligence and everything in between that.
Can you describe the process of launching iPF Softwares into the market?
As I said, when we started, we did not have those plans in place, go-to-market strategy, we did not have a process to do that. It was more about such a thing. It was really saving one customer after another.
And as I mentioned earlier with building products, it was a little bit of a difficult route to tech. So it was more of bootstrapping. I’ll put it that way, like it was purely bootstrapping and picking lesson after lesson, serving one client, getting feedback, growing, moving. There was no point to say, like, now we pause, let’s wait and launch iPF Software. It was all like that.
What were the challenges that you could face in the beginning and how did you overcome them?
So I think like every other startup in the early days it is financing, staying liquid and afloat, to be able to pay bills and pay yourself to be able to see another day. That was probably the challenge in the early days, not for long though. It was a difficult part in the beginning. But after we got our first client, it was then one business after another.
Now we face other challenges. In every step of growth, every step you go, there are different challenges. But speaking specifically for the early days challenges, I would say it was more financing and not having enough to operate a business.
Another major one would be the legal landscape. And mostly we are software engineers, all of us as founders, and we do not know much about tax. We knew about financing from learning and you know like maintaining and managing the cash flow and stuff like that, being careful with where and how we use money.
Those came out of personal habits and behaviors, but the tax area is very complex and the early days of starting a startup is not an easy place to navigate without guidance. So we had our share of penalties starting up before we could afford a proper audit firm, before we could afford a proper finance person.
We went through some challenges with authorities. So probably I will highlight those challenges being probably the major one in the early days.
You mentioned bootstrapping, does it mean that you have not raised funding before?
Nope, we never never raised them. We have never raised capital. So we’ve been bootstrapping all the way with our own capital.
How did you build systems and processes that help in smooth running of your business?
I think our team grew right now, probably 10 times from when we started. So right now we are about 30 plus. And we have seen people come and go. But we’ve always looked for talented individuals.
And it has been more focused on training our team and making the most of people do the skill set while here. Maybe they came in, they do not know much, but along the way, if there’s a potential and good attitude, someone gets to grow to a senior level.
And really we have not much cared about the level of GPA or what school this person went to, what university they study, did they study computer science or not. We really look at the talent and the potential of that person, mostly the attitude and the culture fit of our company.
Regarding processes, I remember one of our mentors a while back recommended a book called, Built to Sell. And I think that was a little bit of eye opening in terms of how important the fundamentals of building up processes are. So that’s where we started.
We have processes for so many things in terms of how things should operate. Like we call it the iPF way, our engineering team calls it the iPF way. And it has been existing for probably over six years being refined every time. And that helped us to really deliver what we’ve been delivering all the time.
It has not failed us since then. And every time we look at it and we get to refine the process, almost every other month it’s been revised and how can we improve it? That’s been our focus.
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How do you manage your team and prioritize your task efficiently?
I’m a morning person. So I start my day very early. On a good day, it will be 5am. Start with my morning rituals. After that, mostly within those rituals, one of the key things that I have to do is scribble, like writing on a rough paper or an ipad or something. I’ll do that and I think that at least helps me get clarity on how my day looks like.
After that I jump into my calendar and start scheduling that. So I don’t have much of a task or tool management tool whatsoever than a calendar. I usually rely on a calendar, I use Notion boards, of course, for managing a backlog and things to take notes on, like things that are coming, the backlog generally.
But I usually rely on my calendar and I usually split my day into 30-minute slots to an hour slot. And I’ll do the scribble part again during lunch hour just to cancel out things that I’ve already done or maybe then irrelevant by that time of the day.
I think casually I am a very flexible person most of the time because at the office sometimes you have working meetings from the team, one needing advice or guidance or something, one asking a question. So from time to time I have flexible windows that I get to support the team and partners if needed.
How is your business doing today and what does the future look like?
The future is bright. From everything coming up with automation, generative AI in general, the space of software engineering and product design and production generally is really in high demand. And we’re at a position where you get to work on projects that you’re very much interested in and being able to select that. So I’m honestly excited for the future of IPF software and Africa in general with everything that’s going on in this space.
Speaking of Artificial Intelligence and automation, how is iPF Softwares positioned to stay ahead of the curve?
We have a team or a department of AI and future tech, a couple of research we are doing but as well we have we are working with some products as well with major banks in the country. It has been really interesting mostly with the chat commerce, so say, looking at that and being able to leverage the powerful engines or artificial intelligence to be able to get to that.
So on our end, the way we look at it, it’s more like we are traditionally coming from being traditional software engineers and how can we be able to embed artificial intelligence into our daily work and everything that we do. Every service that we work with a client, from the beginning of it, we look at how would this look and leverage artificial intelligence.
So like from the early days, from the data layer architecture design, we design and look at that future, how does it look like the solution once it’s done? Because at the end of the day, you need that fundamental solution being able to work and then adding up AI as a service on top of that solution.
What key lessons have you learned in your journey as an entrepreneur?
What have I learned as an entrepreneur in the journey? Yes. One is like every entrepreneur has their own path. So try to be more of yourself rather than copying, I would say, or being scared of what other people are doing. Be inspired, of course, but everyone has their own path to success.
Another thing is always stay true to yourself and stay true to your partners and clients. If you are doing something and you really get to do it because entrepreneurship requires commitment and if you’re not passionate about what you’re about to invest into in no time you’re going to give up. So it’s really important to go in and if you go in with something that you’ll be able to reap the fruits of your labor.
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How do you handle setbacks and failures as a founder?
So there are more lessons than failures, the way we look at it. If you need to learn, you need to pay a tuition fee. Every lesson comes in with a tuition fee. So you pay your tuition fee and you will have learned and you make sure you don’t pay that tuition fee again, if it comes again.
As a business owner, the way that we look at things, at least with my partners, is if we face a challenge, it is a lesson. And some lessons come with bearing costs. Some lessons you need to pay for them.
Some lessons come for free, but some of them you need to pay for them. And you pay the monetary value or time or whatever, but you pay for them. So once you pay the tuition fee and you realize you have paid the tuition fee, planning ahead is like how can I afford paying this tuition fee again? At least that’s how we look at things.
Click here to read the part 2 of the interview with Grayson Julius.
What advice would you give to others who have the mindset or the intention of building a business?
Entrepreneurship is not easy, I’ll start with that. So it’s not the notion that we had in the early days, that I’m going to start a company so that I can be able to work fewer hours or to work less, that’s a lie.
You are going to probably work harder than you’ve been employed. You’re going to work while you sleep. And you’re going to work while you’re on vacation. You’re going to work while you’re driving. You are working most of the time. Well, at least that’s what you’ve experienced, probably other than experiencing differently.
But I would say you should make sure you are in the right headspace. In terms of partnership, there’s no formula to that. I mean, founding partners, there’s no formula to that. You can get lucky. You can choose carefully whichever way you get to do it. But there really needs to be a good balance between that.
I’ve tried to share our story to people and I’ll say I find three being a magic number and a number of founding partners, there’s no formula to that but at least with three you can be able to balance arguments, you can be able to balance things out.
With two, one will feel like he’s being favored or has a stronger opinion than the other and others will be looking down into one another. But it could be different, like the Google founders, they are two.
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But I’m just saying out of experience and the way I’ve seen the ecosystem and everything. You need to find a great partner who you share common values with and not necessarily have the same thinking. Because sometimes that difference is important in building up a business.
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