Shalom Bamigboye is the co-founder/CEO of Entobo, an Integrated Experience Platform (IXP) designed to empower companies to build and maintain lasting customer relationships and deliver service with ease.
By blending his expertise in privacy and business strategy, Entobo is positioned to help companies achieve seamless customer interactions.
Shalom is an accomplished entrepreneur and recognized information privacy expert with a passion for driving business growth and innovation. With a proven track record in building and restructuring IT businesses, he helps them achieve optimal efficiency, compliance, and scalability.
Shalom Bamigboye shared with Today Africa about his entrepreneurial journey.
What inspired you into the path of entrepreneurship?
My name is Shalom Bamigboye and I come from a typical Nigerian family. And I think for a majority part of growing up, I never really identified entrepreneurship as something I wanted to do.
There were things I wanted to do that were around entrepreneurship. But I think at the core of it was the fact that I wanted to solve problems. I was always eager to solve problems.
I was somebody that was very critical of things that people do or what the system is doing. So if I was supposed to walk into a room and maybe there’s blue lights there and it’s supposed to be green. I’m like this should have been green and it shouldn’t be blue.
And I think some of that has just made me somebody who talks. So growing up, it then started translating into entrepreneurship. was like, ah, absolutely. You can actually take it up and solve problems that you encounter or that you experience as an individual.
So yeah, my own journey into entrepreneurship was more of a, you see a problem, instead of talking, why not just take up the responsibility of solving it.
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Why did you name your business Entobo and how did it come to be?
It’s actually a very funny story. When myself and my co-founder actually sat down to find the name for our idea at that point, we had names that we identified. And every time we checked for availability, we had to pay like thousands of dollars to be able to use the name.
So he jumped on the phone with another friend and said we started a company and we are trying to find a name for this company. And then that person said something and I think the network was bad.
And he heard “Entobo” and he said that’s the name. So we checked and it was available. Sometimes people ask me, how did you come about this name and what’s the meaning of the name?
It doesn’t necessarily have a meaning, but I think it’s now our responsibility to find the meaning for the name.
What are the services or products Entobo Technologies offer to people?
Even as organizations are beginning to adopt technology you kind of discover that things happen in silos. So specifically when before I moved into entrepreneurship completely, prior resigned and I focused on Entobo full time.
I used to work in the consulting hand of a technology firm. And we dealt with over 100 clients. And specifically myself, I had to answer to about 45 of those clients.
So I spent a lot of time trying to get my communication in one piece, and trying to get feedback from the business development team, and then working with the project team itself, and also getting feedback from the project team from the other end.
I discovered that I spent more time trying to aggregate things that were happening in silos in order for me to be able to smoothly deliver value to our clients. And so that was the base idea behind what we do at Entobo.
We are trying to simplify workflow such that teams can move away from working in silos and then they can work within the same space.
So what we do at Entobo in very practical terms is we bring your business communication, that’s the CRM aspect, and your project management and then collaboration into one space.
You can collaborate with your teammates, with your colleagues or your subordinates effectively right in the same space. And your clients also come into the same space. They can also see what they need to see.
So the information is managed. You don’t need a lot of back and forth like you have in the way we have it in the traditional workspace. As opposed to some communications happening in your email or your WhatsApp.
Essentially, what Entobot does is simplify these things, I mean your entire workflow, especially as a service delivery firm into the same space. We currently have our MVP, which is out.
And what we are trying to do is we’ve been getting a lot of positive reviews and we are looking at building an AI agent or identity AI to actually simplify workflows the most.
What are the challenges that you have been facing and what are you doing to overcome these challenges?
I think one of the biggest challenges we have with doing business is we are a lot mechanized. There needs to be some sort of move or some sort of transformation into understanding that things can be automated.
So a lot of businesses that you even see you say, what, you actually have these challenges. I don’t know, they’re probably a little more comfortable trying to do things the hard way than to really adopt automation.
As much as you meet businesses who are absolutely ready, they want to adopt what you do. You still discover that a lot of business owners in Nigeria and maybe Africa as a whole still need more education around the impact of technologies and the vast amount of possibilities of how we can make more money by adopting technology.
On the implementation and building side, I think of one of the challenges that we’ve had is power. For instance, we had some internet issues when we were about to start this call.
So when I came back to Nigeria a few weeks back, I think for like three days I couldn’t do anything. It was very difficult to even get phone calls across. So that has impacted productivity for some of our staff who are on this side of the world.
Power on one side, then you have the network, which is another big issue, that is on the productivity side. But on the adoption side, I think a lot of businesses still need education.
And that’s part of the reason why I love to appear on podcasts like these on platforms where you can really talk and explain to business owners, the power of technologies and how they can actually do business and even make more money by adopting technology.
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What has your brand been doing to help educate these businesses to understand that technology will help them make more money as a business owner?
Part of what we’ve identified or what we are actually trying to do is we’ve partnered with a UK firm to produce easily digestible content. And those will be rolling out before the end of the second quarter of this year.
We have also been speaking to a lot of people on ground. And we are trying to collaborate with accelerators, MSMEs associations, and local associations of business owners.
We have been speaking to people trying to reach some sort of synergy or relationship in order for us to continue to educate and bring the gospel of technology and how it has even simplified workflow and here to people.
Some of the conversations we have on this side of the world, we’re probably putting the cart before the horse. For instance, when we went to a five-star hotel somewhere in Lagos. We were trying to drive in and they needed about four people to check us.
Somebody was writing, was scribbling number plates in a paper and was sweating in the sun. Somebody had to carry some mechanical device to check us out. About four people had to attend to us.
And I said, I think it’s a bit premature that we’re talking about AI as a country where certain things that we shouldn’t really be doing manually we are still doing them. And I’ll go back to my first point, which is around the fact that we still do a lot of our business in a mechanized manner.
What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to tell people this can be a lot easier than you doing it. Because what then happens is if you can adopt technology or if we can solve your problem for you, you then have more time.
You have more time to either be functional to your family, or you have more time to even chase more money, depending on whatever you value. But ours is to remove the stress from your table.
And what we’re trying to tell you is that you can remove stress. That’s the point of AI. AI is supposed to come in to enhance human efforts. It’s supposed to mean that where you probably had to use a tractor before, or you need to use a spoon to get your job done.
Don’t you think that there are certain things that we need to do first as a country for these technologies and AI to work well?
I got your point and it’s two forms for me. Like I said, as a personal principle, I don’t like to talk, rather than talk, I want to try and do. And that is actually what moved me to wanting to do something.
I want to solve real problems except we just want to be blind or want to be ostriches. There are problems on the ground that we all know. I think the biggest elephant in the room is the power issue in Nigeria.
And the truth is, if we continue to dwell on the fact that we probably don’t have what we want to refer to as the basics to sorting these things out or what we think are the platform that we need to upon for us to move fully into adopting AI.
I think the world will be gone before we realize what is happening. So while we are trying to sort out what is the basics, I’m of the opinion, and maybe that’s the entrepreneurial mindset for me, that we need to make do with what we have in the meantime while we are trying to sort out or solve these problems.
I say every time that we are still battling with issues that have been solved 50 years ago in some countries. Despite that, we have kept up the energy. We compete very well on the global stage in business.
We have some major startups that have even sprung out of Nigeria, despite all the challenges. So I tell people every time, there will always be challenges. Even in these terrains that you’re talking about, in Europe or in America, there are also challenges that are unique to this terrain. So these are our own issues.
These are the problems that we have, but we can’t dwell on the fact that there are problems, then we don’t move in the direction of what the world is moving. There are issues clearly. We have power issues and you can’t be talking about AI without having steady electricity or steady power.
So that is the problem that we have that probably doesn’t have a solution tomorrow. But we can’t because of that, stay or lag behind. We can’t. There will always be issues. But we must just make do with what we have to keep moving. We need to develop AIs that solve African problems, that understand Africa, and understand Nigeria.
AI agents or LLMs that speak our own language, that understands our context, that can speak or that can translate Igbo metaphors, Igbo proverbs, Yoruba proverbs, right?
We need AIs that understand how we do business. We no longer can afford to lag behind or add blocks that were built for other environments. So there would always be issues, but the solution mindset has to come and we need to make Nigeria work. We need to make Africa work for Africans and for the future.
How did you raise capital for your startup?
So far, we are bootstrapped. Myself, my co-founder and a friend, we’ve been running the company out of our pocket.
Since you launched, what strategies are you using in attracting and retaining clients?
We’ve been doing the footwork. We attend events in the UK and try to preach to them that we can do this for you. We talk to people. Basically, we’re just me offering value saying this is what we can do for you. And if we’re meeting them at the point of their needs and they’re happy, we will come on board and continue to build another relationship from there.
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What key lessons have you learned in your journey as an entrepreneur?
I think it still goes back to what I said earlier about problems and solving them. One of the problems we have in Nigeria and this is from a purely personal point of view, is that we have more talkers than doers.
I think a lot of us are more interested in talking, to be fair. I think a lot of us are more interested in talking than actually absolutely solving problems. In order for us to make this country work, we need to move away from the phase of talking into actually tackling real issues.
I understand and I agree that there is a role that the government plays in developing the country. Because when you come from the angle of policymaking and infrastructure. There is a role that the government has to play.
You need to make do with whatever is available to get some value. So I think that a lot of things need to change in Nigeria, let’s be very honest. We need to change a lot of things, but the work will not be done by just talking.
Africa is the youngest continent in the world. I think there are about 100 million youths that can enter the workforce in Nigeria if my stat is correct. Honestly, we need to be looking at the blueprint of countries like China to say, Can we make a difference? Can we make some sort of shift?
I think if a lot of people adopt the mindset of leaving something better than we met it. So if I am to look at this problem and try to solve it, what can I do to just make this space 1% better than the way I met it?
If we continue to do this, we notice that we would actually find out that we would have made a great improvement in another, maybe in another decade. We might be talking of Nigeria in a completely different light. that’s one.
Another thing I think I’ve noticed or I’ve learned is that we do a lot of training programs in Nigeria, but a lot of young people are still lacking in the skills part. There are a whole lot of, we go to school, we learn a lot of theoretical things.
But I think we are struggling when it comes to the application of this knowledge into real life, or how we translate to real life and really making money or delivering value. Honestly, we need to move away from just training or going to school or learning.
We need to find a way that these skills now translate into what is required in the job market. And I think that is one dichotomy that continues to exist between what we receive in school or training centers, to what should happen when you get to work or when it comes to delivering value.
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How did you build systems and processes that help the smooth running of your business?
We are a very agile team. It’s still a very tiny team and things are very easy to disseminate. So maybe we don’t have a behemoth of the system so far. It’s still a very young company and we’re very few in the organization. We are putting things in place and we have people who understand what they expected to do.
It’s clear, you know what your goals are, what your tasks are. You’re not confused. When you turn up in the morning, you know what you are expected to achieve for the day. And I think that’s very important to getting what is called an organization, if not you have a disorganization. So there are clear job responsibilities and clear expectations and KPIs.
What advice would you give to others who are just starting their business?
I think entrepreneurship is very glamorous. But honestly, it can be hard and it can be a very lonely journey. Entrepreneurship is for people who are ready to stay there despite the fact they can see everything going wrong.
The difference between a successful firm is that the founders were consistent enough, despite everything that was going wrong, what is going wrong. They continue to turn up every day and say, you know what, I’m just resolute. I have to make this thing work. You have to reinvent yourself. You have to reinvent the company.
I didn’t mention this, but we initially just set out to simplify workflows. Initially, what we thought we were trying to do or what we wanted to do was to build a customer relationship management solution, which is just now a part of what we are doing.
And the initial vision was to build a CRM and then build X and then build Y and then build Z. Then we started talking to people and I think we spent about five months building a CRM. And then by the time we were getting feedback, we figured that, oh, the way we were thinking about the solution wasn’t even it.
We needed to rethink the way we were thinking about the solution. We went back to the drawing board very hard. It’s done something that you’re probably emotionally attached to.
You cannot afford to be emotionally attached to your work. Yes, you have to be emotionally attached to the extent that you want to make it work with your baby. But you must prioritize the market feedback. You must prioritize solving a problem.
You don’t want to do it for your family to use it. Very unlikely that the solution you are building that your family will adopt. And building a startup is a game of numbers. It’s not an art. It’s not art where if you draw it and one person loves it or appreciates it, then you’re a winner.
Entrepreneurship is about numbers. If you’re speaking to customers, they want to know how many people you have onboarded. If you’re speaking to investors, they want to know how many customers you’ve gotten. And if you’re speaking to a customer, they want to know how you can solve their problem.
So you need money to solve their problem. And you just see that everything is all about numbers. It’s a game of numbers every day, every time. So as soon as you discover that you’re probably not solving the problem you thought you wanted to solve, or maybe what you even thought was a problem is not a problem.
So you must be agile enough and resolute in your own belief, the belief in your own self to reinvent and move in the direction of what the market is saying or the feedback that you are getting.
You may have a perfect product in your head. But if it doesn’t solve a problem, it’s useless. So you can’t be too obsessed with that perfect product that you think that you’re not working on the feedback that you get.
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