23 min read

How Habeeb Lawal is Digitizing Access to Cooking Gas and Petrol in Nigeria

April 28, 2025

How Habeeb Lawal is Digitizing Access to Cooking Gas and Petrol in Nigeria

Habeeb Lawal is a creative problem solver and entrepreneur with a sharp eye for opportunities where others see challenges. Driven by a passion for innovation, Habeeb co-founded Gasfeel — a tech-enabled fuel delivery platform that makes ordering petrol and cooking gas very simple.

His journey into entrepreneurship began long before Gasfeel, fueled by a deep desire to build solutions that matter. With a mindset focused on identifying problems, creating solutions, and monetizing them, Habeeb is committed to making everyday services more accessible and efficient for Nigerians.

Habeeb Lawal shared with Today Africa about his entrepreneurial journey.

Tell us about yourself

Habeeb Lawal is someone that has a knack for problem solving and a lot of creativity. I feel like Habeeb is someone that does not ignore most things that everybody else ignores.

When others are complaining, Habeeb Lawal is seeing profit and solution. Habeeb is seeing something he can actually monetize.

That’s the kind of person Habeeb is. Habeeb Lawal is an entrepreneur.

What inspired you to start in Gasfeel?

Here’s the thing. Even before Gasfeel started, I’ve attempted many other startups in the past. Like that naive person that is just trying to get into entrepreneurship, like I’ve always wanted to build my own company.

I didn’t really know how it’s done, but I knew I wanted to do it. So I also made sure I was educating the people around me about the fact that you don’t have to get a job to survive.

There is a way the biggest people in the world are doing it. It’s called business and there are three steps to it. You just find it, you identify a problem, you create a solution and you monetize your solution.

Now there was a day that I was explaining this to a set of people, my friends. And I just wanted to give them an instance of the problems that are being faced in that we are facing in society.

And then I somehow just got to the point where I was thinking, okay, look for instance, almost every other industry in Nigeria has been digitized. We now buy our food online, for instance.

We now get groceries online and even call people to come and wash our cars online, laundry online, everything is almost done online. But then look at that girl over there. She’s still carrying a cylinder, which one is easier to do? Ordering your food online or actually buying your gas online? Which one is easier or harder to do?

Buying gas, like at the station where you have to carry the heavy cylinder, line up at the station, do a whole lot of things, probably even fight for line at the station even to get your gas. Or just buy it online.

That was like where the whole thing started and I started implementing it that same day. What started as an example for explaining to my friends that, you can do this thing this way. Like this is how to actually build a business.

I was like, hmm, what I just thought of now could actually be like a really big business. Then I did research about the industry and I saw that it’s a multi-billion dollar industry actually, even if we are focusing on just Nigeria, but it’s a continent wide problem.

Like in other continents, their cooking gases are like pipes to their kitchen and things like that. But we can’t really do that here. We don’t have that here. And it’s even too late to start implementing that.

So we created Gasfeel. That’s how Gasfeel was born, basically. With the drive to solve that one problem of digitizing the oil and gas industry. Now we have Gasfeel, a platform that helps people get cooking gas and petrol online, especially the petrol part.

It’s something people are finding interesting when we hand out our fliers to customers. They are surprised. So you guys order petrol online? So it’s not something they are expecting to see like anytime soon.

And now we have, we have that, which is something unique, different, and it’s not the same as the Fintech you mentioned earlier.

How did you meet your co-founder and what convinced you that he was the right person to go on this journey?

I said earlier that the moment I got the idea of Gasfeel. I started implementing it immediately. So this guy is the first person I actually told about it. I didn’t even go home, I went straight to him.

And I told him, okay, let’s do this thing. By the way, the idea we started with is not the idea that actually went live. I mean, it’s the same product, the same idea, but not in the same method.

The way we plan to do it from the start was so naive. We just wanted to get going. We just wanted to start because we didn’t really have a concrete plan. But the fact that I came to him, I told him about it and immediately, we got out.

We started implementing and went out to these gas shops that are outside and we spoke to the woman, okay, we want to be helping you deliver online. You know, now we are delivering, we are helping gas stations and petrol stations sell online.

But before we wanted to help these gas shops, those that are selling on the streets sell. So we went to this woman and immediately we interviewed her. We asked her questions about the industry. How much do you actually sell in a day?

I feel like that kind of drive and enthusiasm about what we are trying to build is enough on its own. But then he not only had that, he also had this entrepreneurial instinct. It’s the type of guy that we share books with.

He shares books, I share mine. And then we just make sure we finish the books and then move on to the next. He is dedicated and above everything else, like skill sets and things like that. I feel like those are the foundation.

Like that’s like the main foundation of what’s like what we need to look out for. It’s more about the person. The person can learn to do other things on the job, but they can’t learn to be enthusiastic, dedicated, or disciplined.

That was the main reason why I picked him. Because I feel like he has as much drive as I do. And since we’ve been running this, we’ve not actually had any issue whatsoever. But then speaking of skillset,he’s someone that you can bounce ideas off of, like he’s not small minded. Let me put it that way.

Because when you share these ideas with most people out there, they would either tell you it can’t work or just think of something else, you can’t do this. He has the big mindset and he’s also someone that is very good at optimizing operations.

And our day-to-day operations, he’s the one that is saying okay this is how we should do this. He’s is that kind of person and that’s why we’re on this together

What were the challenges that you faced in the beginning and how did you overcome them?

The first challenge was actually funding. Let me just take you on a journey through how the idea actually evolved. We wanted to have our own trucks from the start. Like we wanted to have our own trucks that would have dispensers attached to them.

We’ll be taking the trucks around and dispensing at people’s doorstep. We wanted to have a device for people to be able to measure their gas level. So we would know exactly when their gas is running out and we would remind them and deliver to them immediately.

We wanted to do a whole lot of other things. And that was like something that required so much assets and that was too big a dream for people that are just starting and have close to nothing in the bank, right, in terms of funding.

And it was challenging to be able to raise funds with that kind of dream and that kind of plan. We had that kind of plan with zero traction. We had this plan that we’re going to buy trucks. How much is a cap star truck? How much is this device for people to measure their gas level? Like how many people do we need to hire?

So all of those things were really capital intensive. And it was challenging for us to find someone that would invest in something like that. It was so hard. We didn’t have traction. We didn’t have something tangible, but we just knew we had the vision and that made it hard.

And we were so frustrated because we didn’t understand why. I mean, we were seeing people online raising more million dollars with no product yet and a landing page. We had our landing page. We actually got it done even though we didn’t have money.

And we created the website, but we felt like that was enough traction because that’s what we see on YC. Sometimes it’s not like not everybody had like that crazy traction, but they were still raising funds with the vision and reality had to set in.

And I think that challenge actually made us better in the sense that we became resourceful. We became resourceful in the sense that we started thinking of ways to achieve the same thing without spending money.

That’s what even got us to the point where we are currently WhatsApp-based. Right. We’re fully WhatsApp-based now and we have an AI agent that is going to be taking the whole orders, relaying it to riders, doing all of those things.

And the way the operations are so lean now, we don’t even have our own bikes. We don’t have our own gas plants. We don’t have our own petrol stations. And we are delivering to customers in as fast as five minutes.

That’s how streamlined our operations have been and we’ve not really spent much. And we are able to achieve this much. Meanwhile, what we were thinking about earlier would have cost us nothing less than a million dollars to even go out there.

And it even turns out that people don’t even need a device to know their gas level and we wanted to build a device. We get lost in things like that. And we see competitors out there trying to build something and they are not live yet.

They are still stuck where we were when we just started. They are stuck trying to build a device. Meanwhile, the problem is not running out of gas unexpectedly. People just need to be reminded.

They don’t need to always know how much gas they have left. They just need to be reminded before the gas runs out. That’s what we were able to just solve with software without spending a dime on hardware.

We just had to go back to the foundation and we would not have thought about that if we had access to that money from the start. So one of the things I’ve also learned is that too much money in the bank could derail a company entirely.

How were you able to convince the riders and gas stations to work with Gasfeel?

Habeeb Lawal with his co-founder, Ibrahim Tunmise

As I am on this call, there are at least five orders going on on the platform. So I mean, our service is running. The beauty of it is we are giving value to every single stakeholder, like every single person that has access to our platform.

And as you rightly said, we have riders, we have the stations and we have the customers. And what we are doing is connecting them in an asset light manner.

We go to the gas station, we tell them, you guys do know that we can help you guys deliver online without necessarily having to build your own websites or have your own bikes or hire new staff.

Like most businesses have gone online now, like we have restaurants going online and you guys can actually go online. You can sell to people that are outside of your environment, especially when there is no fuel in one particular station, we can actually bring those customers to you on that particular day, given that you have fuel.

So that’s like the value we are providing for them and in return, they sell to us at a discounted rate.

We also go to the riders. We tell them, we’ve seen you guys and we’ve seen that there is so much competition. There are so many bike riders now that the number of sales each bike man is making per day is really low.

In fact, they would have to be going up and down just to find someone to carry and they are wasting fuel. So we tell them we can actually get you sales. All we just need you to do is be able to read and write and you should have a smartphone, so you should have access to WhatsApp.

We need you to be dedicated to our service. Like anytime we call you, we need you to respond immediately.

Also, we go to the customer to tell them, you guys no longer have to go to the station to queue or is it not embarrassing to be carrying a cylinder along the street? We can save you that embarrassment and we can deliver to you as fast as five minutes.

I was shocked when I was checking out our spreadsheets and I saw orders delivered in 5 to 10 minutes. Because the rider is making his money and he knows that if he does not accept the order on time, someone else will take the order from him.

The stations already know when an order comes in. So they’ve already sold the petrol even before the rider arrives and immediately the rider picks up and delivers.And we are using the nearest gas plants, the nearest rider to you to fulfill your orders.

And it’s beautiful to see how it evolved from an idea to buy gas trucks and pumps and all of those to something so simple. This made me realize that there are multiple ways to actually solve the same problem, just like a polynomial equation in math.

There are many ways you can solve that same problem. And the person, the company with the best solution, wins.

Even now that we’re actually starting new, we don’t have competitors, even when the competitors come, they have to be faster, they have to be cheaper, they have to be better.

And I don’t think they stand a chance in this field because we were able to crack all of that, thanks to lack of funding.

Tell us the process of handling customers’ orders both for the petrol and cooking gas

Let me just tell you how it’s currently running and how we plan to run it in the future as we grow. So right now, if you are placing an order for petrol, it’s a one way thing.

The rider just goes to the station, picks up the keg. We have our own kegs. They just pick up the keg that contains your fuel and take it to you and take back the keg to the station.

“You identify a problem, you create a solution, and you monetize your solution.”

But if you are ordering for cooking gas, we come to your place and pick up your cylinder, we take it to the nearest gas plant for speed. Because we already have a partnership with that station and we fill up your gas there, we bring it back to you.

This literally takes less than 15 minutes. When you’re placing orders for cooking gas, it takes an average of 13 minutes. And if you are placing an order for petrol, it takes an average of seven minutes. So that’s how fast we are.

I buy food online every time and my food gets delivered, literally in 20 to 45 minutes. So it’s amazing to see something that people would usually take a bike to go and buy.

It’s hard, let me just put it that way. It’s like a lot and it is just mind-blowing to see that there are so many local problems that we’re facing in this country and we have entrepreneurs trying to solve international problems when there are people in that market already and you’re not trying to make it better.

Why did you choose the name Gasfeel?

When we started, we were going with the name easily and ‘the easily’ was spelt E E S I L Y simply because we were trying to get a domain name that would be cheaper and still get people to pronounce the word ‘easy.’

Like it’s easy, it’s easily done. You can easily get this done. And that would have made a nice branding. But we had issues with the CAC because they didn’t approve it when we wanted to register the business.

So we had to think of another name. The lawyer that was working on it called me to say that the name you provided is taken. And then I was like in the middle of something, I was too busy to even respond to her.

She was like, what about Gasfill? Like Gasfill with F-I-L-L. I’m like, okay, that’s cool. But I’m not here to sell a commodity. So I want to sell a feeling. So let’s just put F E E L instead, like Gasfeel because we want to sell a movement

How has the economy of Nigeria affected that Gasfeel?

Let’s first talk about the fluctuating prices of petrol and cooking gas. We are the ones the customers see and you know when we tell them okay, this is the price of gas today and tomorrow we are telling them it’s another price sometimes it turns down customers.

We lose customers because of these things but they eventually come back when they see that the old life is not the way. But they want to confirm if the price we are telling them now is what it actually is, or if we are the ones that are actually just increasing prices.

Because once we are in the middle, they don’t know what’s going on at the station again. They don’t care what the station price is. They just want to buy from Gasfeel.

Also I would say when we ask customers to pay for delivery as well. The economy has made people not want to spend money on anything. Even though you are providing service for them, they literally want you to deliver for free.

And we’ve been able to solve that in some ways because we don’t also want to ignore what the customers are saying completely. We have to make money, that’s why a business exists.

And the same thing with fundraising. We are not able to raise funds from Nigerian investors as much because they would be like, this just happened. I invested here. I invested there.

Even the riders are going to tell you the price you’re paying me for this particular order is small. They will be like I got fuel for this price so we have to make sure we are paying the riders as much as possible.

Meanwhile, the customer does not pay for the delivery and the business has to make money somehow in the middle of that. So it is making it hard for us to balance our pricing because there is so much to put into consideration.

What strategies have worked in attracting and retaining customers?

Free delivery. Not just that actually. It is the speed, pricing, speed, the free delivery and the novelty. The fact that it is something they’ve not seen before. It’s something that they are just hearing about and they just want to try it out.

Those are the strategies. And we have a strategy that we’re using. It’s called the virality effect. Where every single customer that buys on our platform gets their orders, there is a graphic that gets automatically sent to them that carries their name the time we deliver to them.

So the headline could be, ‘Soft Life Presido, Emeka your gas was delivered in just 10 minutes while other people are still dragging cylinders up and down. You too get level.’

Something like that and there’s an avatar there, and there is the link to our website, www.gasfeel.com on the same graphics. But because these guys want to show off what they just did.

They want to show off that they just got their gas delivered in just 10 minutes and other people are getting their gas at the station. They will post it on their status and other people see it and we get new customers visiting our websites and checking in like that.

And we also have the pump attendants handing out our flyers. The station is like letting people know that they now sell online and that if you want to buy from them online, you can go on Gasfeel.

The customer base the station already has is also being transferred to our platform. So we are getting customers from all angles and we’re getting different kinds of customers.

We’re getting the rich ones that don’t even care what the delivery fee is. They just want to get their gas as fast as possible. And I’m glad we are not disappointing them.

How is the business doing today and what does the future look like?

Gasfeel is actually doing really well. We started April 20th last year but we didn’t go live. All of that time was spent trying to raise funds without traction, without any customer, without anything whatsoever.

We were like we must build this thing. We must actually get this thing live. At some point before we discovered people actually prefer just getting things done. Like everybody’s on WhatsApp right now.

We can actually get this thing done easier, a lot faster, a lot better by just letting them place orders for what they want on the same platform they are already existing on.

And we can use an AI agent, which is like the next big thing to get this done. So we wasted money and time building an app in the past. And we wanted to even build a device to measure people’s gas in real time and tell them from the app and all that.

That would be a nice experience, no doubt, but then there are several other methods we can use and achieve the same results without charging the customer for a dime. Because if you want to get as many people to use the service as possible, you have to lower the barriers to entry.

So that’s one of the things I’ve also learned about this whole thing, which is like, you don’t think about what you are trying to achieve, you think about the customer in every step of the way. That in a nutshell was like what the whole of last year was spent on.

And we went live this January, 2025, around the 15th of January and month after month after month our revenue is more than doubling.

What advice would you give to others who want to start their business?

I would say look at problems that people are facing around you. Don’t just look at businesses that are working out there and try to replicate it. There are lots of opportunities in Nigeria that we are ignoring.

As a Nigerian, you don’t even need to start looking for jobs anymore. It is a lot easier to start a business now than it is to get a job. I will tell you that for a fact and you don’t need to start with the tech.

Also we think we need to build a website. We think we need to build all of those fancy things, build devices. Yes, those things actually count but they can come after you’ve made sales, after you’ve validated that, okay, this market is something I can venture into because of the traction.

You can now spend your money and you can even use that money that you got from the testing to even build the tech that you need to make your operations faster.

Right now, Gasfeel, for instance, is working on building its own dispensers, like miniaturized dispensers, that we can use to just dispense the gas at your doorstep without going back and forth.

I also think it is better to set a target than it is to actually make plans. Like set your targets and let the plan unfold by itself. If you are making plans, business plans are the most useless thing in business.

Because Gasfeel has pivoted before even going live at all, we’ve pivoted at least a hundred times. And that’s a fact. We’ve pivoted with different methods of doing things, different styles, different pricing, different areas that we decided to start from.

We’ve tested a whole lot of things and the plan that I told you we had is the most useless plan ever now. Because the market is the one that actually gives you the plan. Like the market teaches you what to do.

So don’t start writing business plans, like we did just start. I feel like people should not overthink in the early stages. Just go out there and don’t be too smart as well. Just do your thing. That’s it.

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