Oluwafemi Ogunniyi is the Founder of FinxHost, a dedicated and developer friendly web hosting company. He is a driven and innovative professional with over five years of experience in sales, business development, front-end development, and digital marketing.
Oluwafemi Ogunniyi shared with Today Africa about his entrepreneurial journey.
What led you into the path of entrepreneurship?
My name is Oluwafemi Ogunniyi, founder and CEO of FinxHost, the web hosting company. As a kid, I’ve always been doing research and trying to get things to work. Those are part of the things that actually push me out. Our parents now, they’re all about go to school, get good grades, and get a white-collar job.
So I actually studied banking and finance in school. I got a switch because I love creating things, I love exploring, most especially through the internet and all of that. The passion and the experience of the family has been colliding together but passion always wins. So I had to push on and founded Finxhost.
Tell us more in detail what FinxHost is all about and the services you provide?
Finxhost is a digital agency and also a website hosting company. We get to see the problem businesses and individuals are going through. So we actually lay the foundation of FinxHost on that. And we tend to have a hub where we give digital services to clients – business and individuals.
We want to have a big outreach where people can come on our platform to get access to web development services. We have professionals that are always available to get your projects or your ideas into the digital space. In ThinkSource, we have web hosting services and we also build applications for our clients.
So you want to have an application for your business or for whichever concepts you are looking into the digital space, we build applications for our clients. We also do digital marketing, where e-commerce businesses really scale their sales using digital marketing – running adverts in various platforms and optimizing the sales because that’s the major goal of any business.
Every business wants to make profit. So we try as much as possible to put our expertise as a brand to give them the results they are looking for so they will be happy in the end. We have a hub where we run everything internet, everything digital, everything tech.
We have our basic services, which is our web hosting services. You can come on FixHost and buy our web services, where you need to buy a domain name and hosting for your services. So developers use our platform, business owners or individuals, also use our platform to leverage their online presence.
We are all in one. And also we added the FinxHost Academy. This academy is where we also train the skills we have. Because we have a team that we are working with. So we train people that want to have this skill for their own business, that want to train their staffs to grow the organizations together.
That’s why we bring up FinxHost Academy. So we’re doing a lot of training, training our institutions, staff on how to engage with clients, how to go about converting leads into clients, paying clients and all of those things. So those are part of the activities FinxHost organize and we do over the years.
FinxHost is five years old now and we have been pushing out and our client base has drastically increased with the results we’ve been getting. As I was at last week, I checked we have over 2000 users, buying our domain name and using our hosting services.
We have been expanding and trying to make sure we give quality instead of just taking money. But we want to give quality because as an entrepreneur, those are the things we see, and solve them.
What inspired you to start FinxHost?
Part of the inspiration is this, I look into our ecosystem and Nigeria at large, most of the services we are getting are not giving us the best out of it. In terms of customer care relations, most of the web hosting companies out there, they don’t just care about you.
When you pay for services, they just leave you hanging and you just face whatever issue you’re having, you know. Those are part of the things that made me start something like this and give a difference to society.
As a web developer and a digital marketer, I tend to see that so many businesses are lacking a good platform that could really help and assist them to move. So this gives us the desire to really push out.
Read Also: How Enock Nkulanga is Developing the Next Generation of Entrepreneurial Leaders in Africa
What were the challenges that you faced in the beginning and how did you overcome them?
We faced a lot of challenges. There’s some point when we started, you know, our server goes down almost frequently. But due to proper structure, learning process, relearning, you know, getting new insights, bringing experts in to really stabilize all our servers, we tend to have them working effectively now.
Part of the challenges we are facing also is the current exchange rates, because most of our servers are usually created in the foreign country to bring them working in Nigeria. Those are part of the challenges, we need to really source for Forex to purchase all of this server, all of the systems so that they could work effectively here in Nigeria.
In FinxHost, we try most as possible not to charge our clients in dollars, but charge them in our local currency so they could have ownership of their own. So we, those are part of the challenges, but we’ve been able to solve most of it, not all and keep improving day by day.
Also try as much as possible to have good strategic partners that would not fail us and would grow together as a brand so those are the challenges we’ve had and we’ve been able to tackle them and we are still in the process.
What strategy did you put in place in order to navigate the economic issue that Nigeria is facing?
We have some foreign partners and also we’ve been able to really acquire some of these assets locally to really get our functioning smooth. Also we have done our economic analysis to see that as we charge in there we don’t really burn ourselves.
But part of the goal of FinxHost is to be for everybody and give everybody the desired services they need but not too expensive. So that’s why we try to capture individuals, business owners, and small scale and big scale businesses that can afford our services.
So we have a lot of organizations that have partnered with us that funds are available that we use to push a lot of things. And you know, every company is just to make profits, and we are making profit and also we are giving the desired results to our clients.
How do you raise funds or capital to start your business?
Raising of funds has been one of the great tests talked about as a startup. We have been pushing to raise funds, but the way we started was before anybody could buy your idea or believe what you do, you need to have proof for it.
You need to show that, yes, this thing is working. You need to actually have a roadmap. They need to know that you are serious with what you’re doing. So most of the way we initially started raising our funds was from friends and family. At some point, they see that there’s growth in this business.
Then we tend to attend a lot of tech events, we have some investors that buy into our idea and sign partnerships with us to really push. Majority of it also comes from our sales because we try to drive massive sales in terms of getting clients using either of our services or you’re buying a domain name from us or you’re buying and hosting services.
And also we are a digital agency where we provide website development for clients, where we also provide app development. We also assist with social media marketing and management. So all of these services are the things that we generated funds from and also with personal financing.
And also we have some investors that have already invested in the brand and we’re still pushing forward because we want it to be not only in Nigeria but in Africa at large.
Since you launched what strategies have worked in attracting and retaining your customers?
There are some bigger brands that are here already in the market and can’t just start competing with them. You would need to spend a lot of money to really fight with those brands. But we want to make a difference. And one of the things with marketing is that you need to really look inwards.
Because part of the thing is that big brands don’t look up. That’s what you need to look at. So what we did was, we noticed who those big brands are actually targeting. They don’t really target the grassroots. Grassroots is really kind of cheaper and their services are not really like the big enterprises where you pay a buck of money to get servers and all of those things.
What we did was to really look inwards, target the grassroots, have them in numbers to build our marketing base. They would now recommend us to their friends, colleagues, and their bosses that are big in industry. And that’s how we enter into the market.
We tend to target the schools, upcoming schools, the web developers, we do conferences for them and bring them on board. Sometimes we do free training where we enlighten them on the necessary tools they need to scale. We also help them in digital marketing, and how they could scale their skills.
All of these things really helped us because they have this sense of ownership with FinxHost. For instance, for the web developers or the developers in the house, we try as much as possible to give them tips, trainings on how they could scale. Because when you have all of this training, they are scaling higher.
They bring clients to us, they buy our services to service their own clients. So we make sure that the little things the big guys are not looking at, we are doing it. We are tackling them and we are getting this client massively. And the best form of marketing is when somebody is referring you to his friends, family or business partners.
This has been helping us over the time and we still have this policy. We have big brands we work with. But this approach has been one of the best that has been pushing us and advice other brands also try it. Look at what the big brands are not looking at. Push into that space massively.
The numbers are where you make your profit out of. Get these numbers and they would now, you don’t know who will even connect you to the right source. As I speak with you, we have some partnership going on with some state governments and all of that. So we are pushing out.
When we started we never thought of even having a partnership or a discussion with any government, parastatals or any big firm. But now we have a lot of discussion because they see what we do from the grassroots. We are not just pushing ourselves to meet the bigger guys in the game, but we are trying to carry everybody along.
So we want everybody to up our game in terms of the business owners to put their stuff online, have an e-commerce platform where you could just run an ad and the advert will bring two three four clients for you. Marketing is something that you cannot have like a small budget for you need to really go out for marketing if you want to be in business.
How did you do systems and processes that help in smooth running of your business?
When we started, we could not really pay staff salaries at the initial stage. But we tend to get like-minded people who are interested in our services, who want to be part of the team. So we get them in, in the form of an internship program. I am part of the people who train, and also we have our HR.
Because as a startup, whatever we are doing now, they are fully documented. We have it as our baseline, as our foundation as a firm. And we use this template that if I am not seated as the CEO, anybody sitting in the seats can always scale with the templates we have been building over the years.
These templates allow you to employ the right minded people to come into the organizations, people who are ready to work and grow themselves. We start with an internship. We train you and bring you on board to work for us. You work for us for maybe three months.
We see that, yes, this person is good. If you want to remain with us, you remain with us. And we’ll give you a proper contract of employment where you have all the benefits. Also our recruitment process is one of the easiest because we are not about your CV. We’re looking for people that have passion and are willing to learn in the process because nobody’s island of knowledge.
We are all here to learn and grow. So part of the things we do is we get people that are passionate about tech, about web hosting services who want to learn. We bring them in, we train you, we pay you internship fee after your internship and we see this person is good enough.
We give you our certificate that you are good. If you want to still work with us, fine, there’s a position for you. But if you want to go out to explore, we are here to support, we don’t discriminate at all. So those are the basics we use to really bring people on board. And a lot of good people have been coming our way so far.
Read Also: Remarkable Journey of the Business Leaders in Nigeria
How is your business doing today and what does the future look like?
The future is always bright, but we are doing good. We are doing our possible best to really cover our space. We are doing our possible best to really be at the top in the industry. So we are doing great. We are growing because actually we’re in the growing phase now.
Because it’s five years, we need to grow, we need to expand, we need to get new space, we need to do so many things at the same time. The business is stable. We are trying to get more partnership deals.
We are trying to get more collaborations with brands to see how we could scale together. And the future, we believe the future will be a very brighter future for the firm. We are pushing on that foot and God will help us out.
We are in the era of AI, generative AI, automation and the rest. How is FinxHost positioned to be ahead of this curve?
We actually even created a product. Because things are moving to AI now and you need to know how to use this AI. So we created a product, we called it Botify AI. Botify AI is a marketing AI that helps you automate your marketing activities in terms of replying to your customers, attending to messages and all of those things.
So this AI is a custom AI that we also integrated with some other bigger API companies like ChatGPT and all of those machine learning APIs. The Botify AI understands your business model. You tell the AI what your business is all about, your website, your social media links and all of that. So when this AI gets this information, it analyses it.
When a client comes to your social media platform and just messages you that, oh, hello, please, how does this work? The AI automatically just picks that information, analyses it and gives the clients the right answer. And where the client is actually supposed to go, either to your website or your WhatsApp.
So it makes lead generation very easy. AI is not emotional, whatever you give to AI that’s what it gives back. Because we try to really reduce human interference very well. For example, when you are not in a good state, and a client calls in, the way you respond to that client would definitely be different.
You might not turn that client into a lead, you might not. But AI is what you give AI, digest it, answer the client. So the AI tends to give the proper approach. So we have been adopting the AI era and we’re training people now to use AI.
Also people should know that AI is not taking business away. But it has been giving us or giving businesses an upper hand to understand their clients, to know the next phase of action, and to know what to do in their business.
Even as a person, they would enhance you. There are some letters you will write. Just give it to AI to really refine the letter for you, to show a particular perception and AI will help you out. So AI has not come to take our businesses, but has come to enhance our work.
Is Botify AI a free or a paid product?
As much as we want it to be free, we have a free trial for every user. So we have a free trial where you can create an account, have access for a 30 days trial. So you can actually link a lot of your services on it. One of the things you can link is your Facebook, Instagram, your WordPress website on the platform.
If you want to get people’s email, phone numbers, you can use it. If you want to reply to your clients, instead of going to your social media accounts, you can reply to your clients. You can even use it to schedule social media posts.
And one of the things you can also use it to do is you can use it to get subscribers. For instance, if you’re running adverts and you don’t want to waste the leads, this AI will convert people messaging you to subscribers where you can now send them a newsletter later.
Read Also: How Omowunmi Omoseyindemi is Revolutionizing Last-mile Logistics in Nigeria
What are some key lessons that I have learned in this journey of entrepreneurship?
The key lesson is never give up. And when time comes for you to scale, just believe that things will work and scale. Because at some point, it looks like you’re not doing anything. You’re not serious. Your friends are moving on. People are achieving goals, but they are just stuck in one particular place. But if you believe in your dream, never give up. You’ll get there but it’s gonna take time.
When we started, as I said earlier, our server would go down. It was like I was playing? Don’t I know what I was doing, all of those things. And I didn’t give up. I went back to the drawing board and learned more, so just keep learning, never give up.
One thing I will tell startups, whatever business you’re doing, make sure you as the founder, you have an idea, like 80% idea of how the business works. Because you can’t go into a business blindly, if not you come out very disappointed. So you need to really understand your business.
So if I’m employing you into the firm, I know all of these things. You can’t come and be telling me something else. I know what you’re doing, I know how you’re doing about it. If it’s about digital marketing, yes, I know about digital marketing.
I will tell you the audience you’re targeting, why are we paying this high to get these leads? Because I have ideas about it, I know how it runs. So if you’re running adverts for me, you are spending a lot of money, I’ll tell you that you can actually optimize these things to get the desired result we are looking for.
If you’re an entrepreneur, my advice for you is, number one, understand your business and also be in all departments of your business because you are the founder and the visioner of the business. You need to understand all of the departments so that you can’t employ somebody one day and the person keeps controlling you and you don’t know what to do.
You need to understand all the key aspects of your business so that you can scale and never give up. Because challenges will come but don’t give up, just keep pushing. And there will be a point where you need to scale. You don’t have a choice but to scale. So those are just the three points I would advise.
To find out more contact Oluwafemi Ogunniyi via:
Leave a comment below and follow us on social media for update:
- Facebook: Today Africa
- Instagram: Today Africa
- Twitter: Today Africa
- LinkedIn: Today Africa
- YouTube: Today Africa Studio
