BetaStore founder Steve Dakayi-Kamga LIVE on Global Startup Report (22 July 2022)

Happy Friday! Another Friday in FI land. How we doing, ladies and gentlemen? Everybody out there in the world, good afternoon, good morning, good evening. My name is Martin Martinez. I am your host for another episode of the Global Startup Report powered by the Founder Institute. It's another great Friday here. It's another hot Friday. It seems like it's hot, doesn't matter where you are. So we hope you're staying hydrated and safe and getting some ample shade from all of that crazy heat that's kind of dominating all of the airwaves all around the world. We got a really awesome show today. It's our penultimate episode before our final one to wrap up season 2 of the Global Startup Report before we head into Founder X. And this one, if you watched this last week, we had Ashley Connell, Prowess Project. We ran long, it was awesome. If you haven't watched it lately, go back to it. Um, this week's no different. I'm really looking forward to this, uh, with Steve of Beta Store. Uh, we're gonna have awesome conversation. I'm gonna learn a little bit about what he's working on over in West Africa. Um, before we do that, uh, again, this is our second to last episode. Um, we're heading into Founder X starting next month, August 2nd to the 4th. If you're in FI land, you may have gotten an email to sign up. I think we're almost sold out of tickets. What's going on, Joshua, out of Sierra Leone? All right, let's go. We got some people already coming in excited for this show. Um, we'll talk a little more about— let's bring up Dustin, let's get into the news for today. Dustin, how are you, amigo?

Great, great. Excited to be here. Yeah, as you say, uh, getting close to the end of the season here, and, uh, excited for your, your conversation with Steve coming up from with Betastore. Uh, but yeah, to kick it off here, as always, we're going to share 3 quick, uh, FI Network news stories. And, um, the first story— and I'll drop them in the comments here on, uh, on LinkedIn as well for those who want to, uh, see more. But the first story is a loyal VC, friends of VC investors, friends of FI. They invested $200K follow-on funding in Curveblock, which is an FI London portfolio company. The founder's name is Gary Woodhead. Website's curveblock.io. Basically what they're doing is building what they call energy positive. It's basically like carbon negative or produces more energy than it consumes. New home construction in the UK. They have built demo homes at least, so they're building real new homes there, and they have a really unique real estate investment and financing model that goes along with Curveblocks. So cool to see some follow-on investment from the folks we love at Loyal VC working with Curveblocks.

Yeah, it's good to hear. So one of the co-founders, he's based in Texas, Joey Jones, he's been mentoring for Austin and Houston programs. It's been pretty cool. So I am familiar with CurbBlock. I'm excited to see that they're continuing to move forward. And yeah, congrats to that team over there. Let's, let's bounce over across the pond over here to the US. We got out of Techstars Atlanta passes the 100th startup participant mark, which includes FI Silicon Valley grad MetricMate. The alumni co-founder Marcus Tor Strickland is part of that group. Right on. MetricMate. MetricMate is a workout and conditioning app used by personal trainers, physical therapists, athletic programs, sports teams. And tell us a little bit more about that.

Yeah, yeah. So it's just cool to see a lot of FI companies were a pre-seed stage accelerator. They do graduate and go on to join seed accelerators and probably the The biggest one is Techstars because just like FI, they have a global footprint, run lots of different geographic as well as vertical based on programs. And so yeah, this company, their website MetricMate is themetricmate.com. You can go over and check it out. I believe you can even download the app if you're one of these, you know, personal trainers, physical therapists, or just somebody who's interested in athletic conditioning. But yeah, congratulations to them on getting into Techstars.

Yeah.

We've got some. Yeah, we've had, we've had a lot of Techstars alumni. I mean, if you, if you've been watching us and following us for a while, you know, we had one of the co-founders of Techstars come in and do a fireside chat the last Founder Showcase we did in the spring. Um, you know, it's out of Texas. We've had about half a dozen companies, uh, that have graduated our, just our core programs going to Techstars, one of which actually did Atlanta, and we had them on the show a few weeks back. Anders, uh, Anders Liljevik, VocalPoint. Also another Techstars Atlanta grad. It's really great synergies out of that. I don't use that word too often, but it certainly is apt for what we're doing here.

Yes.

Now we got one more. Looks like we got one more for this.

Yeah, so the final story, it's actually already happened now. This was a Techstars robotics event called TC Sessions, their Robotics 2022, and FI Silicon Valley alumni Endiotix was on there. So as I said, it happened actually yesterday, the livestream. But the cool thing is Endyotix founder Tori Smith is our guest here next week. So what Endyotix does, it's robot pills for what Tori calls hardcore telemedicine, which is basically this is a pill that you will swallow and it can drive around basically in your stomach. So they're starting with upper endoscopies is the market that they want to disrupt. And yeah, super cool robotics company. Tori will be our guest next week. If you missed his Techstars pitch, you can get him here on the Global Startup Report next week.

Oh yeah, I'm sure we'll ask him how that went too. And yeah, I've seen these pills. Yeah, he's— they've gone from like the— they look like started like a Beats pill size, if y'all agree with the speaker, and he's gotten it all the way down to something that you can quite literally swallow. I mean, he swallowed a few of these himself.

They've done many inhuman trials.

Yeah, he truly dogfoods this food, this product himself, to really see if it's going to work. It's really interesting. He'll talk so much about it. I'm sure we'll talk about a lot more. He's an interesting character. We got some awesome—

Yeah. Hello to everybody who's tuning in here. A lot of people are saying hi. There's a Richard from somewhere on Earth.

Yeah, we've got Boston.

We've got people joining us from Cameroon. So hello to everybody who's tuning in. So it's a global startup report, but yeah, I'm going to go away now.

Yeah.

Bring on this. You can bring on our special guest.

Yeah. So, so awesome. So thank you, Dustin. And again, for all you watching in FI land, seems like there's a ton of y'all coming out of LinkedIn. Please keep that love coming. Keep that love coming for our special guest. If you have questions, we'll bring them up. We'll float them up. Dustin will float them up to the top right here. And we can give them up to Steve. So let's bring our special guest for today. His name's Steve, the KaiCom guy. He's the founder, CEO of Beta Store out of our FI Lagos chapter. So Steve, welcome to Global Startup Report. How you doing? Good afternoon. I know it's a little just past business hours over there. You're getting ready for—

Can you hear me fine?

Yeah, yeah, no, you're sounding great.

Yeah.

How you doing today? How's the week been?

Good, good. The week has been, you know, very, very good as well. Happy to be here. Hello to all my brothers and sisters, you know, from Cameroon and, you know, all over the world.

So it's— Yeah, you're getting a lot of love in the chat already. Everyone's excited to see you. No pressure at all. Uh, well, you know, I promise we'll make this, we'll make this as fun and easy as possible so that you can roll into the weekend, uh, rested easy, rested easy. So, um, obviously, uh, you know, if you've been following the, the story, uh, y'all in the audience, um, Betastory just recently raised a good amount of, great amount of money, $2.5 million in a pre-seed Series A, uh, funding, including some of our known, some of the known, uh investors that I've always worked with at FI, like Loyal VC, but you've also brought in like 500 Global, Vast World. But before we dive into kind of all that magic that's happened recently, let's start at the beginning. Let's start even before that. Tell us, Steve, tell us a little about yourself, maybe for some people that aren't familiar with your journey and kind of just what led you not only to use FI as a way to launch it, but how did you stumble onto this problem? Why did it drive you so so hard to actually, you know, build something to solve it?

Yeah, so I mean, basically I've been for the past living in Nigeria, in Lagos, Nigeria for the past 7 years. So I'm from, I mean, I'm from Cameroon, so hi to all my brothers and sisters from Cameroon in the chat. So I'm from Cameroon, but I, you know, I've studied and lived in Europe and then moved to to Nigeria in 2015 to actually work in Jumia, you know, in the e-commerce sector. It was a great experience for me and a lot of learning, you know, being in a, you know, fast-growing startup IPO 2019. And it was also, you know, where I actually, you know, I'm so the challenges in terms of supply chain in retail in general. And then when you look at retail and how, you know, in Africa we actually, you know, consumers get access to product, a lot of it happens through neighborhood stores, right? And then with e-commerce, we were trying to simplify, you know, access to goods and, you know, at the best price for end consumer. And then what also struck me was, you know, trying to match the need in terms of the end consumer, identify that a neighborhood store were actually a key, key, you know, player, chain in solving that. And, you know, looking at what we could do how we could leverage technology to support the retailers, neighborhood stores, mom-and-pop stores. That's what actually led me to start Beta Store in 2020.

Awesome. So obviously, you know, you got involved also, you know, with our FI Lagos program. Were there any kind of basic assumptions that when you came into the program, you know, that just kind of changed fundamentally? What Were there any, some big things that you're just like, wow, I don't know anything about this. I'm glad I found this program. Is there any kind of anecdotes from there, stories?

No, so I think what is great with the program, it really forces you to go deep into the problem that we're trying to solve and really try to validate, you know, all the, you know, hypothesis or understanding that you think you have of what is the problem and what's the job that your customer, your target customer is trying to do and how you can support them. So the pace of the program and the assignment that you have to do forces you to go through these steps without actually trying to find a shortcut. And I think that's one of the key, I think, advantage of going to that program, even if you think you are, you know, I mean, I've done MBA at INSEAD, I've done a lot of entrepreneurship electives, but still the FI was really valuable in the sense that it forces you to go through each step, each important step. One after the other. So, I mean, some of the assumptions was, you know, in terms of, okay, I mean, does the retailers value having a solution to manage the inventory? Yeah, I mean, we were 100% sure that that was like one of the top, top, you know, needs. But in reality, if it's your own store, I mean, you know what comes in, So, you know, what's in your store and you lock it at the end of the day, so you don't really— it's not like a key imperative to have such solutions. So it was something that we completely deprioritized, right? So that's an example of how, you know, we were able to avoid, you know, building something that, you know, customer doesn't want or doesn't absolutely need, right? And focusing on, you know, building what, what, uh, uh, our consumer, our target customer really, really need, and, and the key, you know, uh, you know, problem solver.

Yeah, you mean you put— you pose a really, really great point that we, we see in a lot of our founders have been— we've had them on the show or talk about, you know, it's, uh, Definitely talking to people a lot more than you want to early on, especially pushing out your comfort zones to really understand, you know, is this something worth building, but also building something that they're going to use versus just assuming that they're going to use what you're trying. So, so tell us, how was, how was those first few customers coming in? You know, how did, how did the product evolve, you know, as you started to kind of level out those assumptions and really understand the problem in a new way from their eyes?

Yeah, so I think it was really about, um, what are the, the, the top priorities, you know, um, for the, for the, the, the retailers that we wanted to work with. That's one thing. And then the, um, the channel— how do we reach them? What platform, um, uh, is key to have in place to actually be able to connect with them easily. That's one side. But also understanding better from the wholesaler or distributor or brand that we work with on the supply side, right, because it's a marketplace, trying to understand what are the challenges, right? Um, you know, Betastore is a, is a B2B marketplace, so we needed to understand from both sides, you know, um, what are the, the, what are the key challenges, um, in order to be able to, um, to, you know, to make it click and to have, uh, be able to scale both sides.

That's awesome. And that, again, as you're talking about marketplaces too, there's always that kind of chicken and egg dilemma that happens. You know, you got to have this balance of the demand on one side, the supply on the other. So, you know, how did you go about kind of solving that early on and trying to maintain that balance? Was it— were you prioritizing one side of the market versus another, or were you trying to tackle them at the same time?

Yeah, so, so, I mean, I've, I've also had that, you know, experience, uh, experience Jr. I think what we did at Betaflow, understanding that the problem that we're trying to solve is facilitating restocking of essential goods for neighborhood stores. Then you need to prioritize what are the hypotheses that you want to validate. When you go through MVP and then MVP+ or your first solid version of the product. So you need to know, okay, at each stage, what is it exactly I want to validate in my, you know, in my product or in my business model. And then at the beginning, what we wanted to validate was, is it something that, is it something that the, you know, the neighborhood stores would they actually be okay to instead of going to the market several times a week by themselves, meeting the different suppliers and talking to them and negotiating the price, etc., would they be okay to stay in the store just either connecting through WhatsApp, through phone or through the app ordering the product? Without, you know, there's no negotiation, you know, the social aspect is different, etc., right? So would they be able to do that transition, right? That was the first thing that we wanted to confirm at a certain scale, because you can talk to— there's a difference between, you know, asking the question, would you do it, and then actually having your retailers actually doing that. So that was the first step. I mean, we put aside, okay, you know, unit economics, etc., etc. That was the first thing that we wanted to construct. And it's important, you know, you can't validate ever because it's quite difficult, especially where you are in— when you are in a sector that requires skills. So you can't validate everything at once. So you need to choose what you go for first and then go step by step. That's why our idea first was to really simulate the supply side, meaning that— so we were not a marketplace from supply perspective at the beginning, meaning that we were buying stock from different brands in order to have certain offering, right, that was enough for the retailer to actually decide to test our solutions. And then as we grow, we actually identify that it was key for us to control end-to-end the experience, right? So basically the assortment, the availability of product, delivery, etc., right? And then we wanted to have more of that control. But one of the downsides— so after you've confirmed like, okay, you know, actually this is a solution that works, this is a service that is valuable, right? So you're at the stage where, okay, I have like a beginning of product market fit, I want now to see how I can scale. And then you get into a different stage, other challenges that you have to solve, and then you need to figure out, okay, what are the solutions. That's where we really started, you know, thinking about, okay, trying to do the full end-to-end on the supply side ourselves requires a lot of capital, requires a lot of, you know, things to be in place, slowing down our ability to scale. That's where we really like, you know, decided, okay, we need now to work on the marketplace from a supply perspective. That's where we also built in terms of product internally what we needed to be able to actually stop simulating but actually being a real marketplace on that side. So I think it's important to go through the phase step by step, right? And being very clear in terms of what you're trying to validate in your either business model, what is the offering that the customer as my customer wants, um, and then, you know, validating if the unit economics will then, uh, make sense, right? Um, so yeah, I mean, uh, well, I was not trying to do a short answer.

I wasn't looking for one, my friend. Um, so, so like, walk me through the product a little bit, maybe for some people who might not be familiar with at least how you know, how kind of retail or supply chains kind of managed overall just in like Central West Africa. So I'm a local retailer. What's something, you know, what's that typical kind of user journey on the retailer side trying to do stock shelves, maintain inventory, and then turning that stuff over? And so how does Betas fit into that?

Yeah, so exactly. So let me just, you know, first talk about, you know, what is the journey without Meta Store, right? So retail, so consumer consumption at mom-and-pop stores, right, so neighborhood stores, is about 70 to 80%, actually, of overall retail, right? The remaining is between what we call, you know, large supermarkets and also large open markets, right? So which is huge, right? 70 to 80% is quite huge, right? Now for a small retailer, right, so who has around, you know, 200 products, right? So it needs to restock this product at different, different speeds, right, throughout, you know, the week, throughout the month, throughout the, you know, the week, right? And then to do that, he's working with maybe 20 to 30 different suppliers. And the reason for that is because, one, each supplier will not have all that he needs, right? Secondly, that supplier may be out of stock. So for, you know, a specific SKU, he needs to have 3 or 4 potential supplier who can have stock, right? So that's what actually multiplies the number of suppliers the retailer, the small retailer is supposed to work with, right? It's supposed to have in its network. And, you know, imagine that this is easy for a supermarket chain who has, you know, maybe in their procurement 4 or 5 people, but the small retailer, just like one person. In Nigeria, 80%, 75% of them are women, so they have to manage a very complex or time-consuming restocking process, right? And the other part of it is that the cost in terms of logistics, going to the market, finding, you know, people to help with the product, finding a vehicle to bring it back to the store, right? It's quite expensive when you're subscale because the volumes are limited, right? So you will not necessarily fill a large truck, which means that you pay more as a percentage of the product, right? So that's the challenge without a solution like Betastore. With Betastore, the the retailer can, you know, Spanish shop, look at the product, all the products available on the platform, you know, contact us through the most convenient channel for them. So basically we are agnostic, so whether it's WhatsApp, whether it's an app, phone call, right? So we actually work with what are the preferred channels for the retailer. And they can order the product that they need and then we deliver in 24 to 48 hours. So they can see all the products available with us and then they can order and get them delivered, which solves a lot of challenges that I just mentioned. You reduce the number of people you have to interact with, you can have better prices, and you can actually know the price before you actually get to— you know, usually they don't know the current price before they get to the supplier. Here it's transparent. And then in terms of having enough cash so that you can place orders large enough so that it makes sense from logistics, all that is— it's an existing—

Interesting. So, and how are they using this? Is this going to be—

is this—

is it mobile first, or are you finding them using like laptops, desktops, or, you know, what's kind of the primary channel in which they're— that you're seeing so far?

So it varies also from some countries. You know, we are— we've started in Lagos, Nigeria. Now we are in Senegal and Ivory Coast. So what we've seen in Nigeria is that actually the retailers have basically 3 key channels, right? Voice, WhatsApp, and using our app. Another channel is also they can reach out to our agents on the field, right? That's doing the onboarding at the early stage. that's another channel they can use to order with us. And we're actually seeing, you know, because of the penetration of smartphones and the evolution in terms of generation, we're actually seeing a shift in terms of channel use. Because we have the generation of the, you know, the parents that, you know, are running the store. When they, you know, are now involved their children in terms of running the business, it's a different approach, a different way of interacting with the platform.

Got it. So some of these are, I mean, is the majority of these like mostly like family-run shops, small, like, uh, you know, boutique kind of realtors? Um, you know, and how so far, what's been success? Are they happy with this? They're coming back, obviously. It's it's given you the opportunity to continue to grow. So how has it really changed kind of just the way they do things?

So I mean, it's changed significantly because one, you know, very visible, impactful difference is that maybe the number of times they have to leave the store and go to, go to the market to restock, you know, is reducing, right? Because as we increase the number of the number of categories that we have on the platform, they have less and less need to go to the market to restock. And I think we still have such a long way to go because we can still increase significantly in terms of category of product and also in terms of assortment of products that we have. The second aspect is basically working capital. So we have done a pilot in terms of being able to offer payment terms to the retailer and help them a lot manage working capital because you need to understand the access to a solution to manage things that you were not planned. For example, okay, you need to— suddenly you need to buy drugs for your kids, right? And then they take the money from the business to do that, right? Meaning when they need to now restock product, they have used some of their working capital for their family, and that also prevents them to continue operating properly their businesses. I mean, in Lagos, what we see is mostly women, so mothers that run the stores, sometimes with the support of their children. And then what we see is depending on the region, for example, north of Nigeria, it would be mostly men, actually. It's cultural. Same thing that we're seeing in in Abidjan and in Dakar as well, it's mostly men that run the store. So you have different differences in this way.

Got it, got it. Interesting how, again, it just varied from region to region, obviously. So I mean, right now, yeah, you're not in Lagos, you're in Bijan, right? That's what you just said.

Yeah, right now I'm in Bijan. Yeah.

That's awesome. So obviously y'all are growing and yeah, we, you know, you've just, you closed this round earlier this summer, $2.5 million, which is at the pre-sale level, it's nothing. That's very, very impressive on that. So I'm sure that's taken a lot of work. What was some of those learnings going into that kind of first real major fundraising round. I'm sure you're going to have to do it again, but you're glad at least the first one's over. What was that experience? Any tips maybe for people that are looking up to you right now thinking, I can build something here, I can build something in my community. What do I need to know going into fundraising that I don't know yet?

I think we could actually, you know, fill a full session just on just on fundraising. And I think even after, you know, we've been— I mean, we've fundraised several times over the, you know, fundraising with friends and family, fundraising with, like, professional investors. And I think we still have a lot to learn in terms of fundraising. So I think one of— that's one of the big, big challenges. Being an entrepreneur is that you actually have to learn that— I mean, there's no other way. You have to go through those steps and learn how to fundraise. But on the other side of the table, you have professional investors, right? So they're not learning it. So it's some of the challenges. And I think there's one of the ways to be able to balance the situation is go through a program that helps you actually learn better. So one of the, for example, with funding, Funding Lab was extremely helpful after FI actually when we needed to do our pre-seed round back in 2020. And again, that was, you know, there's a lot of things that even after reading it, it's not just enough. You need to experience it. And there's a lot of psyche also that goes into fundraising. But the basis of fundraising is you need to have a business that is successful. But then depending on the stage, you need to know what successful means. If you are very, very early stage, what are the things that are the early signs of potentially successful business, and then at different stage, what are the signs? Because the worst that you could do is to go into fundraising without having signs of potentially successful business. It makes the whole thing just 10 times— it's already very, very difficult, but it makes it 10 times tougher.

Yeah, yeah. So, well, at least the— at least this first big one's done for a little bit. Um, I'm curious about what your plans on— obviously you're already starting the expansion process, so what, what's exciting you about like Central and West Africa right now that, you know, maybe some of our wider audience that isn't aware of for startups, for companies like yourself, you know, where you see not only Beta Store but the entire region going? Through the rest of this decade?

Yeah. So, I mean, what I'm— you know, what is interesting in our story, so, I mean, my co-founder and I, we're both from Francophone Africa, right? And then we started in Anglophone Africa, so in Lagos, right? And Lagos, or Nigeria itself, is a— It's a very different market than, you know, any other, even East Africa, you know, West Africa, etc. I mean, you could say, yeah, I've been successful in Kenya or in Ivory Coast or in South Africa, and then you think, okay, I will move to Lagos and then it will just pick up. No, Lagos is a different beast entirely. And I think, you know, if you're able to make it and to successfully grow your business there, you are ready to tackle, you know, challenges in a lot of other places. Maybe not all, but it prepares you to, you know, to be able to tackle in a lot of, you know, other places, right? And then that— That's what we've seen launching in Senegal and Ivory Coast. So it's a very, very interesting market. I think there's a lot of opportunity. The ecosystem is still at an early stage compared to Nigeria. So yeah, there's a lot to be— There's different challenges, but at the same time, it's quite exciting to kind of relearn or discover new things there.

That's awesome. So, I mean, for Betastore, I mean, what's next? Again, I can kind of see the momentum. You're really kind of building this thing out into something that can span the whole continent at some point. Now that you have some good funding in the bank, what's kind of the next 6 months or the rest of the year and the year ahead looking like for you specifically?

Yeah, so I mean, what we have in— and then what we've started, like I was mentioning, we moved to really like full marketplace since the beginning of this year, right? And then what it has allowed us to do is to be able to scale a lot faster, right? So in Nigeria, currently we are expanding across many different cities across the country. And our objective is to be in 100 cities by end of this year. And it's actually, you know, quite interesting. Quite interesting and we see that we'll be able to accelerate even faster. And then we have, like I said, expanded to Senegal and Ivory Coast. And for us, we feel like this is like maybe in terms of— if Nigeria is 10 in terms of challenge and level of difficulty, then there is is 5, right? So for us, we want to double down on Francophone Africa as well and expanding into Africa there. In terms of product and solution that we have, right? So a big launch for us, I mean, being able to expand the financial working capital solution for retailers. And this is something we're going to push across the different countries in the coming months. Because of also the acceleration that we've experienced, we have decided also to start actually fundraising here because we we like or we have to do it. But yeah, we started also discussing with investors for Series A round. And yes, the discussions are going well.

That's great. That's awesome. I'm looking forward to watching the journey. So for everybody else that might be in FI land watching this, learning a little bit more about Betastore yourself, region at large. How can people continue to follow you? Like, where can they go to follow your journey? Where can they go to follow Beta Store? Maybe if they're in the region, what can they do to stay updated when, you know, you're expanding into their, into their regions?

Yeah, so I mean, yeah, it's true that, like, I was, I was saying before, we've been very shy from, you know, publishing a lot on what we're doing. We've been really focused for the past 2 years, like, you know, head down in the trench to actually, you know, build Betastore and sell to them. We're like, yeah, we'll do— we'll communicate a lot more later. I really want to focus on building first. And I think, yeah, I mean, people deserve to, you know, to get a lot more opportunity to kind of understand what we've achieved and be able to reach out if they need to learn from our mistakes. So I think we've done— we'll do a lot more in terms of communicating on the, you know, Betastore social media. Channel. Um, but yeah, definitely, uh, you know, you should check, uh, check our LinkedIn page, uh, Twitter, and, uh, you know, and Instagram, um, on, on what's happening at Betastore.

Awesome. And yeah, we'll be dropping some of those links in the show notes as well as, uh, in the comments for each of these, uh, each, each of the channels that we're, we're hitting. Because again, if you're watching us on LinkedIn, we got a whole bunch of people coming in from LinkedIn. Good to see Chris, Leo, MD, Bertrand, Thanks for joining us. And thanks to you, Steve, for sticking around a little bit longer past the half-hour mark. I know you're ready to get into the weekend, but before we— ay, oh, go Steve! Right on, looking founder to founder there. Yeah, there he is. So before we let you go, I've been asking founders this question before we wrap up every show on the Global Startup for it. If there's somebody in the audience right now, they've been listening to your journey, they're inspired, they've been trying to figure out what can they do to start a company, but they don't know where you're gonna know where to begin. What would be that first piece of advice you give them before they do anything?

Okay, I need to choose, I need to choose one piece of advice. Okay, okay, so you need to think very hard about the match between the problem that you're trying to solve and who you are and your experience, right? So it's very important to be thoughtful about, you know, don't just pick any problem. It needs to be something that has a fit. It's called the founder problem fit. There's the product market fit, but there's also the founder problem. It's important to be thoughtful of that, and it will save you a lot of— I mean, it will increase your odds of success, actually. Right. Oh, yeah, that's, that's the advice I would give.

Founder problem fit. I like this. We've been getting a lot of good turns of phrases from our founders on the show about this. Actually, Kano had one about culture fit. You don't use that phrase. There's something else that fits better. Dustin might have it on top of his head when he comes back. But I love that. I love that. Now again, solving any problems, all good and fine. But You got to really be in the right mindset and also have a background that's going to be requisite to really tackle this in a meaningful way, in a way that's going to be good for you too, as well as the people you're trying to help. That's awesome. That's brilliant. Any final things you want to share with the audience before we let you go for today?

Yeah. Again, thank you for— inviting me on the show here. I think one final thing is that, you know, the founder journey, you know, is a lot of ups and downs, and, you know, so it's important to, you know, keep in mind that these things happen. Failure is possible, but it has nothing to do with who you are, right? You shouldn't be afraid of that because it doesn't necessarily mean that you're a bad person. It's not necessarily related to who you are as a person, right? So that's, that's important to keep in mind.

Awesome. Steve, Steve Nakayikanga, uh, founder, CEO of Beta Store, thank you again for joining us today. I hope you have a phenomenal weekend. Definitely want to bring you back in a year or so, maybe less, once you've covered, stretched all from West to East Africa. With Betastore. I want to hear how that journey's been, what's changed, friend. Um, yeah, you have a great rest of the day. Um, you be well. Um, well, again, we'll bring you back here soon. Uh, so let's bring up Dustin back up here and we'll close out another good, good conversation. We got 10 minutes before the top of the hour. I knew that was gonna run long. I knew it was gonna have some good, good combos there. I've learned some stuff today. And yeah, again, our founders are coming with just these awesome phrases. He's awesome.

Yeah, the founder problem fit. I loved that. As you said, I can't remember exactly what Ashley said yesterday. It was like, it was more of like cultural. The idea was instead of a cultural fit, you want to be a cultural supplement. Like you want to have a diversity of—

like a cultural value add. I think that's more— oh yeah, what are you adding in addition? Because that culture fits like a derogatory term apparently, right? You know, but, but founder problem fit, I love that.

It's a great insight.

Yeah, because I mean, we do, and we in the core program, you know, we get a lot of founders who are just kind of really, you know, fortunately kind of out of their depth with the problems they're trying to solve. You know, they might have been, um, lawyers or some other really great profession, doctors, and they're trying to solve something that has nothing to do with all this domain expertise that they've been bringing to the table. And it can— I've seen it, seen it work. I've seen certainly people just totally turn, you know, a hard left and do something new with what they're trying with their careers and their entrepreneurial path. But more often than not, it's just, it's not really something that's driving them in a meaningful way. So again, I love the way, you know, Steve kind of framed it that in that respect, you know, having Deep expertise is—

it makes it. Yeah.

And when you look at it, yeah, when you look at it on the other side of the mirror too, you know, when investors are asking you like, why you? Yep, that's the answer, right? It's that founder problem fit.

Why you?

Because that, that's— you're always going to get that at that early fundraising stage, pre-seed, seed, even all the way up to Series A. Like, why are you the one that's going to be built to then made, born, or molded into solving this problems. So I love that insight. I love that. Um, inevitably, maybe after show 100, I'll compile all of the, these answers into a book.

Yeah, yeah, there you go. Of all, of all the learnings. Yeah, really great insights though. Thank you so much, Steve, for, for coming on. Yeah, I just, uh, found the, the interview totally fascinating, and especially that number he mentioned, uh, that this is 70 to 80% of retail that comes through mom-and-pop shops I don't know if you're saying in LEGO specifically or the larger target markets, but just so interesting to see that from our perspective, at least where you and I both sit in the US. It's quite different retail landscape and the challenges that face those small retailers are different. So yeah, just fascinating stuff.

But absolutely.

Let's get to our closing announcements, I guess.

As we got to wrap it up for the weekend, our audience is ready to get out and jump into some cold water somewhere. It's hot everywhere. It's hot everywhere. Yeah, like literally, like the tarmac in the UK like melted.

I saw that. It was crazy in Europe right now. Yeah, it's 90 degrees plus in where I am in Pennsylvania, East Coast, US, all week. So it's hot everywhere.

Yeah, my plants outside are hating me. The inside ones are laughing at the outside plants right now. Yeah, they're living large inside. But no, you're— y'all are probably going to see this like I'm moving. Y'all in FI land moving. So I may be coming from the new studio next week. It's not going to be as nice, but hopefully I'll be building it out ready for Founder X. Yeah, next month. I guess that's the plan. We got internet over there, so again, I'm ready to go. It's going to be a whole thing this weekend. I'm just giving you all heads up.

Let's look forward to your changing backdrop.

Yeah, yeah, again, again, I'm changing them like all the time. Uh, but yeah, well, what do we got going on next week? That's the final show of season 2 GSR. Um, how many episodes we've done now? At least well over a dozen at this point.

I think this was our— yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, oh, okay. In this season we've done at least like 5.

Yeah.

And next week is our last one for the season with Tori from Endiotics. But before that, on Tuesday, we're having a crowdfunding best practices and Q&A. So this event is going to feature 3, I believe all 3 are FI alumni. I know at least 2 of those are, I'm just not sure about the third. I'm sure they're all 3 FI alumni, but all 3 of these founders have successfully crowdfunded through platforms like Republic or similar. So mostly equity crowdfunding, I believe, as opposed to preorder crowdfunding, which is a different thing. So if you're interested in equity crowdfunding, you've seen Republic, you've seen companies like Raise funding on that or similar platforms and curious learning more, come out to Tuesday's event and I'll drop that link into the LinkedIn comments as well here in a minute. But so that's happening. Then you mentioned on Friday, yes, we are— our final guest for the season is going to be Tori Smith of Andiotix. And then you also alluded to the big thing that's been coming up that we've been leading up to all season on Global Startup Report, which is our Founder X conference. So that's going to be the week after next, sneaking up on us very soon now. We've got a ton of founders from across the FI network RSVP'd to join us, but if you haven't done it yet, Go on over to founderx.com/attend. You should check your emails for the invites to the Eventbrite. It's a gated event just for our community. But if you have trouble, if you are in the FI network and you haven't received an invite yet, you can email support@founderx.com and they will help you out, make sure you get a ticket to join us. So that's what we've all been leading up to and the big thing on the—

Yep, yep. I think we'll be going— yeah, I think tomorrow— I think next week, final episode of season 2 will run a little long because I know Torrey and I are gonna probably run a little long. We're gonna go all over the place. Uh, yeah, we were talking about Torrey earlier on the news. Yeah, he's just— guys, just ball energy with an incredible vision. All our founders have such awesome visions of the future. Torrey's certainly no different. Um, but we are going to talk— we'll probably talk about some other things too, but But then I'm sure we're going to deep dive a little bit more into some of the granular programs that we got day by day. And we've got some awesome keynotes. Yeah, one of the, one of the co-founders of Rotten Tomatoes is going to be one of our keynotes. We have some prolific angel investors, special appearance by our founder, co-founder, and former CEO Adeo Ressi to tell us what's going on in VC lab world and all things VC. Uh, and so he'll have that. He may have a special guest here too. Um, well, again, time will tell. Can't, can't let— my lips are shut at the moment.

Still got a few more big keynote speakers here we haven't announced yet, but yeah, a lot of the programming is, um, becoming public. And so yeah, it's up at, uh, founderx.com/attend. But yeah, a few more big keynotes to announce in the final week leading up to it. So a lot of exciting things.

Yeah, and if you got— and if you have a pretty, uh, big active FI, uh, chapter in your region, um, and you are dialed in with the community there, you know, founder, mentor, advisor, investor, um, we are hosting localized in-person events. So it's truly hybrid in that respect. A lot of, you know, 99% of our programming, at least content, can be delivered online by Airmeet, uh, platform we've been using really last couple years now to feature and connect our community in these weird times, this grand social experiment of ours since 2020. Though we're going to be hosting in-person events in Texas, we're hosting one in Austin. If you're in the community, you've probably already gotten the notifications in the emails, but check in with your local community because I know we're doing stuff, I think, in Denver, we're doing stuff in Silicon Valley, you know, all over the place. So definitely bringing the local families together, it's going to be a fun time. Then I'm gonna sleep on that following Friday. A lot behind the scenes, man. Do a lot. We can't do without the family here. Um, but yeah, that's it for the show for— yeah, penultimate for this week, everyone.

Yeah, everybody have a wonderful weekend. Yeah, tune in, uh, next week for the last episode, and we hope to see you all at Founder X the following week. So absolutely, uh, Y'all be safe, stay cool.

Y'all be safe, be well. Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. We'll see you next week.