Bujeti Business Spotlight: Meet Nadayar, The Co-Founder of Eden Life
“We have so many people who could be living better and who could afford to live better. Access to the right product and services to make our urban lives easy is not there”
Nadayar is on a mission to make urban life easy and accessible. His journey began when he joined the world of startups and businesses, from Andela to Eden Life. In his story, he tells us about his journey, making life easier for people, navigating some of the challenges with that, nurturing a great team and work culture and his plans for the future.
Can you tell us about your background?
I started my career as a software engineer and got dragged into the world of startups by a friend of mine. We started building a tech platform to host North American University content so people who couldn’t afford to travel overseas to study can get quality education from there. We did that for a while, then went on to start our next company, which was Andela.
Our thesis at Andela was that brilliance is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not. So we found brilliant people across Africa and connected them to global software engineering jobs. It was actually while doing that I moved to Lagos to start Andela. Prior, I had only spent time in Bayelsa and Rivers states. Spending time in Lagos building Andela and travelling across Africa showed me something — Africa has the largest underserved consumer population in the world.
Oh, that’s not a good one.
Yes. We have so many people who can afford to live better. But access to the right product and services to make our urban lives easy is just not there. On the other side, we have millions of small businesses that want to deliver high-quality services but don’t have the infrastructure. Everyone is losing. Everyone is living a subpar life. We could all be living way better than we are. Of course, there are other economic factors that contribute to that, but primarily our markets are fragmented and do not have the right infrastructure. That was when I decided to start Eden Life with the purpose of just making the quality of life better in Africa. The way we describe it is 10xing the quality of life; we want to make lives 10x better; it’s our purpose.
I’m sold, Nadayar. And what has the journey been like?
It’s been great and very rewarding. We describe our product as the operating system of life. It is one app where we want consumers to be able to get everything they need for a good life. From food to groceries, medicine, and home care; we want these things accessible in a way that’s convenient and consistent. We’re also going to add entertainment, sightseeing, travel and everything you need in one place. And we’re still very early in the journey. Like, we’ve only cracked three services so far. Currently, you can order meals, have your laundry picked up and delivered, and request home cleaning. And as we implemented these, we got to really understand what it takes to deliver quality and trustworthy experiences. So our task is now how to make this quality and trust in services more accessible to the point where anyone can access them for a better life.
This is really good. So in your process of building all these, what are the biggest challenges you faced and how did you tackle them?
We’ve had different kinds of challenges, but I’ll mention two. Our biggest challenge at some point was getting customers what they needed on schedule. When we started, we were working with third-party businesses to deliver food. We first launched a subscription product where people could get their food delivered to them on a recurring schedule — on a daily basis or on a weekly basis.
So the providers knew that at 8AM, the food should be ready and the dispatch riders should be there to pick it up and deliver it to the customer. But for some reason or the other, it was always one story that led to lateness or the other. And the way we ultimately stopped that was we realised that we could not support all these businesses without understanding how they work. So we started our own food operation and in doing that, we understood end-to-end what it takes to deliver quality food on time every day. We’ve also now built a bunch of tools and processes that when we decide to go back to work with third-party food businesses again, we can give them all of these tools that will enable them to do better. That’s like one big challenge that we’ve faced.
That must have been a rough time.
It was. Another big one we faced was when we started our own food operation. We also ran into that same problem because we too were not initially hitting our own timeline — everything ranging from the process of making the food and the process of dispatching or delivering it. The way we solved those was by creating a process that looked like a funnel. So if you want to make food, you need to procure the ingredients, which must arrive at a particular time. Then you need to prepare the food according to specifications — that also needs to start at a particular time and end at a particular time. The cooking, plating, packing and dispatch all need to start and end at a particular time too. We had two main teams internally — our food operations team and logistics team. And for about three months, we took each of the stages of those funnels and just measured the start and stop of each of them. Every day, we’d look at the numbers and ask why things didn’t start at the target time; and if they did, we would ask why they didn’t finish at the target time. And we just kept on tweaking and optimising our processes till this point. Throughout last year, it was perfect. In January 2021, only 11% of our deliveries were on schedule. By December 2021, that number was over 95%.
Our big secret is just iteration and obsession with quality.
Well done, Nadayar. Tell us about some of the biggest lessons you’ve learnt since you started Eden Life.
I’ve learned a lot, and I’m still learning every day. But I’d say “the customer is always right” is a good one — it sounds cliche, and maybe it is. But how we look at that is that customers are coming to us with a problem, and we have our own opinions of how we want to solve it. But every customer brings their own context to the problem. Most customers are actually not going to be vocal about what that context is.
Sometimes, when a customer gives feedback or requests for a particular thing. It might become reasonable once you understand where that customer is coming from, what their daily life looks like, and how the product fits into it. So one of the biggest lessons for my team and I is to continuously talk to customers, even when they stop using the product. We call and talk to them about what once made the product relevant for them to use, but is no longer applicable. Then the product can learn to continue to solve these problems; it’s something that is definitely cliche but has a whole different meaning to me.
“The customer is always right” is not necessarily just about what the customer says. It is about proactively listening to them and learning from what their daily lives look like. It’s learning how the product fits into that context and then ensuring that the product incorporates many of those insights.
Quite insightful. So how do you treat customers who are overly demanding, stubborn and unreasonable?
It depends. On a base level, I’d say it’s good to speak to a lot of customers because then you can start to create patterns and solve those patterns. If you’re able to identify these patterns and solve around them, then you can actually address the needs of customers. Beyond that, some customers would request special treatments once in a while or have particularly unique issues or feedback that might go against what we initially thought the product was supposed to do. Whenever these unique situations come up, we see them as opportunities to create an advocate from a customer because if the customer is asking for something that is ridiculous, and you can actually do it, then that customer tends to love the brand more.
They become advocates because they know what they are asking for is ridiculous. If you’re able to meet them, we’ve noticed that there’s a sense of reciprocity that comes with that. So the ones that we can take on, we definitely jump at the opportunity to take those on.
What has been your biggest achievement since you started Eden Life? And what’s that thing that when you look back, it makes you feel like you’re doing the right thing?
Too many things actually, but the one that stands out for me is definitely our team and culture. Every day that I go to work and see my colleagues or talk to them or hang out with them, I feel very energised because we have managed to pull in the right set of people who are not just great at what they do, they are also mission-driven. Everybody at Eden Life always thinks, “How can I 10x the quality of life today?” The energy is just contagious. And building and sustaining this kind of culture where people are not just mission-driven but are also supportive of each other is rare and hard. I’m super proud of our team for creating something like this.
Interesting. How did you manage to build the right team and culture?
To be honest, it’s hard to say. I think it started with my co-founders and I; we have a very candid relationship with each other. We hold each other to high standards and, at the same time, are very open to and supportive of each other. And I think the way we work with each other sort of translated to the team over time.
We codified these things early; we asked ourselves why we behaved the way we did. We wrote them down and realised we were obsessed with quality. We like to automate things, which we describe as exponential thinking. We love and embrace the diversity of thought and approach, not just diversity of tribe or race. We engage with each other with radical candour; we don’t hold back, but we’re also kind when we give feedback. We’re also thoughtful. An example is when someone is celebrating something, or it’s their special day, or they’re sick, we show them that we’re thinking about them, that we appreciate them, or are by their side in those moments. These are some of the things that make up our company values.
This is amazing!
Yes, yes. We wrote them down and acknowledged that they were the things that make us enjoy working with each other and should be the things we look out for when we also hire other people. And when we hire them, these are the things we should teach them so we can also continue enjoying working with them. Codifying those values and talking about them every week during our all-hands and celebrating people actively demonstrates helps reinforce the culture and behaviours we want to see.
We’ve also had different moments where people acted against these values and we had a strong stand against those situations. Anytime that happens within an organisation and the company steps up even when it’s difficult to protect the culture and abide by the values, I think it also reinforces the culture. So these are some of the things that we’ve done.
That’s deep. So what does the future look like for Eden Life in about 5–10 years?
As I said in the beginning, our vision is to become the operating system for life. We want to have that one app where, as a human being, you can get everything you need to have a good life. And then behind the scenes, all the business owners that want to deliver services or products to these customers have the right tools and infrastructure built by Eden Life to enable them to reliably serve these customers. That is our vision.
What advice do you have for people looking to start companies or businesses in Nigeria today?
First, before giving advice, I have encouragement. Anybody who wants to start a business should go for it. It might seem daunting, tough — it is tough — but go for it because it is not just going to transform your economic situation; it is also going to transform who you are as a person. This is my encouragement to anyone who is looking to start a business.
Good, good….
For advice, I’d say to have a clear picture of what you want the world to look like as a result of your business or what you’re doing. Have something that represents that view or vision that you can look at every day because when you look at that thing every day, and you meditate on it, it remains in your subconsciousness every day and will keep you grounded. The road to building a business is turbulent and unpredictable; there are so many times that you may want to dump it. There are so many times that sexier ideas will pop up to seduce you from your original vision, but putting that vision front and centre where you can see and engage with it every day will keep you grounded and help you stay on track. The other thing is that the customer is always right. Look for ways other than just post-service customer feedback; look for ways to listen to the customer to understand their context and how your product fits in their context.
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