Building the first African-focused FinTech company to list on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange with Louwrens Van Schalkwyk

Rui: If you’re looking for stories, strategies, and actionable advice on how entrepreneurial careers start, you’re in the right place. I’m your host, Rui, and this is the Startup Journey Podcast, the show where every week I sit down with different entrepreneurs, experts, and thought leaders to dig deep into what it takes to get a startup off the ground.

Today, I’m joined by Louwrens Van Schalkwyk, an entrepreneur with nearly two decades of experience building companies and leading teams in the fintech sector. Welcome Louwrens, thank you for joining me today. How are you?

Louwrens: Thank you very much for the opportunity. Very well under circumstances. And, uh, thank you for inviting me on your podcast.

Rui: Absolutely. Louwrens, you’ve done some impressive stuff throughout your career, right? Today, I would like to focus on one particular project you had, and that is MyBucks. For anyone that doesn’t know, MyBucks is a fintech that provides a range of solutions from insurance to banking. Just recently, I saw in the news that the company went public with an offering just shy of 143 million this year.

I read Samoei also became the first African focused fintech company to list on Frankfurt Stock Exchange. As I said, impressive stuff, I’d like to dig in the early days of the company and see what lessons we can bring to our listeners. So to start, let’s go straight for the beginning. Where did the idea for my bucks or get bucks at the time come from?

Louwrens: Thank you. Well, admittedly, and to be honest, I think it was almost by accident that we stumbled onto the opportunity. A very good friend of mine. Sorrow and I actually started out building a lending platform. It was for the use in our previous engagement where we did lending and specifically in the temporary employment sector.

Now, the problem there was that we had weekly payrolls. Now, other than in Europe, a weekly payroll is not a very common thing in South Africa and the market systems available at that point did not have functionality. So that was a start that company then got taken over by a bigger firm. And we said, but we’ve got, I think we’ve got something here on the technology side.

And we elected not to, to go along with the acquisition, but arranged for the ability to keep hold of the tech. So our next ventures, actually went into building a software solution for the market because we’d already progressed pretty far down the road. And we started marketing the loan system management, which we built at that point to various existing market players.

Now at the time, online lending was starting and doing extremely well in the European market and specifically in the UK. And, you know, we were honestly struggling a little bit to convince big existing lending operations to take on this fledgling company and its tech. And we decided, but let’s build a web platform to enable online lending on the back of our lending system, which we did in our spare time.

Then a couple of weeks afterwards, we had a sort of a beta version available and started talking to people and got interested parties involved. And that was a sort of a 180 in terms of where we were at that point, because we said, but if this is where we wanted to go, then we are changing our strategy.

And I think that’s, that was kind of the first pivot in that whole story was to say that instead of trying to get our software in the market, we become the primary user of the software and with new partners that also onboarded and ultimately became the other co founders of what was then to be GetBucks, got capital invested for the lending book.

And from the business that, uh, was the first online lender in South Africa humble beginnings. I think in the first month we had 10 applications. You know, and that increased a little bit in the next month. We were obviously bootstrapping a lot of the stuff. We did not have big marketing budgets and spend to go into Google ads and a lot of above the line kind of marketing.

So it was sort of undercover, but we steadily grew. And within the first six months, we had a couple of thousand of applications every month coming in. So from, at that point, we felt comfortable that the concept was proven and the, the investors and our other partners in the business also had more comfort with regards to then push in more capital and create the capability to really grow.

The following six months was a little bit of a whirlwind cause we rapidly grew South Africa, but we also decided to take an approach into the rest of Africa. And we quickly on boarded countries and other areas in Botswana and also in Zimbabwe. And by the end of year one, we had moved from literally going from a garage set up to having a presence in four countries and doing online lending and online business in four countries in Southern Africa.

By that time, the business was rapidly growing in terms of staff, in terms of capability. We had moved from a single developer and a business guy to about 15 full time developers, and probably about 20 to 30 admin people just in the South African office, and then also the vested operations, each in, uh, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and the other country that we added was Malawi by that stage.

So that kind of set the ground for GetBucks and still with a primary focus on lending, the business expanded further into Africa. By the end of about three years down the line, we were in nine African countries and we were starting to kind of look at other markets across Europe and that kind of piqued our interest.

The expansion into Europe was, was definitely a different experience. And I think we’ll delve into that a little bit later, but I think before we get on to other stuff, we then sort of had a change in, in our goals as well. We started acting a little bit more in the wider financial services space. The Zimbabwean business by then had applied for a banking license.

We were pushing insurance products through multiple markets, and we were very comfortable in a lot of our African environments where we had drawn quite substantial loan books. We had quite a big customer base. The business in itself was in excess of about 500 staff by that time and was very healthy. So I think that, that, that’s sort of the first half of, of my involvement there.

Which was definitely hockey stick kind of stuff. Very exciting and also intimidating because every now and again, you do find yourself not really knowing what’s going on. Challenges are frequent and, uh, you have to think outside the box. Think on your feet. Yeah. So, so that was sort of. First half of GetBucks.

Rui: Absolutely. And actually, thank you for the comprehensive overview of the company. I have a bunch of stuff to deconstruct here already. I’m going to go right back to the beginning where you said that at some point before that opportunity for the acquisition. You understood that you were onto something right with the tech and you decided that, okay, this is worth pursuing.

Why was that? Was that a response from the market? Was it a, an intuition or a gut feeling? What led you to believe that this was an opportunity for you to build something?

Louwrens: Yeah. So I think it’s twofold. I think there were two main considerations. The one was definitely our positioning in the market. We were definitely different than.

anything sitting in the market at that stage, mainly not because of the accounting side. I think what people sometimes very important to have that in place, but what wasn’t in the market at that point was the ability to handle workflow. And it’s completely different from what we see today. I mean, workflow has become very important, but back then your financial systems were literally glorified accounting systems.

I mean, they were journals. You loaded a loan, And, or a product and, you know, based on accounting rules and journal entries, it managed out the product for you, but there were no workflow decisioning, customer management, you know, that set in other systems, very expensive systems, you know, the likes of your large ERPs.

So I think from a product perspective, that was, was our feeling that, that we had something. That was pretty well developed, pretty robust and configurable. I mean, we didn’t have to go and redevelop things. We could literally give this to the end user and speed to market. You could get an operation live within a couple of weeks.

So I think that was the other one. And the second part was less clever, but was emotional. We’d invested time. We’d invested effort. So, you know, it was sort of. a brainchild that went from sketches and drawings and diagrams into something tangible. So I think that was the other side. So we felt we had something good and we felt that we had invested so much into this.

We definitely can’t leave it to You know, to die.

Rui: Love that. Yeah, absolutely. And, and it makes sense, right? So you rely a lot on, on the data that you had available, but in the end you’re, you’re gut feeling and how much you believe in, in, in the product or in the startup that you’re about to build that plays a big role as well.

Okay. So the value is clear for me. But you were saying that you kind of struggled to bringing this to, uh, to, to, to acquiring some early adopters as a clients, and in the end, uh, you decided to, uh, start using it yourself and then on onboarding other people that were further down the, the line actually part of the company as well.

So why do you think that happened? Was it a matter of timing? Was it the industry that was conservative or used to doing things differently? What was the main reason? because the value is clear. So the adoption there should happen unless there’s, there’s something that is not working. What was it in the, in your case?

Louwrens: Yes, I think, and always looking back, it’s easier to kind of spot these things. I think the, our approach to the market was maybe a little bit early. We were pitching our system and the tech capability into very well established at that time, which had large investments and operating capabilities in terms of bricks and mortar outlets.

So you had distribution, you had stuff. So our use case, you know, in terms of saying, but we can automate so much of this for you. And You know, take away the decision making process in terms of credit, in terms of processing, in terms of speed. The kind of feeling was, but my customers are used to queuing, they’re used to coming to my store, you know, they understand that, you know, whether I, you know, there wasn’t really a service differentiator for them to say, you know, whether they wait.

10 minutes or an hour, they wait, you know, I’ve got such a big foothold. And I think that was kind of what we experienced in the market from the one side, the other side was, I mean, we went and, and funnily enough, I think this was very applicable at the time. And once again, today we, we look back and we laugh at it, but we picked the whole software model as software as a service.

It was just not understood in the market. I mean, guys were used to paying exorbitant amounts of license fees for systems. We specifically did not want to do that. Now, when you go and talk and mainly lenders at that time, and you put two scenarios on the table and you say, Pay me X for a license once off every year, they understand it.

When we go, when we went in with the model that said, pay me a small little fraction of every single loan on a monthly basis, all of a sudden the guy says, but wait, now you’re taking my profit. No, no, no, no, no. I don’t like that. And where do you get this kind of approach to the market? It doesn’t work like this.

You need to sit in the corner. You need to be a manageable little cost that I can plan for that I have as a license fee. So I think those kind of things at that point, you know, made it hard for us to get into the market. And when we look at it today, it’s like, it’s ridiculous because it’s, it’s the market today.

But I think in 2008, 2009, That just wasn’t the approach.

Rui: Absolutely. And there’s a valuable lesson in there as well, because yeah, the market requires some education and even from a marketing standpoint, you could have used all the budget that you wanted, right? If you were to, to spend millions in Google ads or anything like this, you would still have to change that behavior.

So admittedly, and this is something that I, for one, speak a lot about. At the start, and especially with innovative products, you need to go there. The founder, you need to explain exactly what this does and what the benefit is. Otherwise it’s simply not, not going to work. So that makes sense. Perfect. So then six months to product market fit.

Couple of questions on the actual tech. So did you build it in house? Was this with an external resource? What was the process to building the actual product that went into the market?

Louwrens: It was literally bootstrapped from an in house resource. So from line of code number one right down to the end solution It went through extreme technological alterations.

We started out, believe me or not, in Windows Forms as a distributable. We very quickly transgressed into web based technologies, which at that time was actually Silverlight. Windows piloted one of the first distributables in terms of web technology. So we went through silver light 1, 2, 3, and four. And then all of a sudden all of the other guys caught up, you know, the, the Java kind of clients and, and, and, and, and scripting and caught up and Windows sort of said, okay, we now ending this product.

And, uh, you know, we kind of getting out of the market and we eventually, you know, went over to, to the scripting site. So it was very rapid, very quick. We transitioned through a host of underlying technologies in a very short space, but all in house and from scratch that that code base was, was done from a, like I said, from a single line of code, right up to the millions that eventually ran the business all in house.

Rui: Perfect. What was the team behind it? Was it, you’re mentioning, you mentioned that you had just one developer at the start, was it just him or her, just one resource doing all of this? Did you have anyone on product on design? What was the overall composition of the team behind technical development?

Louwrens: Yeah.

So before, before Agile was even mentioned or existed, that was what we did. I mean, I was literally, Writing business requirements. I didn’t even know it was called that, but user stories, it was way before one of these terms came to the market, but that’s what we were doing. And, and my, my partner, Saul is a rockstar in terms of development.

He, uh, built the system on requirements and then it was the rapid deploy test. Change, deploy again, test, check and change. And that’s, that’s the thing we went through. I mean, you obviously had the tools to help you. I mean, like I said, we started from a Windows Forms perspective. So you had the little generators that can help with some code generation and those kind of things.

But it doesn’t take away from the effort. So yes, he brought in a very good friend of his at one point. So we had two and then later three developers, which was the core team for quite a while that built it. practically most of the platform. And that was the process. It was highly iterative. It was extremely agile.

I mean, we went at some points, we went through multiple deployments in a day. So it’s literally fix that, change that. And then they say, okay, test again. And that was, that was what we did. It was, it was, uh, it was literally great fun and a lot of excitement.

Rui: Perfect. And you mentioned something that is quite interesting that you had this partner that was somewhat of a rockstar, right?

And that, that made me think because, I mean, a couple of decades ago, you could find Steve Wozniak’s in garages, right, because they were geeks and they were, the demand was not as high as it is today. Now you look at any technical stakeholder for, from, from any tech company and they all look like John Travolta in Greece, right?

They are freaking rock stars, all of them. So it’s really hard to get them with an idea on a napkin. With that in mind, obviously the situation changed and now the demand is much higher. We have, the competition is much more fierce, but back then, how did you meet him and how did the, how did you guys get together to work on this idea?

Louwrens: Yeah. So, I mean, we were introduced through a mutual contact. I mean, from, from the previous little business that I was involved in, we had the gap in terms of system capability and we got introduced. You mentioned napkin. Our very first interaction was literally that I met him on a Saturday morning. And I said, I’m struggling to find this kind of system in the market.

It doesn’t exist and I need it built. And we pulled out a little piece of paper and he started drawing and concepts and this and that, and ask questions. And I said, you know, we went through that small little planning stage, literally on not bigger than an A4 piece of paper to say, yes, that, no, this little bit left there, a little bit right there.

At the end of the conversation, I said, but would you be willing to build this if given the opportunity? And he said, by all means. And in that first environment, we employed him to build it. And then once that was acquired by the big company, the two of us essentially said, if we can ringfence this tech, we’d like to have it.

And we went out on our own.

Rui: Okay, so I’m going completely off script as, uh, as you know, and I’m going to keep going simply because this is too interesting. Okay, so you know that a lot of founders today, especially first time founders, they struggle to find not only technical stakeholders to help them, but also to find a good co founder, someone that they can trust and that that they can build a business with.

Would you say were the main reasons why you got to together and then this partnership with, with your partner worked so well, what would you say were the main reasons?

Louwrens: So I’m going to park things like capability because I think that that’s sort of the entry level kind of things that you look at. I mean, he obviously exhibited more than sufficient capability in the subject matter.

The most important thing for me, and especially in co founder, is the ability to get along. It’s someone that shares a set of values, and it doesn’t need to be 100%, but it’s someone that sets the same set of values. that has the ability to be challenged and also challenged back. But the reason why the values are important is that it never gets personal.

I mean, we, we had disagreements, we had heated arguments, but it was always about what we wanted to achieve. And because of that set of underlying values that were inherently there, we just clicked. We clicked from day one. I mean, we’re still friends to this day, even though we, we literally separated by continents now, and he’s doing exceptional work in Europe, but we, we still have the ability when we meet up, that’s like we saw one another yesterday and we can pick up a conversation, be it on a personal level, on a family level on, you know, what’s going on in the world or what’s going on in business.

And I think because of that, That is more important than what you’re doing. Cause I think a lot of times, and, and, and it’s also when in the business it starts, I think later founders, it gets a little bit easier potentially, but if you’re literally doing stuff from scratch, you need that kind of interaction.

That’s my opinion.

Rui: I agree 100 percent and we here at Taltar, we work mostly with founders, as you know, and that’s something we see a lot because there’s fires everywhere, right? You need to be doing something in the morning that’s radically different than what you’ll be doing in the afternoon. And it’s almost like a marriage.

If you can’t make it work, if you can’t get along with the other person, it’s not going to work no matter how good technically they are. Yeah, absolutely. I, even though it’s. way harder today to find technical stakeholders. And that was actually one of the reasons why we created Altar to help founders get that technical stakeholder because we experienced that ourselves.

But we still believe that the idyllic option is to have that technical person inside. It simply works better, right? So whenever founders can find them, we always encourage them to do it because it makes a lot of sense. Perfect. Louwrens, let’s change gears here. Let’s go to the second semester of the company, right?

Because you mentioned that the first six months were pretty much to get product market fit, right? And then you immediately decided to expand. This is a tough decision, right? Because you’re still figuring things out. It’s fairly new still, and you’re already adding Enormous layers of complexity and eventually other services on top of landing, expanding the team from a couple of resources to 15 developers, 20, 30 people only on the administrative, administrative side.

How was that? So, well, I’m assuming it was. It’s hard to, to maintain control, maintain a grip of, of everything. How did you come to the decision of expanding so quickly and how did you manage that transition?

Louwrens: Well, I think naturally, and it will probably lead into a little bit of, of another discussion. As you grow, I think the importance is to start attracting talent that has got other experience and other capabilities.

And I think once again, through sheer luck, that’s what we got. When we approached guys to get involved in the business, I mean, these were guys that had already been into various African countries. They had already taken businesses in the previous kind of a way of doing financial services, you know, branches, people, heavy infrastructure, those kinds of things.

But what they still had is they had that deep knowledge of markets, which markets work, How to approach those markets and how to get there quickly. Once again, unknowingly and for sheer dumb luck, we built a team that was on the one side, my sorrow and I that for all practical reasons had a lot of the product and the system knowledge and we’re sort of driving the, the continuous evolution of our capability.

And we had guys on the other side that were just saying, but we know these markets. This is a natural fit. So yes, we are still growing in this, this in South Africa, but we can definitely hop across the border and take it to Botswana. Yes, it also makes sense to take it into Zimbabwe. And by the way, You know, a couple of months down the line, hello, we can place another opening in the Malawian market.

And I think that’s the importance of the diversity of a team that wants to take a business. Now there’s, there’s various ways to look at this. I mean, yes, we could have said. Can we grow to scale first in our own market and then start attacking other markets? Or do we start going into diverse markets to, to continue our growth there?

And I think South Africa also played a part in that. We’ve got a very strong financial market and very strong competition. We knew our space in the market was limited in the country. I mean, we were never going to be the guys that were going to take over a specific segment. I mean, we were participants at a very small scale, and we understood very early that our capability for growth is only that big.

And I think that also helped with the early decision earlier than some people would expect to go into other markets because there we could play a bigger game in certain of the other environments like Botswana, like Zimbabwe or Malawi, even though they are smaller markets than South Africa in total. We could become serious players there fairly quickly.

And when you now look at the business as a whole, all of a sudden you’ve got something interesting other than a small little participant in the corner and the South African market. I think that was sort of the benefit and what got us, you know, going quickly in those markets.

Rui: So this is very interesting.

It’s not, I mean, not the, let’s say the most straightforward path most people would take, right? This is not what would come to mind first as a growth strategy. Still, results speak for themselves, right? And your reasoning is, makes total sense looking at it now. It seems like you had everything figured out back then and it worked.

Based on the assumptions that you had and still you talk about how luck played a big part in their luck on securing the right people, right? And a while back you were talking about feeling intimidating a lot of the times and not knowing exactly what to do so it’s interesting because It seems like you had everything figured out.

You didn’t, right? You just used the information available that was there and you made the decisions that felt that, that were the ones that would lead you to the, uh, the, the least amount of odds of failure. Right? So that would give you the best odds of success. Let’s put it that way. So, but, but it’s interesting because, and this is a lesson that we need to stress.

Founders, especially in, in dealing with innovative products, they need to be comfortable with not knowing what to do sometimes, right. And with having luck on their side to succeed. And I believe it’s really important to, to, to stress that out.

Louwrens: Definitely.

Rui: Perfect. So Louwrens, let’s now talk about the increasing in numbers in ranks, right?

So you went from just a couple of people to a couple of dozen people. Was it hard to maintain culture?

Louwrens: No, surprisingly, I think so. The culture thing is twofold and I think it’s harder today, admittedly, but I think the culture thing is twofold. One, we were in those, in those first couple of years, we were very much a company driven by a very clear vision.

We wanted to deliver a digital product into the market. We wanted to change the way that financial services was done in a lot of these markets with regards to customer service access, the capability to give the customer the management tools to do a lot of things themselves, to have visibility in terms of how does the product work?

How do I get hold of the product? What does it do? That inherently created so much excitement. Amongst the people that were joining us, you know, it was almost as if they were just carried along, you know, they were longing for the ride. We’ll talk about culture. And there was definitely in, in sort of the latter part of the business where we ventured into some other things, we experienced culture issues because it was done our way, people bought into what we were and they understood what they are joining and it just slotted in place, you I mean, and you sitting in different countries with different belief systems and different histories and, you know, different local languages and, you know, Funny, funny stories.

I mean, it was literally when we started speaking to people with regards to cloud hosting and we, you know, the service or the guys were looking at us as if, you know, you’re doing magic. What? What are you talking about? And I mean, it was fun in those days because it was so out there. The concept was so new that it created so much excitement amongst the staff specifically that Yeah.

Like I said, definitely no culture issues initially. And I think that was because of a strong drive in product and brand. By that time we had realized a bit of a brand, you know, when we came into a new market, people have noticed what we had done in South Africa and what’s one eye in Zimbabwe and Malawi.

So by the time we started, he didn’t care. Kenya and Swaziland and the rest of the countries, you know, there was a little bit of a reputation, you know, these guys do it differently and it’s nice and it’s cool and it’s exciting and that definitely played a role in terms of the staff as well. So it made it easier for us.

Rui: Absolutely. And I mean, I can see from every answer you have that passion and excitement were there throughout the whole journey. And it makes it easier, right? It’s easier to align. It’s easier to maintain a good vibe around the company when that happens. Perfect. So Louwrens, if you agree, let’s move on to the second part of the story, which would be the expansion to Europe.

So if you, can you share some, some, some thoughts there because I know it didn’t go as well as until, until that moment, right?

Louwrens: Definitely. So by now we were, we were operating in about nine African countries. We were doing well. We had acquired a banking license in Zimbabwe. And there were a lot of things happening in the business.

I mean, the business was, was really growing at a very good rate in terms of customers, in terms of product, in terms of business lines, in terms of, Capability, you know, once again, the platform capability was there. And there were two main developments that sort of came as a strategic choice in the business and in an African market, the one was to go into more deposit taking capabilities.

And we kind of said, you know, we, we kind of think we’ve, we have a handle on how to do this online lending thing. So. Why not, uh, go back over the Mediterranean and see if we can, uh, get something going in Europe. And, uh, I mean, we had no clue in terms of where to go. It was literally just because, you know, some Oaks had been there and okay, the one is Spain because been there, done that.

That was a nice country. So we need to go to Spain. And the other one was, okay, let’s read a little bit. Oh, look, Poland seems very good for new FinTechs and new online stuff. And they’re very keen on that. So here we go. Can’t, not one of us can speak Spanish, not one of us can speak Polish, but we are not.

Same concept as the very first South African concept, literally online lending, unsecured lending, short term, low amounts. And we launched fairly quickly and robustly in Spain and soon followed by Poland. Now, what we talked about a little while ago, which was initially a lot of luck and a lot of benefit was guys that had experience in markets that knew how these markets work.

And that could, you know, kind of navigate the way into these new markets. We kind of broke our own rules. We had nothing like that when we went into Spain and into Poland, the culture was completely different. I mean, things like. The Spanish culture is in certain instances is I give you a loan and we make a deal.

You’re going to repay me in two weeks time. And if you don’t repay me, it’s not a problem. Don’t worry. I’ll pay you next week, but you’re breaking all my provisioning models at the back. You’re causing chaos in terms of my bad debt risk ratios. It’s not just, it’s okay. I’ll pay you next week, but it’s a culture thing.

It’s just. No, don’t worry. It’s, it’s, it’s not a bad thing. Next week I’ll, I’ll pay it and they do pay and it happens and it’s like, but it’s madness. How can this work? You know, I think the other thing was that we were very used to how the third party system interactions work in terms of, of collections and stuff like that.

And we were a little bit out of depth in terms of, of the European market there as well. Means of collections is card at that time. So, so, so that created a little bit of an issue. I mean, it’s, it’s not as guaranteed as what we were used to here. We then tried credit card collections and funnily enough, we, we registered on Stripe and we were told three weeks afterwards, no, no, no, no, no.

If you’re a lender, you can’t use Stripe. So we’re closing your account. So, you know, we, we needed to find yet another avenue and we essentially back then had, had, had a deal with Wirecard to do collections. And the other thing was, was credit scoring. I mean, we were used to rich credit scoring models, which just wasn’t necessarily available in those markets.

So we went in there blind, we borrowed to guys we shouldn’t have borrowed to the language barrier was a nightmare. We had no presence there. We had literally had people in our South African office that spoke Spanish and Polish. I mean, for the odd customer interaction on a web chat or on a, you know, a query or an email or that.

Admittedly, I mean, we were completely out of our depth from day one. You know, a very nice learning curve and, um, interesting nonetheless. And the other bit was the banking bit. So now across this journey, get bucks transitioned into my bucks. And that was mostly because we started going into more of, of, of the banking products.

So the get bucks name was essentially, Started as literally something you do get and box is the slang for money, you know, so that was where we got the name, but it was primarily for, for, for the lending kind of approach to the market. So my box was a little bit more of a comprehensive customer focused thing.

It’s all of my money, you know, it’s my insurance, it’s my transactions, it’s my savings and it’s my lending. So the name transition made sense and it was, you know, sounded a little bit more grown up and responsible and all of those things. And there were various then target banks identified in the African context to get us quickly into these markets.

We don’t have to start up, we don’t have to get customers, we’re sort of acquiring customers and we’re acquiring existing infrastructure in terms of banks. So, so that was, was that that second bit of the, of the story that also happened. And subsequently, interestingly enough, that kind of forced us. to, to do the listing in, on a stock exchange in Frankfurt because a lot of the banking licenses required a listed entity to, to own these, uh, these operations.

So I think at the end of the day, the bad thing is a little bit of a split off focus. You know, being naughty and going to markets that you don’t understand and doing stuff that that wasn’t necessarily on day one, your, your core thing, you know, we, we, we, we lost a little bit of character there when, when we also bought those bags.

Rui: Absolutely. Absolutely. It makes, it makes sense. So how you envisioned how it would go is, is clear to me. Would you say that that decision was a bit of. Were you feeling invincible at the time and you were just trying to conquer the world? Was that a bit of emotion associated with that decision or a little bit too much?

I would say, or was it a completely logic decision that simply didn’t work?

Louwrens: No, I think it was definitely a little bit of, of, of ego to say that, you know, if we can make it here, we can make it anyway. And, uh, the European. lessons taught us that that’s not necessarily true. Look, and I, and I still don’t think it’s impossible.

I think, you know, if we approach it with a little bit more caution, we forgot that it, that whole journey went from system development to buildings, a platform to getting us down the line and even going live was, was, you know, a couple of years. So you can’t just all of a sudden go and, you know, drop yourself into an environment in Europe and within a couple of months, you think that you’re going to be a player in the market.

So I think it was a little bit hasty and I think it, yes, it was off the back of. a little bit of an ego saying that it’s been going well and we, we, you know, we, we kind of, you know, we don’t what’s next in Africa. There’s not really anything exciting. So let’s go to Europe and very much so for the later acquisition in Australia.

I think it was, it was, you know, it was a little bit overzealous. But acquisitions, I’ll put in one little basket, because those are different than, than, you know, going into markets yourself.

Rui: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, and what would you say were the biggest lessons there? Because definitely you learned something with that semi failure, let’s call it.

Louwrens: So, I think, I think when you, when you want to go into a very different market culturally and also foreign and not only foreign because it sits in another continent, but I mean, it’s language barriers. It’s very different. You know, it needs, we almost needed to find. Someone to start off the get bucks Europe endeavor.

We almost needed to find another founder and said, listen, we should have actually identified small, similar tech environments that were kind of, you know, not successful yet, or small financial services guys that would sort of grouping, trying to get something off the ground that that’s maybe what we should have done.

And we should have gone to them and said, okay, hello, here we are. We’ve got tech capability. We’ve got a little bit of a wallet to spend money on development and infrastructure, but we need your expertise in the market. So can we combine this? And we literally treat it as a new start. in Europe, not get bucks going to Europe.

I think financial services unfortunately has too many nuances to just, you know, you can’t just, it’s not a cloud service. It’s not like I’m taking something over there and I’m putting it down. You know, if all the infrastructure ticks off, it’s the same thing as if, whether I do it in Europe or in the US or here or there, you know, it’s not financial services and how people interact with financial services do differ.

And maybe that would have been a better approach. I think a little bit of More. caution with regards to going in, lots more local knowledge, you know, it’s, it’s absolutely vital. We were, we were schooled in more than one way. Yes. So I think, Not impossible, you know, get yourself educated with regards to what you’re going into perfect

Rui: Louwrens There’s something I’d like to to go into a bit as well Which is you were talking about the transition from get bugs to my bugs and it makes perfect sense By the way, it’s clear the reason why That change had to happen.

But one thing that we see often working with founders is especially again, first time founders, they want to build everything from the get go. Multiple features, multiple layers of the product, multiple stakeholders to impact. And we always try to apply lean methodologies and explain why a narrow value proposition is a better way to go to market.

You were focused solely on online lending at the start. How important would you say this was for the market penetration? So to, to get things going. I

Louwrens: think it’s very important. I think there’s much more value in terms of an MVP going to market than trying to do it all. I mean, we didn’t know what we were doing.

We were building a lending system to sell to other lenders. And all of a sudden we built a front end and we pivoted into a business ourselves. If we said that we were building, if we kept on down that road and said, wait, we’re now going to build a core banking system, and then we’re going to build a insurance back end, I mean, we, we might’ve gotten lucky and sold it to someone, you know, or we would have spent another two years with.

A hell of a lot of time invested in a system that no one’s using, trying to chase that complete solution. Cause I mean, those were the logical steps in terms of building out a system that financial institutions use, lending, banking, transacting, insurance, You know, where do we stop? And so the main thing is treat the thing that you want to get into the market as the most important thing first and get there as quick as you can, because that tests the water.

But what it also gives you, according to my kind of, you know, experience is the ability to, to change focus fairly quickly without feeling emotional about time invested without, you know, having gone way past the marker and having to turn back. It literally gives you flexibility to pivot at any given point.

You don’t know as a founder, what that very specific USP is going to be that’s going to make the market turn. And that’s why I say luck is, is part of the journey. Cause honestly, there’s other guys in the market that did not experience what we experienced. And I’m specifically talking experience. I’m not talking monetary reward.

I’m not talking, you know, any of that I’m talking seven, eight years that I was part of that journey was. exceptionally important to my life and an absolute blessing. I mean, it’s lessons that you don’t learn at university. You don’t learn in big corporates, you know, it’s the hard yards. It’s the exciting stuff.

It’s, you know, it’s the everyday frozen new curve ball and you, you bootstrap it, you solve it. That’s the stuff that, that you don’t get. to buy off a bookshelf. And I mean, you can read these things and you can embrace probably 70, 80 percent of it from, you know, founders books and guidelines and, you know, best practices.

They are very important and it’s always valuable to see what the guys are doing and how they did it. But that last little 10, 20 percent is pure adrenaline and that you only get in, in, in, you know, walking down the hard lines.

Rui: Absolutely. Thank you for that. So Louwrens, we’re actually approaching the end of our conversation.

So I’d like just to go a bit into the personal side of how it was back in the beginning. And then I have some finishing questions, rapid fire style that, uh, we can, uh, we can get to as well. So first I would like to ask what was the day in your life back then? How many hours a day were you working? What was your focus split?

Louwrens: Right, so, I mean, we started not too early. I don’t think neither of us were necessarily early risers, but, you know, it was, you know, early enough. And we literally kept on until we were done. I mean, it varied on, on, on, you know, you are tired. Sometimes you need a little bit of a break of context. Important to note, both of us were already married at that point.

So, I mean, we weren’t single guys that could sit there and only eat pizza in a dark room and go for 23 out of 24 hours. We needed to break back to our families and needed to spend that time. So you need that kind of control as well. But the arrangement was always we go when the work is done or when we can’t see straight anymore, you know, and, and that was literally based on energy levels.

And unfortunately, sometimes you have low energy and low motivation. I don’t think it’s bad to then just go home, stop doing what you’re doing. You know, I can go, Two, three, four, five weeks of working, you know, 11, 12, 13 hours that days. But if you hit that one day, we were off to four hours. You just doing squat.

You know what? Just go home, take the break, break context, give yourself that little bit of peace, you know, refocus and come back. And I think that’s important. I think Oaks always think that I need to go 110 miles from day one. And that’s going to give me success. I think focus is more important than, than, you know, just putting in hours and hard yards, but we did put in those hours and efforts.

Rui: Perfect. And about the focus split, what were you doing? Was it 30 percent managing 70 percent selling? What was the, obviously I know you were putting out the fires that were appearing each day. You were dealing with the curveballs, as you were saying, but was there a specific focus that you had more than anything else?

Louwrens: Yeah. So I think, I think initially it was very much You know, making sure that, that, that we could scale pretty quickly. I think we went through a phase where, you know, if you get 10 customers online, that’s, it’s not touching the sides in terms of capacity, but we very quickly realized that when in a couple of months down the line, that when we were hitting, you know, significant numbers, we needed to address that.

So the first. A couple of months was definitely spent in terms of making sure our scalability and our, and our services were intact to be honest. And once again, I think we were a little bit lucky. I think word of mouth and organic marketing helped us a lot. Yes, we did put focus on marketing, but it was, it was, it was like fish in a barrel at that point.

We were the only online lender in South Africa. So, you know, Google ads was the cheapest. Online manager is only us. You click it, it’s us. We were ranked up. We didn’t have to do special effort in terms of that. So, so that helped. And, and yes, and then it’s obviously, you know, it’s the governance stuff that you leave for last.

Those things do come back and they bite you. And, and those are the sort of the procrastinated efforts that, that we needed to sort out and sort of, you know, throw water on those files.

Rui: Absolutely. And you mentioned both of you were married, right? So. Working until things were done can mean a lot of different things, right?

You can stop at five or you can stop at 3am in the morning. So how did you balance this with your personal life?

Louwrens: I think the important thing, and once again, it goes back to that, that initial remark that you need to find someone that shares the same values with you. So we went into this little, that little period of risk worth.

assumed knowledge of what it was going to be. But the agreement was always the two of us said, we are up for this. And then we needed to go check with our wives, whether they were up for us. Because I mean, it’s an impact. It’s a financial impact. It’s a time impact. It’s a focus impact, you know, and we sort of got the buying from them and the support.

And I think that also helps. And it just goes to show that when we got back and we kick started this thing, we always had the knowledge that if the one guy says, listen, I got a little bit of issues that I need to sort out at home, there’s no hard feelings. We understood that and that goes, and that, you know, that mutual understanding is, is, is, is important.

You know, there’s just some days where the stuff at the home needs more attention than the stuff at the office. And it is what it is. It’s life. It’s got to be looked after. And that was once again, the common understanding that we had. I mean, we were going a hundred miles an hour, but if the one guy said.

You know, my wife says I must fix this at the house today. Otherwise I don’t have a house anymore. Then that’s what you do, my friend. You don’t build a business. You go and fix the house. Cause that’s the important thing to go and do. And once again, it’s

Rui: prayer. Exactly. It

Louwrens: sits in that common understanding of having respect for the other guy’s situation.

And, and it’s, it’s about building something and understanding that life also happens outside of this.

Rui: Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. So Louwrens, let’s go for the rapid fire questions and these are really quick questions, quick answers. So give me one lesson you learn on dealing with investors.

Louwrens: Oh, I’m going to take the first deal on the table.

Rui: Perfect. Perfect. And no, I’m sorry. I know I said quick, quick answers, but now I need to ask you to expand. Can you expand a bit on that? More,

Louwrens: I think here’s the thing. When you pitch something and a guy immediately says to you, I’ll invest. And it’s not on the terms you like, you’ve got something. So look for someone else.

I mean, cause those answers don’t come along that frequently. So you do one 20 minute pitch and a guy says, I’m in. And here’s the price. If that price is not what you expect, walk out the door. He’ll come back. He likes. I mean, you don’t get features like that.

Rui: Perfect. So learning, learning how to read the room, right.

Makes perfect sense. I

Louwrens: mean, as a founder, you’ve got value. Don’t let anyone discount that.

Rui: Perfect. So one lesson learned on product.

Louwrens: It needs continuous evolution. It’s never, it’s never fixed. Don’t think you own the market. You never do. Perfect.

Rui: One key lesson you learned on marketing.

Louwrens: Marketing’s changed and, and, and I think customer engagement is where it’s at.

You need to understand who your customer is. And unfortunately you need a wide net. So you need, you need to tap into the feelings of your customers more than, than, than your product. And. If you go out and pitch something into the market, be damn sure that you can deliver against it, because if you don’t, that’s a killer.

Rui: You’re done. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The user is much more demanding. I agree 100%. And I actually fundamentally agree with the first statement, which is, Marketers and marketing teams winning today are the ones that know their customers the best, not the ones that have the biggest technical ability. The ones that have the biggest amount of resources are the ones that understand deeply their user, know their pains and can act on them.

I, that I agree 100%. So one key lesson you learn on managing people.

Louwrens: Managing people is about flexibility. You know, in the early days of management, there were a host of management styles. Funnily enough, they still get to ask those questions every now and again, which is absolutely ludicrous. Unfortunately, as a leader, you need to be the guy that needs to adapt.

I think EQ is, is the driving force. You need to understand who does what, what gets people motivated and it differs person by person. And there’s different styles for different scenarios. Yes, there are, there are other times that you need to be autocratic and make the decision and make the call, but then you take the accountability for that as well.

And there’s times where you just sit back and you say, God’s done it. let me know how it goes. Um, you know, and let the team do what they need to do. So for me, it’s flexibility rather than a specific approach to management and leading people.

Rui: One key lesson you learned on creating and maintaining a good culture.

And here you need to talk about passion and excitement. I know.

Louwrens: I think it’s, I think it’s that, I think it’s, you know, don’t forget the vibe. You know, the thing is when you start a business, this is specific. Vision that you have in mind of what you want to build, make other people come to work for that same reason.

Then your culture is sorted. You know, to sit down and later want to say, Oh, we are this and here’s our five culture rules. Crap, man. I mean, you’re boxing people, you’re boxing people into believing something that way or not. Just keep on doing what you’re doing guys. We are here. We are, why are we here?

Because we built a product because we have customers. You join because you thought it was exciting. That’s the culture and never forget that. The rest is sorted by itself. I mean, cause yeah, I mean, specifically in today’s day, I mean, if you say we are honest and we are this and we are that, I mean, you’re going to get 10 oaks that are going to say to you, y’all, but you being patriarchy or you being this or you, please just keep focusing on what we are doing.

That’s the culture. We are all here to make the business work. That’s it.

Rui: Cool. So now one resource that was invaluable to your success. And here it can be a book, a podcast, a mentor, a mindset, whatever.

Louwrens: No, look, I mean, I, I mean, my good friend, sorrow. I mean, none of this would have happened without him. And, and, You know, throughout our engagement, there was various sources.

We, we were sort of groupies of a couple of guys in various industries. You know, we went through the Steve Jobs phase, we went through the Bill Gates phase, we went through the, you know, we had certain aspirational guys that helped the two of us. He, he was absolutely, So important, the foundation of all of that success, to be honest.

Rui: So thank you so much for that. And for taking the time out of your obviously busy schedule to sit with me and have this conversation. Was it fun?

Louwrens: Exceptional fun. It’s good to have, you know, the ability to look back and have fond memories. And I think, you know, as we were talking through this. You know, every now and again, you get chills when you, when you think back over those days and the actual circumstances and, you know, great, great experience recalling that, uh, that time of my life.

Rui: Perfect. Glad, glad that happened there. I’m, I’m also very happy with the amount of lessons and insights that we’re bringing to our community. So Louwrens, uh, thank you. Thank you so much for, for doing this with us.

Louwrens: Thanks for the opportunity Rui, an absolute pleasure.

Rui: To our listeners, I hope you found the conversation useful.

I know I certainly picked up some valuable insights from Lauren’s story. Thank you for listening and I’ll see you again in the next edition of the Startup Journey podcast.