I still remember our first set of deliveries. That was June, a few weeks after we launched. Ore, my co-founder, had called everyone to ensure they had received their orders, that they were satisfied with it, that we got it right, and to get any feedback they had on the service we had just provided. I wanted — needed — everything to be perfect. If I was going to dedicate significant time to any venture, risking what looked like the path to being a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, then it had to be worth it. That first set of deliveries, I thought, was critical to the success (or not) of this venture.
And our first set of clients, from Lagos to Kaduna, had been so excited about their books, so excited about the service. Some of them had written us glowing feedback emails afterwards. Some others had shared, without prompt, about their Flippe experience. Others had nudged (and still nudge) their friends to try out Flippe. 100% client satisfaction on our first run was good, really good.
Many of them are now return customers, fans, evangelists of the brand, and family.
Between May 16, when we announced what we hoped to do with Flippe, and now, so much has changed. Our understanding of our mission has gotten firmer, our communication has gotten better, our process has gotten clearer and simpler, and our customer feedback reminds us that we’re doing something right. The other day, a visiting lecturer in Nigeria from the UK had said, excitedly, that Flippe is the only bookstore he’ll get his books from whenever he’s in Nigeria. I remember, too, texting Ore, excitedly about that experience as I thought about how we even got there.
You probably know the story. We had started it — all of it — in one week. On Tuesday, we were excited about opening up a new system of international orders that we had just tested to our friends, many of whom, like us, have been frustrated about bookstores not having the exact books they wanted. By Sunday of that same week, we had come up with a name (Thank you Charles!), created a process and announced it on social media.
In the days that followed, as orders began to trickle in and people began to take it seriously, fear came.
“So, we’re really doing this?” I had texted Ore some weeks after, still unsure about what was happening. She had laughed because she was thinking the same thing. At some point, we contemplated returning all the payments and apologizing for wasting everyone’s time. Still, we continued.
And that fear is normal. Or at least, now, I know it’s normal.
We hadn’t really dreamed of being the kinds of people who start businesses. I had always imagined that I had the ideas to do things, but I wasn’t much of the initial starter. Ore says the same about herself too.
But we have done it, week in, week out, in a country where people spend time pontificating about the lack of a reading culture. That famous question posed at Chimamanda about whether there are bookshops in Nigeria (or is it libraries) comes to mind.
Here’s a brief recap of what we have achieved over the past few months:
0 employees – Just me and my co-founder
153 books sold
321 Twitter followers
252 Instagram followers
Over 1.7-million-naira cash flow.
No salaries paid.
Delivered books to 10 cities across Nigeria – Lagos, Abuja, Ilorin, Port-Harcourt, Kaduna, Ekiti, Ile-Ife, Enugu, Calabar, Benin.
And it feels quite important to emphasize that we have achieved all of this with hectic personal work and life schedules, no external investor, no influencer, and zero marketing spend (not even a giveaway!).
As we have put in our best in the past few months, we have noted these three things as some of the major points of learning:
Logistics
A few weeks into the business, we identified a major pain point (both for us and for our customers). We wanted affordable, seamless, fast, and efficient deliveries, and for some reason, you just can’t get all three of them in Lagos. Deliveries outside of Lagos didn’t take a while to get steady. We got a steady partner during our first run, and it has made deliveries outside of Lagos extremely efficient. But till today, we still struggle with deliveries within Lagos. For most deliveries outside of Lagos, cost still remains a recurring problem. We believe that delivering books anywhere within Nigeria doesn’t need to be as expensive (in some cases, half as expensive) as the book itself.
If your small business requires logistics, the first thing to prioritize, as we have learned, is efficiency. From there, negotiate pricing, then speed. You can explain to a customer that the delivery of an item costs a little more than it normally would within Lagos (outside of it, even) because you’re conscious of safety; It’s harder, however, to explain why days after they paid cheaper for delivery, you have no idea in whose hands the item is.
People
We have experienced the magic of people in Flippe in three different ways. People as friends, people as fans, and people as communities.
Our friends have been, in most cases, the reason Flippe continues to run. Most of our first set of users were friends – people who knew us and could vouch for us. Sharing the news of our launch with their followers and actually making orders brought the people who barely knew us, but who were willing to take a chance on us with their money. Our friends designed our logo, gave us massive discounts on our first sets of packaging materials, organized a giveaway on their own account, have been committed to sharing all our social media content, have driven us around town for deliveries, have approached us for strategic partnerships, given us their time, helped us with managing deliveries when we were out of town, and I can go on and on. Having this group of people who are committed to us and to seeing us succeed have been the backbone of much of the success we have achieved this year.
Then there are people who barely know us, who just like what we do, who like us, and who are ready to join us on any mission we embark on. Sometimes, the friends too fall into this same circle. These ones are the evangelists. They’re excited about what we are doing and will talk about it everywhere. And often, they’re the link to the third experience of people – people as communities.
If we weren’t able to tap into the communities of book lovers with niche interests and a direct need for the service we launched into the market with, I doubt we would have made as much progress this year. Discovering that has helped us shape our priorities, our direction, and redirect our attention.
The real heroes of Flippe are all the people who have believed in us in ways that continue to surprise us, in ways that reinforce our belief in who we are.
There’s no Flippe without our friends, fans, and members of several communities who read books that make this happen.
Courage
“We can’t keep making decisions from a point of fear.” Ore had told me one Sunday morning, months after we started Flippe. A few months in, we were launching our in-store service and everything was going well. Then, I began to panic about and overthink everything.
But, she had reminded me, we hadn’t gotten here with fear. Why exactly did I think fear was what we needed right after we had done the hardest part – launching?
So every day, we learn (sometimes, we fail, but we do it again) that we cannot do our best work at Flippe, we cannot think clearly, and we cannot take the bold steps that should take us to where we want to if we live in fear of what the outcome of every single decision will be.
What I mean here, is not that we should not think critically about why we are making a decision or what the pros, cons, and possible losses of that decision should be. It’s that thinking invariably leads to action, not paralysis.
We hadn’t come into this because we needed a side hustle (surely, we could find more lucrative side-hustles), or because we needed a source of income desperately. We chose to lead Flippe out of heart and love for this mission.
As it turns out, that’s exactly how you build a business.
The Future
Operating more from a place of courage and deep conviction gives you the audacity to dream as widely as you can. It also allows you to look clearly at the reality of things and acknowledge all the possible real-life factors that can hinder your dream. Sadly.
The way I see it now, there are 4 different possible futures for Flippe:
In a few months (or years) from now, we take a bow. There are many ways this can happen: we could get fatigued or carried away by our individual careers; we are unable to bootstrap our way out of this phase and unto the next level; we are unable to raise funding for expansion, or we just need time to focus on our individual lives.
We leave this country in search of newer experiences and Flippe dies slowly.
Flippe remains a Nigerian enterprise. We work hard and create a few stores around the country and become a household name.
We are able to fight through the next few years and from our search for newer experiences, carry Flippe’s mission with us. That way, Flippe becomes a chain of stores within and outside Nigeria. And one day, some 100+ years from now (if a comet doesn’t hit the earth yet), somewhere in Lagos or Ibadan or Enugu or Ghana or Rwanda or South Africa, we will be able to have a signage that reads “Flippe, since 2021”, and it will be a big deal.
I am biased towards the fourth option, of course. It puts me at the forefront of leading a mission and building what I think is necessary intellectual infrastructure in this part of the world. It affords me the opportunity to leave some form of legacy in this world after I leave. It gives me the space to interact with some of my favourite communities – bookworms – and it gives me material to work on a question that has bugged me for years – how exactly do you build a lasting, intergenerational business?
So, what if we never achieve 3 or 4?
Then, it fails. But it will not fail because we did not put our hearts into this. It will not fail because we didn’t try our best. It will not fail because we didn’t do the hard, necessary work.
We will work towards ensuring that Flippe does everything it can do, everything we can make it do. We will we do that without hustling for it, we will do that by moving in the direction of what we believe is true, by working with courage and conviction and without being attached to an outcome – by taking every single outcome as material for what we do next and how we work on creating Flippe’s future. But wherever we land, we would have been successful.
What will it look like for Flippe to say that we have achieved our goal, the exact thing we have set out to do here? I have spent a lot of time thinking about this. And here’s what I think – When theology nerds, football stans, journalists, fiction lovers, romance lovers, LGBTQ+ persons, finance folks, tech bros (and I use this as a gender-neutral term), lovers of African fiction, history and religion nerds across different income levels and location in Nigeria no longer need to look to international retailers for their books, yes, we have achieved our aim. The future is where “we don’t have that in stock”, is rare. The sky is only the starting point. So we get to work.
2022
2022 is a very critical year for Flippe, as are the next 4 years of the company. They will determine, to a very large extent, which one of the futures I listed earlier we’ll end up in.
In the coming year, we will be laser-focused on the following:
Defining, forming and growing our culture as an organization;
Strengthening the relationships we currently have with communities (particularly underserved book communities), and growing our raving fans;
Expanding our product offering;
Simplifying and perfecting our user experience;
Operating with less fear and making more courageous decisions on what we believe will steer the company in the right direction;
Sourcing funding for growth, stability, and expansion.
We believe that a combination of all 6 elements here will expand our customer base, grow our revenue, and move us closer to our desired future. We will, as we always have, move only from a point of conviction.
We will continue to iterate and perfect our process till it gets shorter, faster, and more efficient.
We shut down most of our operations last Friday, and we are now taking time to relax and prepare for the new year. It has been one hell of a year (both individually, and as an organization). A letter of this nature tempts me to speak about Flippe only with hope, but it hasn’t been the easiest year – for me, for Ore, and by extension, for Flippe. But the work we do is fulfilling, and it gives us joy. We hope the reward comes soon.
I am deeply grateful to everyone who is committed to seeing this vision flourish. Sometimes, that’s the only thing that keeps us going. Flippe works because of you. We’ve achieved more than we anticipated we would this year, and we can’t wait to do this again in the coming years.
At Flippe, as it is with Bezos, it’s always Day 1.
Happy Holidays!
Boluwatife Akindele,
Co-Founder, Flippe.
30th December 2021
Wow!!!
Congratulations, and cheers to greater milestone and achievements.
Felipe🥺🥺🥺