Aubrey Niederhoffer moved to Nigeria at 15 to build Swoop, a super app targeting Africa's $2.6T digital payments market

That's great. Uh, yeah, we had a lot of fun. Well, what are we looking forward to this year? self-improving AI systems. That's on brand. Anyway, uh we have our next guest from Swoop, building a super app for Africa, starting with food delivery in the waiting room. Let's bring in Aubrey from Swoop. Aubrey, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.

Hey, I'm doing well. Uh yeah,

please introduce yourself and the company.

So, yeah, we're building a super app for Africa. So, I live in Nigeria now. Okay.

Uh I started my first company in Africa when I was 15. So I got like really into geography growing up. I had this first company. It was a recruitment company uh in southern Africa and I was spending all my you know summer and winter breaks in high school living in Africa building this company

and I realized that all the biggest opportunities basically you you had to live in Africa. All these export industries were way more competitive. Anything

uh where you had to live in Africa was a lot bigger opportunity. So I was figuring out you know what is what is the uh you know biggest opportunity in African tech because I knew I wanted to move to Africa build tech company uh land landed on this idea of building a super app uh biggest opportunity is fintech but I felt like um you know doing super app is going to be the way that uh you can get there how you can build a you know multi-billion dollar uh consumer business in Africa.

Let's start with the state of food delivery in Africa. Uh are the major players there in a minor capacity? are they failing or is it sort of a wide openen blue ocean market?

Yeah, so uh it definitely depends on the country. So for instance, South Africa Uber Eats is doing quite well. Uh but Nigeria is our big market right now.

Um so Nigeria where we just launched uh we have two major competitors. We have Glovo, it's a international uh you know competitor and you have Chak which is actually the market leader. It's a local company. uh but uh you know Nigeria is very early stage if you look at you know the ratio of GDP to how much GMV food delivery is doing Nigeria is you know five or seven times behind a lot of uh comparable countries and it's still growing you know more than 150% every year so it's still very early days what you see is in food delivery in particular uh once that kind of service becomes available the culture adapts and it can continue to grow for a really long time

what what do you think the other players are are doing poorly like where where's the opportunity to differentiate?

Yeah, I mean uh biggest thing uh is price. Prices are really expensive in the market. Uh we're a lot cheaper. Um and then I think you obviously to have a lower price you have to have a vision for you know how how you can keep those prices low. So that's when we get to this you know super app idea. uh if we can convert a significant percentage of our food delivery customers over to being payments customers for us that's you know something that's really exciting uh because uh you know payments are extremely large there's 18 trillion in digital payments being sent in Africa every year 2.6 Australia and just Nigeria. If you can capture a significant uh you know percentage of that and you can be converting each food delivery customer maybe one in five of them uh you know starts using your peer-to-peer payments product sending money to other users. That becomes not only you know a really effective way to acquire customers for something that's very high margin but also it allows you to keep the food delivery service cheaper because you don't necessarily need to make you know your your revenue from it. Whereas, you know, company like Guovo, they're international. They only run a food delivery service in Europe. It's too late to build a super app in Europe. So, they're not set up to build a super app. They'll never launch a payment service uh in Nigeria because that's not their business, but is ours. So, we do have an advantage there.

What's the uh what does the Northstar super app look like these days? What is the canonical example of success?

Is it still WeChat?

I'd say WeChat is definitely big. I think one company that I uh you know get really excited about in terms of comparison is Caspby. So they're not only like the biggest e-commerce company in Kazakhstan. Um but they're also one of the biggest payments companies, one of the biggest banks in Kazakhstan. I uh you know they do e-commerce ride, they do a bunch of verticals. I think it's a really exciting business. And you know Kazakhstan's not that much of a bigger economy than Nigeria. It's about the same size, but you know Caspy's doing 2.4 four billion in profit every year in just Kazakhstan. And I think that you could do that in a number of African countries with the state of uh you know what the competition is. I think it it really is early days. These verticals are growing very fast. The competition uh is not established to the point that it's impossible to win in a lot of these verticals. And in a smaller market, you have this phenomenon where the gains to uh scaling become greater than the gains to specialization. Whereas in a bigger market, you might need to specialize because the fixed costs are relevant relative to the potential size of the business.

How big of a deal is the Belt and Road initiative in Africa these days? We were reading about uh some potential bailouts for some loans from the IMF uh being discussed at a very high level. But is is the Belt and Road initiative uh a big deal? like from being actually there like what's your perception of it?

I I wouldn't say it's it's maybe like you know top top two or three things that you know we're thinking about in terms of what's going to shape a country but obviously it it's very real. There's a lot of infrastructure that's going on uh that's being built. actually the one of the countries that we work in uh our first country actually Espatini you might know it as Swazan that was the old name uh in in Swan that's the only country that hasn't taken belt and road money and it's interesting to see because they actually recognize Taiwan so China will not uh you know do belt and road there's 53 African countries that do get belt and road funding as well as the one that doesn't uh but there there is like a difference there in like you know who who's building roads who's building uh you know different infrastructure but I don't I think it's like, you know, one of the top three things that I'm looking at as something that's going to, you know, change development in Africa.

Yeah. Uh, how do you think about geographical expansion? How local do you want to be focused from a staffing perspective? Do you imagine having satellite offices internationally or you want to centralize everything? What are the trade-offs there?

Um, in terms of, uh, recruitment, uh, first of all, like our our team is primarily across Nigeria and India. So uh I decided that we would go uh you know international with the software development function in particular to be able to uh be able to capitalize on just all the markets. That's you know my my first business as a recruiting company. That's what I felt was uh the right thing to do and I think we've been able to bring on a great uh team that way. Uh that being said, the majority of our uh team is in Nigeria and going forward I expect to uh you know expand uh primarily in Nigeria for let's say the next year and then from there we'll be looking at primarily launching other African countries and and hiring there. So the vast majority of staff is in Africa. there's amazing talent uh in uh af African countries particularly in Nigeria and if you are able to identify that if you have a good process I think there's amazing talent uh there in terms of uh geographical expansion for the the business itself uh I'm definitely excited about a couple of other African uh markets and uh we just need to be able to get to a point where launching another country would not hinder our business in Nigeria which that's not where we are uh today uh obviously we just started in Nigeria started marketing actually last week um so we're not at that stage yet but I would love to you know be at that stage where we can start launching other African countries

what did you learn from the recruiting company what was the story of that business

yeah I think I the most important thing I learned is how to recruit okay

uh second most important thing I learned is how to sort of operate a business in Africa what it's like uh to to live in Africa what what are you know the challenges what are the ious opportunities. I learned a lot about what the opportunities were. Uh but I think number one most important thing is how to recruit. Um I I feel that most companies uh in the world uh but maybe particularly in Africa are not meritocratic with hiring. If you are if you you know can go out uh into a new market if you can figure out how to you know source thousands of candidates uh if you can reach out uh proactively to people that you know are good. If you could do more than reliable referrals, if you could build uh an effective way to actually assess people that you know you don't know before, right? If you can actually build that, there's incredible talent on continent. We've been able to uh you know bring some amazing people onto our team. I think that's the biggest thing I learned. Um basically how how can you get an advantage uh in recruiting?

Yeah. Uh well, congratulations. Thank you so much. Jordy, you have anything else?

Yeah. Very cool.

Have a great rest of your day. Congrats on Congrats on the launch.

Congrats on the fellowship.

Thank you so much.

Cheers. Great to be here.

Uh uh people having more fun with the OpenAI image model, a hydraologically accurate cutaway of the straight of her moves drawn by Richard Scary. Are you a Richard Scary guy?

I'm a huge fan of Richard Scary. Uh with the cats. This is a good way to learn.

It's a good way to learn. Um, uh, Riley Walls was doing some crazy stuff where or actually it's Riley Goodside, the prompt engineer. I got them mixed up. So, Riley Goodside, uh, worked at Deep Mind and Scale AI and he asked uh, chat GPT images 2.0 Pro, generate a photo of a cake decorated with an SVG that when transcribed to a file renders the cake, another cake. And so it it's it's absolutely wild. People have been putting putting the model through its paces.

For sure. For sure.

I like this other one from Tender.

Yes.

Said, "Got to say GBT Images 2 is pretty clutch for interior decorating ideas."

Yes. Yes. If you if you have an empty wall, put a fridge of soap.

What happened? What happened?

Monster and Red Bull in your blank wall.

So's been discontinued, John. Really?

Insane opportunity for certain people to remember who they are and bring this back. Yes. Yes. Uh it I I was never I was never a soie drinker, but I always respected the brand and what it stood for, the funny ads, and what a what a wild time. Was it highly caffeinated or