0:00:00 - Eko When you're building something like Vybe, you have to know from the beginning that your journey is going to be a bit different from what others might have gone through or might go through. I mean, sometimes I remember in the early days, even now, because I used to work in payment obviously payments was the biggest like use case of technology Early days of Nigeria texting when I was like, yeah, I'm going to go do this Vybe thing with my friends online dating. Some people just I was a joker Like what do you mean? You want to do dating online and you know how Nigerians can be...

0:00:45 - Yemi Hi guys, welcome to the episode of Build by Vizible. I'm Yemi, and then with me today is my co-host, as always, dami, and then we have an amazing guest, Eko. Can you share a bit about your background and then just very high level intro and how you're going to tech?

0:01:00 - Eko Hey guys thanks for having me on the podcast. First of all, background. So my name is Eko, like Yemi just said, and I'm the co-founder one of the co-founders of Vybe. Vybe is a dating platform that is designed to help Africans find the right partners for them. Thinking about how I got into tech, I think my first interaction with like tech in terms of engineering was probably sometime in 2007. I took some coding class with a company in Nigeria. I don't even know if they're still in existence, but that was the first time I tried to build anything, and I think subsequently I just experimented till I found myself studying computer science and math and eventually building things.

0:01:51 - Yemi Yeah, so fun fact. Yeah, Eko and I literally started learning this at the same time, and then we took the same path and suddenly we went in two very separate directions. One of us decided to become a Jedi, and then the other joined the dark side.

0:02:05 - Dami Or one decided to become a founder and the other decided to become a failed founder or wannabe founder. I wonder who the wannabe founder is.

0:02:13 - Yemi Yeah so.

0:02:14 - Eko I already introduced myself as the co-founder of Vybe.

0:02:19 - Yemi So back to Vybe Eko. How did you start, Vybe? You can give us the long version of the story. I know that's the short one, but we'd rather the longer version of the story.

0:02:30 - Eko I think before going into the story of Vybe, I have to start from the story of myself and my co-founders. Basically I was working in tech doing a lot of freelance stuff, got a job 9 to 5, a few weeks or months after I joined. This lady joins the company as well Software engineer and like work who we spoke a bit and then she was always raving about this other guy that she knew Very smart guy, first class computer science, great software engineer as well, and one way or the other he also joined the company. I think, apart from being colleagues, we were also friends. So we would just about everyday life stuff, talk about tech products. So it was like I wouldn't say early stages of the Nigerian tech industry, but startups just started booming. So every time you go on tech, point tech about, there's always like a new startup and so we reviewed the products, discussed about it. Oh, what do you think about this? And yeah, we always had that like relationship and bond. I think what even used to happen like three of us used to sit together I used to sit at the angle, like the corner I don't know if that's associated with bad boys in quotes and then Ron came between, and then Osagie at the other end. So one thing we always had in common was we always felt like a lot of startups. So again, this is like maybe early stages of Nigerian tech startups. So a lot of the ideas were, oh, I'm building Uber, but for Nigeria, or I'm building you know the era I'm talking about, and so, like, we were just like a lot of these things are not very relevant to what people are facing day to day or like the kind of problems that we have, especially the unique ones to Africans, Nigerians. So we always had the idea logic and then we just always spoke about it.

But at some point, myself and Osagie started working on like this interesting idea. At the time it was a payment idea, it was relating to QR code and things like that and then we're just playing around with it and we're thinking of other ideas. At the time, Ronke, who is COO at Vybe, basically like explained to us the problem that she had with finding a partner online. So she was on, I think, tinder and one other one, and she just explained that it was trenches for lack of a better word out there and she just explained like the problem source. I'm saying, okay, this is something that is interesting. Right now we're working on like this payment thing and we will sort of see how we can develop the idea for both of them.

So what sort of happened at that point was we started talking to some of our friends, family, family not necessarily saying we're building a dating app just finding out what the problems were talking about. Oh, how do you find people? Have you ever tried dating online? What has your experience been? For those who had never tried it, why did you not try to find someone online? I mean, you use Facebook and Twitter and the rest to do other things, so why not? And things like that.