Day 1–1000 of Sharesell: How a market question built a credit startup

Every day for a month, Praise Olaoluwa showed up at Eko market, the cluster of Balogun and Idumota markets on Lagos Island, one of Nigeria’s commercial hubs. 

Not to sell anything. Not to pitch anyone. Just to be there – to eat lunch with the traders, share dinner, celebrate birthdays, buy a bottle of whisky when someone added another year. 

He was trying to understand how these businesses breathed: how they bought, how they sold, and how money moved through their hands each day.

Then he noticed something. Every time he showed up, someone asked the same question, almost jokingly: “Have you come with money for us?”

It happened once. Then again. And again. Different traders, the same question. 

“It didn’t happen once. It didn’t happen twice,” Olaoluwa says. “There were different people who were asking. Have you brought money for us to do business?”
That was the moment everything clicked. Sharesell, the inventory-backed operating system for small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) that he had been building and rebuilding since 2022, finally had its answer.

Day 1: A marketplace nobody needed

Sharesell did not start as a lending company. It started as a marketplace.

The idea emerged from observing a business model that had quietly gone mainstream in Nigeria: WhatsApp vendors. After WhatsApp launched its Status feature in 2017, informal sellers turned it into a 24-hour shopfront, posting products for a 24-hour shopfront and fielding orders through direct messages. 

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. With people stuck at home and searching for income, selling on WhatsApp became one of the lowest-friction options available.

Behind the scenes, however, the supply chain was chaotic. A buyer places an order. The vendor calls the supplier to check if the item exists. The supplier ships to the vendor. The vendor ships to the buyer. No tracking. No visibility. Constant delays. 

“The whole process was fragmented,” Olaoluwa says.

He built a marketplace to fix it: a platform connecting suppliers with resellers. Vendors could select a product, add their margin, share it on social media, and let Sharesell handle payment, settlement, and delivery. It was clean, simple, and logical –  at least Olaoluwa thought so.

The only problem was that the vendors didn’t think they had a problem. “They were okay with having to reach out manually to suppliers by themselves,” he says. “They were even okay going into the markets to buy items and resell.” 

What Sharesell had built was, in his words, a vitamin — useful, but not urgent. Nobody wakes up in pain for a vitamin.

Day 500: Going back to the drawing board, twice

After the first version stalled, Olaoluwa and his co-founder, Osamudiamen Imasuen– a childhood friend of over 20 years who initially joined to design the UI before becoming co-founder – shifted focus to the suppliers. If the resellers did not feel the pain, maybe the suppliers did.

They rebuilt the platform for merchants:  importers and major distributors operating in markets like Eko. They offered shopfronts, logistics tools, and inventory management systems. The suppliers engaged with it. But engagement wasn’t retention. 

“They didn’t come back to it as they should have,” Olaoluwa says. Inventory systems only work if updated regularly. Miss a week or a month, and the data becomes unreliable. The habit breaks.

Part of the problem was cultural. These were businesses that had kept sales books by hand for decades. Convincing them to digitise was not just a product problem; it was a behaviour change problem. 

“You can maybe penetrate, but the resistance is going to remain there whether you like it or not,” he says.

That’s when Olaoluwa put down his laptop and went to the market himself, every day, for a month.

What he found there changed everything. The suppliers weren’t struggling with inventory software. They were struggling with cash. Banks asked for collateral they didn’t have, and the loan terms didn’t match their sales cycles. Traditional banking was built for corporate-style businesses and had largely left them out.

“These guys, while the need was valid, were marginalised,” he says.

Sharesell became a lending company.

It took nine months of conversations to close the first credit partner. When Sharesell did, they secured a $4 million line of credit. Within the first week of launching Pulse — their lending product — over 400 businesses had qualified for loans. 

“The demand was more than the supply we had at that point,” Olaoluwa says.

But they had learned one critical lesson early: don’t give cash. When some of these business owners received money directly, it had a tendency to go toward other things — a renovation, a second wife, urgent family needs. 

Instead, Sharesell collateralises each loan against the inventory or asset it’s purchasing. A business submits what they need. Sharesell buys it on their behalf and delivers it. The loan is secured against something real, and if repayment fails, the inventory can be recovered and resold.

That insight—financing tied to goods, not cash—is the spine of what Sharesell is today.

Day 1000: Distribution is everything

Sharesell is now a team of 10, split between Lagos and Kaduna, where the engineering team is based. Olaoluwa shuttles between both but stays closer to Lagos because that’s where the suppliers are, where the partners are, and where the deals get done. 

“You can’t sit in Kaduna and be doing business in Lagos,” he says.

The company is bootstrapped, initially funded by the founders’ savings and crypto gains from 2018 to 2020, and later topped up by an undisclosed friends-and-family round. 

External fundraising has been on the radar since 2023, but when the funding climate turned cold, they made a deliberate decision: build toward profitability first. 

“I’m trying to optimise for productivity,” Olaoluwa says, “rather than for raising.”

That same shift in thinking has changed how Olaoluwa leads. In the early days, he and his co-founder were obsessed with the product — building, iterating, shipping. The market was secondary. 

“We didn’t engage the market early enough to be sure this is how they want to interact with the product,” he says. 

Now he describes himself as distribution-obsessed. The product is the team’s job. His job is to be in the room—the meeting, the pitch, the handshake—because visibility compounds, and people do business with people they like.

Two telecom companies are currently in talks to white-label Sharesell’s business tools into their own products. If that goes through, Sharesell’s solutions would reach millions of SME customers at once—an audience no amount of fundraising or marketing could replicate. It is also why Olaoluwa says openly that he would welcome an acquisition. 

“There is no amount of money we could raise that would help us deliver that result in real time,” he says. “If a larger player can get our product into the hands of more people, I’m good.”

Nigeria’s informal economy accounts for around 85 to 90% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). It is enormous, deeply entrenched, and largely undigitised. Olaoluwa is clear-eyed about what it will take to change that. 

“Collaboration is what would actually help us grow faster,” he says. “If larger players in the ecosystem were to buy smaller players, the result would start to compound.”