While it is widely believed that shopping for foodstuffs at the local markets will get you the best prices, it is not an activity for the fainthearted, more so if you are an advocate of the soft life. You will spend your energy haggling, battling with human traffic and subjecting your nostrils to the assault from an assortment of smells, and being the recipient of other not-so-nice experiences.
But what if you could do without all these and still get great value for your money? That’s Luther Lawoyin founded Pricepally, the solution to improve the local market shopping experience.
Pricepally: The Beginning
Luther had a good idea what it was like to shop in the local market from the times when he accompanied his mom to buy ingredients for her confectionery business. But it was after he got married in 2018, that shopping at the local market became a concern he couldn’t ignore.
“My wife had to go to the market, and I would go with her and it was so insane. I could not fathom she would be going through all that.”
It wasn’t just the physical hassle, but the financial strain. His wife was the one who managed the books at home, and there was never a constant budget for food. “On a monthly basis, she would show me what it was like on graphs. The graph of food was always inconsistent.”
It got Luther’s mind spinning. He knew bulk buying and sharing were already a thing amongst Nigerians, but there was no established structure . “We thought we could just build something simple, which we started on whatsapp. Then we thought we could build this simple minimum viable product (MVP) to just test it out. The day we launched the MVP, we had an order that same day for a hundred tubers of yam so I knew we were on to something.”
Pricepally founder and CEO, Luther Lawoyin during a performance evaluation and strategic planning session
Pricepally’s Initial Hurdles
He may have found the perfect solution to solve the headache of getting good value from the market with ease, but it was a lot of work and like any startup, there were challenges.
Some of the initial problems they had to deal with included what measurements to use as the benchmark, “Back then things as basic as standardizing measurements were an issue. In Lagos for instance, things are measured in paint buckets which are never the same. We had to get customers accustomed to the fact that our standard paint bucket is 3.15 kg for tomatoes. It was not an easy thing to do, as some would outrightly refuse, while others would confuse the paint bucket measurement with another measurement.”
Then there was the aspect of quality control of products. “We also had problems standardizing the products we buy for customers. How to make sure they are the ideal ones and so forth.”
Of course, this sort of business could not run without logistics and that was also an issue.“The truth remains that it is a headache every day. We have a team of about four people who deal with that on a daily basis. And they make sure to do their best.”
Sourcing for products was another tough nut to crack. “At the early stage, we wasted a lot of money and time trying to find farmers. We were looking for farmers who traveled across, and quickly realized that might not be the best model for us. Eventually, we were able to create standards for the farmers we could work with at the stage we were at, and that really helped.”
In the beginning, they connected with farmers who were young and modern, and could meet up with their expectations. “A lot of them are graduates of the University of Agriculture, Abeokuta. When they have problems, they are able to go online and fix their problems themselves.”
Having established a standard of operation, Pricepally could now afford to open its windows wider to accommodate the rural farmers, whom they connect with via agents. The sweet spot in this relationship is that “It’s a deal for them that accelerates their growth and their mindsets, and is a lot less risky compared to them not having that plan ahead. When they farm and are contracted to us, some of them have earnings ahead, which supports their farm cycle. By contracting them ahead, we give them a percentage of the contract.”
When it came to building the Pricepally workforce, Luther sourced for hires locally. “We went out for locals to be able to set out standard operating procedures. From there, we started bringing people into a culture that had already been built. We look out for genuine people. It’s hard to tell, but time tells. We also look out for skills and how much the person is able to integrate. We let people be themselves and we try to encourage them to see the bigger picture with us.”
The Pricepally team comprising administrative and operations staff
Pricepally’s current workforce totals 112 staff across three cities, and safe to say, Luther seems to have done well with building a company culture. “I am really proud of both our operational and administrative teams. They are people who are really dedicated, where they go above the pay. We also make sure we remunerate people the best possible way and they know we have their interest at heart. I think that helps to build people to build your company.”
Chaos and Growth for Pricepally
The year the COVID-19 pandemic hit was a crazy one for a lot of companies, but for some, it was the year they thrived, and Pricepally was one of such. And for a company in its early stages, it was all the acceleration they needed. “It was fantastic for us. It really activated us and that was in our very early stages. We got a license to be able to move around Lagos at that time, and we were able to keep the supply chain we started the year before. We grew quite fast, a lot of people were reliant on us and we were able to keep them.”
Then came the introduction of the Naira redesign policy, which shook Pricepally’s equilibrium to the core. From cash shortages to delays in sorting payments to angry customers to pacify, it was a continuous nightmare for weeks. “A lot of people rushed to us, and we were not prepared. We also took hits in the system. There was no naira to pay drivers with, some farmers did take transfers, but at some point they stopped because they couldn’t get their money. We had calls swarming us and we could not attend to everybody, but we were doing our best. The team kept late nights.”
Pricepally’s new operations facility in Lagos, which can process up to 2000 orders per day
But in spite of the frenzy, the Pricepally team experienced positive outcomes (moving to a bigger operations facility was one of them) in addition to the lessons learned, proving that sometimes, chaos can be a catalyst for growth.
Luther Lawoyin the Entrepreneur
Pricepally isn’t Luther’s first try at business. He’s set up four businesses to date, and he attributes his entrepreneurial spirit to his mom. Being the youngest of four siblings, he watched her take on more responsibilities after their father died, when Luther was only seven years old.
“I was always with her so she would take me through the whole process of business knowingly or unknowingly. We would go to the market together to buy the raw materials, get home, knead the dough and do every other thing that needed to be done—bake, package, label and move it out for supply to supermarkets. The business did quite well.”
With two older brothers who are medical doctors, and an only sister who’s a lawyer, it seemed only natural that Luther would follow suit in either of the professions, but in the trend that seems to be common with most last borns, he didn’t. He enrolled at the Obafemi Awolowo University to study geology. “The premise of that was you would get paid to work in oil companies after graduation and my siblings felt it was the best thing for me to do.” He soon found out studying geology wasn’t going to lead him down the yellow brick road. “I really respect people who go to Ife and come out in one piece. It was rigorous and I wasn’t able to explore my creative path. I just knew something was wrong.”
Luther decided to make the unpopular decision to quit school, and face what came most naturally to him—building businesses. “It felt like a crazy decision then. Nobody understood me. While my mates were in school, I delved into all sorts of things, eventually being able to put businesses together, and formalize business processes.” And he did go back to school, but this time to study business administration at the University of Lagos.
His first business was Potato Lagos. A friend’s wife made tasty dishes of Irish and sweet potatoes with different sauces, which they sold on Twitter, and they did quite well, until they had to go their separate ways due to irreconcilable differences. In 2013, he started Pass Exam Ventures, which was an e-testing platform designed to help students prepare for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, popularly referred to as JAMB. He ran it for two years, before selling it to a rival company.
Two years later, he founded Lucy.ng, an e-commerce site for branded merchandise, and though he loved what he was doing with Lucy, he wanted more. Traveling to China for the Alibaba e-founders Fellowship, opened his eyes to bigger opportunities. “Jack Ma was really generous to enable us to explore e-commerce as it is in China with all the advances. It was really mind blowing and inspiring. I knew I wanted to do something bigger.” It was there he also saw a company called Pinduoduo, which was based on the same premise of sharing. But when Pricepally took off, he had to say goodbye to Lucy, though the company is still active.
Pricepally and the Future
Photo by Mark Stebnicki
Access to quality and affordable food has been and is still a major issue in a lot of African countries. According to the African Development Bank Group (AfDB), Africa is the most food-insecure region in the world with more than 232 million under-nourished people, or approximately one in four. So Luther and his team at Pricepally have their work cut out for them. “Food is not anyone’s concern in other countries and shouldn’t be. It’s a basic thing and we should have solved this.”
And while it’s been a delight to watch Pricepally rise, currently with a presence in three cities—Lagos, Abuja and PortHarcourt, providing same day and next day grocery delivery services, Luther says they have barely scratched the surface. “We know we are at the early stage and we are happy with what we have achieved, but there is still a lot more to do.”
There are plans to add one more city to that list this year, and more cities in Africa in the near future. “Our model really fits Lagos. So we are looking for systems similar to this where we can fit. We have identified a couple of them, but we look at population, if people are already adopting e-commerce; we look at the buying power.i.e. the size of the middle class, lower income families concentration also really helps the business.”
Garnering Support for Pricepally from The Diaspora
In spite of the skepticism held by the Nigerian Diaspora about making investments back home, Luther says,“This is home. We still have a myriad of problems. We still have basic needs that are still not being met. It is important to support businesses that are solving critical issues that we have. It is also a wonderful opportunity because Africa is where the growth is. Africa is where things can change. For Pricepally in particular, we affect the lives of families, farmers, wholesalers, and even retailers. We have built a smaller model of what the ideal food system should be. It works and it can be improved.”
For Luther, Pricepally isn’t just a business to build and exit from. “I think it needs about 10 years of my life if God wills it. It’s something I am really focused on now. There are a lot of other ideas I have, but this takes the cake.”
And while we wait patiently to see what other ideas Luther has, we watch with hope and eagerness, how Pricepally will continue to improve access to quality and affordable food in Africa.
If you are abroad you can shop for your loved ones in Nigeria and if you are here, simply visit the Pricepally website and enjoy the best food prices or download the app from the iOS and Google Play stores and have your items delivered safely to your doorstep.
