Podcast transcript: Episode 21- Future of Domestic work in Africa

Transcript

Host: Hello and welcome to the experience pod. My name is Chiwueze Ihebuzor. The experience pod is a one-on-one interviewer led podcast that discusses the adoption and utilization of relevant emerging technologies and trends for impact oriented professionals, researchers, developers, and students who demand realistic and thought provoking perspectives on the opportunities and challenges presented by these phenomena in our unique environment.

The adoption of home cleaning services in Africa is on the rise.. According to PR Newswire, a US-based news publication company. The global cleaning services market was estimated at $60.25 billion in 2019, and is expected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 6.3% to 88.9 billion us dollars by 2025 with the middle east and Africa having an estimated share of 6.5% of the global market 

Domestic work is considered a difficult sector to cover. Partly because this work is performed in private households and frequently for more than one employer. The occupation is also characterized by high job turnover and frequent in kind payments. For example, free food and accommodation. It's also characterized by irregular wages and a lack of formal work contracts.

According to UNICEF the social significance and demand for paid domestic work around the world has grown enormously, becoming an important source of employment for an estimated 70 million people in the world. It's interesting to know that up to 10% of that working population is in lower income countries and they are engaged in this space of domestic work while the range is slightly less in higher income countries. ranging from about one to 2.5% of the population. Now to add insights to this conversation, we are joined by prosper Otemuyiwa co-founder and CTO of Eden life. A human powered tech enabled service that puts your household chores on autopilot.

Eden life has recently raised $1.4 million to accelerate growth and they are set to scale. So we welcome Mr. Prosper who's going to give us some insights. 

Hi, prosper. We're happy to have you here. 

Prosper: Hi, I'm really excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

Host: Before we go into the background, we had a conversation in our office about how to pronounce your surname. I hope I got it correctly. Is it Otemuyiwa? 

Prosper: Well, yeah, that's very close. Otemuyiwa

Host: Okay. What does that mean? Because I spoke to some of my Yoruba colleagues and I think what they had mentioned was that it means cool is coming or something. I don't know. Could you maybe clarify that for us.

Prosper: So it means rebellion brought this so It came about as a result of rebellion or coup, that kind of stuff. Wow. 

Host: And you're going to rebelliously transform the domestic work sector. That's fantastic. 

Prosper: Yes, of course. So of course, 

Host: Exactly. Very nice. Very nice. Okay. So let's start with some background for those who might not be familiar with you, Prosper in one or two sentences.

Could you explain what Eden life does , and maybe expand a bit more, what led to you founding this company? What were your initial thoughts on your initial focus initial targets? 

Prosper: So Eden Life is simply a tech enabled service that puts your home on autopilots. So basically when you talk about things like the chore drivers of your home, cleaning, laundry, eating, these are the things you do almost everyday without even thinking about it, but as you grow, these kinds of things require so much of your time. 

So Eden is just that service that runs on tech. That allows us to be able to handle all of that for you. You don't have to think about handling that recurrently what makes Eden, Eden There is no other company or service that offers that ability. And the reason we came about it was just to solve our immediate problem.

I'm a very active person in the developer space in the tech community. My co-founders too are very active in the tech community. And we used to work at Andela. Andela is a company that accelerated, developer, community and evangelism in Nigeria and many people started working remotely.

I started working remotely for a company in years, and this was a problem for me. I just wake up, I eat, I try to get food, I have to order food or just go out to buy food. I need to find somebody to do my laundry and my cleaning. So I had several numbers and all of that. So it was like, how can we just run a service that will just like solve all of these problems for us remote workers, that's how Eden came about, and then now we've extended it to every other person 

Host: Interesting. Nice. Okay. Let's talk a bit more about your service offerings. So your mobile platform allows customers to schedule home services such as food, laundry, and cleaning, right.

So what does adoption look like? I mean, what combination of services do customers seem to prefer and, and how did the different services perform relatively, any trends to note or anything like that? 

Prosper: That's a very interesting question. So from what we've seen so far, a lot of people go for the meal plan which is not surprising because if people don't do any other thing, they will eat, but they must eat, you have to give them your food. So that's like, one of the most popular plans on Eden then if you're talking about a combination of one or two plans, we have. the meal plan and the laundry plan. So you have a lot of people that just subscribed to the meal and the laundry plan.

So if you guys are ready, handling my food, you can as well, just take my laundry as well. And then we have some customers that already have a washing machine. So because of that, be like, okay, I have a washing machine. And I have just like this other person that comes to clean the house. So instead of having somebody else come to clean the house, since you already do deliver food to me, let me just upgrade my plan to meal & clean. So the majority is the meal plan, and then, you have a lot of people doing the meal and laundry and then many people doing the meal & laundry switch to, Meal & cleaning most times.

Host: What has adoption been like, is it catching on quite quick, what's it like? 

Prosper: Well, I think it's catching on because, we have a bunch of customers from different places, in Lagos , and I think one of the ways to identify if like a lot of people are interested in your product or starts using your product is when you start looking at the customer love, even on social media. So if you just go on social media, Twitter, LinkedIn, just search for Eden life, you can see hundreds of reviews of Eden life. People subscribe, people talking about it, people talking about how it has changed their lives. And then also internally we have like some really good numbers, I can't share the number with you,

sure of course, like is really catching on within the Lagos market. And, you have people always just telling their friends about it. And some scenario we've seen is somebody subscribed to Eden and maybe they live a A friend, or they're with their family. And then you have their friends or their siblings say, why are you wasting your money 

Why can't you just do these things yourself? And then two month after you have this friend comes in. I think I'm just going to subscribe to Eden a couple of times even with couples oh, why are you subscribing to Eden? I was like, I think you should just subscribe for both of us and then that's how people catch on. And then you tell your friends at work and before you know it, the HR is asking, oh, does Eden offer a corporate plan. And then we do, we offer corporate plans for companies.

So then we start having companies getting on board via their employees. So that's how it has been catching on. And it's really very interesting to see. 

Host: That's awesome. I mean, and this flows nicely, to my next question, we would like to get a better understanding of the business model.

I know you've hinted around it already. But we know Eden has a long time vertical integration strategy, but it's also open to horizontal strategies, at least for now. So how have you managed the horizontal and vertical supply chains and what are the costs, are there any benefits even of playing either way or are you leaning more towards, maybe the vertical as opposed to horizontal .

Prosper: So we started with just horizontal, using so many service providers, but one thing we discovered is the bar for service quality, especially in Lagos is on the floor, literally. So we experienced that with all of our services so what we decided to do, especially with meals, everybody eats, like I said before, we decided to transition from horizontal to vertically integrating our food service.

So right now everything about that food service is in-house . We run everything From procurement to hiring chefs, to cooking, to documenting the recipes, to the nutritional value, all of those things happen within Eden. We have full-time chefs, just working at Eden and making sure that we run a very good food service production pipeline.

Just on an interesting note last year we delivered over 112,00 meals just for last year. So this year I'm sure we're going to like triple that number. And one of the things we've looked at internally, especially among the leadership team, is how can we also transform our laundry and cleaning service to be vertically integrated?

Because some of the issues we experienced right now is, oh something happened to our laundry and the feedback is given to us as a company. So we give the feedback back to the service providers. And most times we discovered that these issues just continue happening recurrently. And there's really nothing we can do about it apart from removing the service providers from our platform and trying to onboard new ones.

So the best way is just to own everything in house so that you can control the quality. And that's one of the things we are looking at too, for our laundry cleaning this year and next year to find a way to, vertically integrate

Host: That's really interesting. I mean, the sky is really the limit because there are a lot of ways you can vertically integrate to just ensure that quality, which is a big deal for the kind of business you're in because people want quality service.

Yeah!

Prosper: Exactly. And that quality also determines our retention, like the strongest signal for us right now as a company is how we retain customers month on month because it's a subscription platform, it's not an on demand, a subscription. So in our worst months, last year, our month on month, customer retention was 85%, in our worst month 

Oh, wow. That is good. 

It's really a good thing to see customers that can subscribe, in January, continue January, February, March, . Even for some of them that pause , maybe they traveled or chun because they felt like they wanted to explore other options.

We see them coming back again in later months. So that has really increased the quality of our customer retention and that's like the greatest signal for us right now. 

Host: fantastic. Okay. So from your website, we can see that the prices for your services start from as low as 10,000 for cleaning, or maybe even 13,000 for laundry a month. And sometimes some of the services go up to about 150 K when you combine different services.

So what drives your pricing, and with the rise of household, sort of labor saving devices and affordable outside services, such as DIY laundries and fast food, how are you building Eden to remain relevant? Nowadays a lot of people have access to washing machines.

People can go to laundromats,people can order fast food. I mean, there's Jumia food. There's a lot of ways where you can actually get these services yourself. So how you sort of positioning Eden life to remain relevant for years.to come 

Prosper: I really love this question, because this question resonates with what is happening right now in the world, in like the world as a whole is transitioning to a very remote, friendly work environment.

So what does this mean? It means like you have people in Lagos working for companies in Canada, or you have people in Canada consulting for companies in Lagos. . And so you have right now in Lagos or in Nigeria, we have a greater population of young people, and youth, and these youth, they are upwardly mobile and they are really trying to increase their income Daily.

And they do this by consulting for companies, working two or more jobs and all of that. So our proposition now is would you rather spend all of your time doing these things yourself or going to other services, which means you still need to involve your time. For example, if you go take your laundry to a laundromat, you have to either go there and drop it and come back or you have to go there, do it yourself, wait for it.

You know, do the spin on all of that yourself and bring it back every second counts in all of these actions. If you want to prepare for, for example, buy food, you can order using another service, and you can keep ordering , but everyday you have to wake up in the morning and decide, what am I going to eat today? with Eden you don't have to do that with Eden you just have to pick your meals on Thursday or Friday. And for the next week,you don't even have to think about what to eat. The app will just notify you. Hey, you have Jollof rice and beef today and it's coming, you're going to get it in less than five minutes.

You don't have to think about it. So shaving off all of those, like timely meets decision-making when you look at it every single day that you have to think about. I like to use this example , you see tech bros, Outside wearing all types t-shirts and the same type of Jean .Now its not because they cannot afford it, it's just most times the decision to wake up and look at your wardrobe and say, Hey, what am I going to wear today should I wear blue? Should I wear red? Should I wear Black?

You would just rather have one type of clothes that you wear for me, I like wearing natives .So I just have a bunch of natives so that when I wake up, I just select one. and just go about it. So when you look at that for food, you have eliminated that. So you don't have to think about cleaning and laundry, because you already have this convenience and quality for meals.

When you subscribe to laundry and cleaning it's the same thing we have a Gardener that is assigned to you. The gardener is like your customer success manager So the Gardener just chats to you, calls you if you want. And like just helps you manage all of these things without you even thinking about it in combination with the app.

And then the current offering that we have right now, heavily focuses on quality and convenience, because. If you can shave off all of the time, that is inconvenient for you and take all that time,and put it into your work. I'm sure it can move the need for your salary for consultancy work, that you can be doing, or even like building, because you don't even have to think about all of these things.

Eden takes care of it for you. That's one of our biggest value drivers, convenience and quality. Like I said earlier, the bar is on the floor and we were trying to maintain at least a four star five star experience. If you can build that then of course the sky is really the limit.

Host: Fantastic.

Convenience and quality, love that. If you can nail those, then that would set you apart. 

Prosper: If we can take more ownership of the entire supply chain. So let's look at it this way right now, if the number of customers we have in Lagos, triples, it simply means we would also as a company have to increase our supply chain in terms of the service providers or in terms of, vertically integrating .

And when you're vertically integrated, the more customers you have, the lesser price you can offer to your customers. 

Host: Because ,you control the entire value chain

Prosper: Exactly. So once we can control the entire value chain like that. Apart from offering quality and convenience to customers, we can now offer it at a lower price. That will just be heaven basically

Host: So convenience, quality and affordable pricing, brilliant,, really, really lovely combination. Okay. So, domestic work has historically been driven by a growing number of middle and upper class families that can afford it just sort of going off what you've said around affordable pricing now in 2018, the richest 10% of the OECD countries controlled above 50% of all total household wealth compared to the poorest 60%, that only control 10% of that household wealth.

What's the impact of this growing , economic asymmetry on domestic work? Is there an impact, I mean, with the whole disparity between rich and poor that gap getting wider, do you think there's going to be an impact on domestic work? 

Prosper: So, I mean, when you say disparity like,when I look at it right now, when you look at the rich and the poor, The rich maybe right now their current offering is that they have like a living maid they have all of those things. That helps them live their lives. But when you look at what Eden can do on the long run, unless I'm not getting your question correctly, if I get your question correctly, first of all, you will have hundreds and tons of jobs that would be created if we can take over the entire market,number two, we also plan on having what you call builds like builds and communities.

So we are going to have cleaning communities, we are going to have laundry communities. If you remember, like the Uber model where, when Uber came in, all the drivers that were not making as much income were able to even borrow cars or beg somebody for their cars and make money.

 When we have all of these communities, now that these people are in our network. There are several other levers that we can pull to ensure that these people can earn more money, food, laundry, and cleaning is not the only thing we want to do.

We want to do other services like auto maintenance , for example, it simply means now you have access to more mechanics in your network. So mechanics that were earning enough can now start earning an increased amount of money, because we already have a pipeline of customers waiting for them to service. So they don't even have to think about things like, oh, I need this customer, oh, let me call Mr lagbaja to check if his car is okay,if you look at the pipeline they already have access to all of those things and they can make more money just by being on our platform. So also when you look at the workers too for example a cleaner. A cleaner in our community because again we want to improve the quality of life, which is our mission.

Then next the quality of life in Africa. a cleaner that will be in our community. Imagine a cleaner having access to health care & pension, just because you work at Eden .imagine an A.C repairer that is now able to pay tax, because they are now paying better because they are Eden community, there are so many ways we can pull these either from just maintaining the community and they work as contract employees or they are full-time staff with like access to all of this.

Now, when they have access to all of these, they can live better lives. And when they can live better lives they can pay taxes to the economy or the country where we are in and it's like a chain reaction that will also just like lead to the taxes that we contribute to the economy where we are active in like different cities where we are active in, and I think from our own angle reduce the disparity we have between, people that are just like really poor people that are very rich. 

Host: No. So I think you've answered this question brilliantly. Thank you for that.

So essentially, Eden life is actually playing a part or he's been a significant part in bridging that gap because you're actually offering people a way to earn a living. And like you said, you already have access to all of these households and it begins to look like a marketplace where you have the contacts and you just need the artisans to plug in.

And they become under Eden life, they have access to a wide range of people that they can offer services to. They make money. They are happy Eden life is happy. The customer is happy and everything is just hunky-dory. I think that's a very nice response. Thank you for that. Okay.

So according to UNICEF, domestic work is highly, allow me to say, it's highly feminized. It's a feminized job, with women making up to 70.2% of workers. It's not me that said it this is UNICEF, so please don't come for me so first of all, are you seeing a similar gender split in your business and secondly you know, women face, some additional risk in the form of harassment, violence when they go for this sort of domestic work what processes does Eden life have for dealing with this sort of issues?

Prosper: Well, thank you very much for that first. We know our customers, right. KYC, so we know our customers very well.The same way fintech does KYC too, we have data on our customers so you cannot, as a customer, decide to assault a cleaner. We know, we have their data, it's part of our terms of conditions. You can't even offer tips right now to people that work at Eden, because we want to maintain a really good strict structure of quality service and also make sure people are safe. So when we started Eden , when we started having female cleaners go to like, customer's houses, what we do, we also make sure it's supervisor goes with you so if you're a female cleaner going to like a male customer's house, there's a supervisor too, that comes along. So you are not the only one or vice versa, like a male cleaner going to a female customer's house. So most times when we look at the customer, this is a single customer, this person is not married, she is female, Most times will not take a male cleaner to your house. This would mostly be a female cleaner so we look at those demographics just to ensure that we prevent any form of mishap. Thankfully right now, we've not had any form of mishap, because internally we have like a central operating system where we see all the orders ,the schedule the people that are having their orders and then we have people that also monitor systems. So when you assign cleaners to people's homes, we assign each strategically, we do not take our customers trusting us for granted. So access to your homes, access to your food, access to your clothes. We take it very, very seriously.

So when we assign cleaners or we tell people to come and pick things from your home, we are very conscious of the fact that security is number one. Privacy is number one. And then of course our offerings, service, quality, and all of these things. So we look at those things very well while assigning people to people's homes. 

Host: Fantastic. So just to ask them, do you maybe leverage technology to do that assigning? How does it happen? Is it done on the app or does somebody have to do it manually? Just trying to get a sense of how it works

Prosper: so by default is automatic. So when you sign up on your app internally, we have a system we call it lighthouse.

Lighthouse is what I like to call the central operating system that manages all the orders and schedules . So when you sign up,when customers sign up,it is lighthouse, the software, the technology that automatically maps Gardeners to customers, maps, cleaners to the customer's homes and all of these things. So all of those things are done automatically, but when it is now time for these cleaners to go, we have the Gardeners that call them, and say, Hey, it's your time to go to this person's house and all of that. We automate those things too, but we know because we have to do certain reassignments, for example if the cleaner is not available or something is wrong with a particular service provider.

We have to reassign those things on our internal platform. So the gardeners just go ahead on the internal platform and reassign all of these things, one of the examples I gave before about somebody going to someone's house, we once had an issue as of 2020, we used to have gardeners go to customer homes.

But now Gardeners don't go to customers' homes and Gardeners work remotely so they can manage you as a customer using the software tools that we give them lighthouse, flash, flash is the mobile app on their phones they use .There was a customer once that threatened a Gardener. Something went wrong with his laundry .and we talked to him and told him we're going to fix it. And then he was so angry and he threatened the Gardner that he was going to find the Gardner and deal with her. And we took that very seriously. We called him. We told him not to try it again,and we fired him as a customer and we know that the customer offers money, but you would never talk rudely to any of our employees or threaten them. Because as much as we want to serve you greatly, we also treat our employees with the utmost respect and care. 

Host: I like that a lot. And I think that even providing a value add to the cleaners and the gardeners who would come on your service you're actually protecting them against abuse.

And you're being intentional about that. That is something that's a great value add for anyone who wants to come on,Eden life as a service provider. So, well done for that. 

Prosper: Yeah. Our core values at Eden, because as founders too, one of the things we believe is that the people make the products, without the people, there are no products. without the people there is no business to sell. So the top of our list is take care of the people, then take care of the products. And every other thing will fall in place.

Host: Nice. Thanks for that. Quick question. Do you guys also do nanny services?

You know, I have two kids, so, you know, 

Prosper: it's one of the things we wished that we offer . But because we are right now at the stage of Eden, we are too focused on the three services. And to be honest, it's can be very chaotic right now 

Host: I know, I can imagine 

Prosper: adding nanny services on top ,my Goodness, when we are dealing with children, kids. You have to really be extra careful. 

Host: Yes. And I guess you have to be skilled to be able to deal with those sort of people 

Prosper: you have to be very skilled, very careful just to prevent any form of mishap. So right now 

Host: it's in the plans in the works right 

Prosper: in the roadmap.it's one of the things we want to do in the roadmap Great. Great. 

Host: Okay. So how did COVID affect your business? I mean, people who were now staying at home had more time to do things. Did you notice a drop in sales or drop your subscriptions or was it the other way around? 

Prosper: So this is very funny because when COVID hits, we almost made a decision to shut down the business oh, wow. Yeah, because people were home, people started cooking and it was so funny because eventually, I mean, we lost customers.

We lost a lot of customers during that because people started having time to cook at home and everything. But an interesting thing happened after the first two months when COVID heat, people started coming back and people did not just start coming back, they started bringing in other people. So people just literally got tired of cooking at home.

People got tired of doing the same thing over and over. People will now discover that even the people that came back, they got more jobs. So you had maybe somebody consulting remotely for two companies. So there was no time to do any of these things again. So they just really wanted Eden to take care of it for them.

So even though the COVID came and then it affected us that was just for a small period of a few months two, three to four months. And after that we had customers coming back in droves, like, Hey, Eden please just take care of everything. Take care of my meals, take care of my laundry, take care of my cleaning.

I really don't want to do this. I really just want to focus on my work. And then we have people start working more hours, even inadvertently like they did , did you know? You know how you start working from home and normally if you are going to the office, you do nine to five, you actually think because you are home you can say let me take a stroll because you're home you can say I'll do this thing in the evening.

Let me just watch a movie. . So many people started working late into the night? And because schedules started changing and also companies started giving concessions to like, you know what, you can deliver this thing later you can deliver it early in the morning. Meeting schedules , were no longer cast a stone 

So many people now needed somebody to just offload the business of cooking, cleaning and laundry and then Eden was just here welcoming them back into the food. 

Host: It's also possible that maybe when COVID hits and people try to start doing it themselves. In terms of cooking, they realized that this person cannot cook like that. Maybe I'm not that great of a chef. Let me just call the guys that are supposed to be experts to come and do their work. Okay, interesting. So, on your blog, you mentioned that the innovation behind Eden life was to create a blueprint for your idea to be sustainable, in Africa, by using simple solutions like automated cleaning services with the aim of solving complex problems. So, maybe expatiate a bit on the impact you think domestic assistance will have on sustainable living for everyday Nigeria ? 

Prosper: So I think it's just straightforward,

I can draw a straight line from having an assistance, so you can look at leaders. For example, when you look at top leaders in companies mostly, most times they have an executive assistant, or somebody that's a senior leader in your company. They have assistance that takes care of all of these other things for them so that they can focus on strategy, vision, and actually just moving the needle for the company.

So let's circle back to the home for instance, you have a single person that earns a certain amount of money. Maybe say 200 K ,250, 300k to up-skill. That monthly salary is looking to do fiverr jobs and is looking to do all of these things to double his income, because things are getting expensive or he just wants to live better, for you to be able to do all of those things.

You need somebody to be able to assist you in taking care of the things that they really do not , move the needle for your income, maybe as long as cooking is not your business, like you don't have a cooking business or any of those things. For example an Accountant or a software engineer, you will need domestic assistance to help you with all of these things. If you're a couple, your wife just gave birth and all of that it's hard to do that alone. You need a nanny , you need somebody that can come clean the house. You need somebody that can take care of all the clothes, so that your wife, there's probably either working at that time or not, can focus on her job or a career out, same thing with you too.

Right. So if you draw a straight line from having Eden take care of all of these things or serve as your domestic assistant to you leveling up your career or doubling your income. You will see that it is a very straight line with no curves, no comas. You can actually move from one point to the other, like you're doing all of these things on your own.you don't have domestic assistance. You get to the middle, you add domestic assistance to your plan? And in this form, we call it Eden. Eden is the assistance to whatever you do at home. And then by the time you walk a few more steps on that straight line, you discovered that your life has consistently improved and then your income has doubled because now you have more time on your hands to be able to do the things that actually matter by applying for more jobs by having time to even do greater work in your company, because you don't have to think of anything so that's my answer to that question. If you draw a straight line. Not having an assistant to having a systems like Eden, to take care of all of this mundane tasks, then your life will literally, and quantitatively just improve,

Host: improve productivity, allow you to focus on more things to the more important in quote, the revenue generating activities for your life, not just revenue or the experiential side of your life as well. 

Prosper: Exactly because this are the things that matter in the economy now Like, I mean, the watch changes over time, from the time of our parent during the time of our parents to say, oh if you are growing up and you don't know how to clean, you do not do laundry.you are a lazy person . You're not small, these are the things that we heard while growing up because we have like millennials and Gen Z that are really doing things that our parents were never doing at their age. So it is a knowledge economy now,literally of course, a knowledge economy.

So whether you're five years old ,you are 10,you are 12. You just need to be able to accommodate that much knowledge for you to be able to live a really good life. You can earn money on Tik Tok these days and all of those things. So if you can afford a service like Eden then why not 

I am sure at the back of your mind you would be like men. My mom knows that I'm subscribed to Eden wahala

Host: if she comes to spend the weekend I will just cancel my subscription let her not think my wife is lazy

Prosper: well. It's funny because even when they come to spend the weekend, they might complain initially but they will come around later, They're like, Hmm. Wow. So instead of me taking care of things I can literally just sit down and watch Netflix or let's say for the very religious ones I can actually just go to church, and go for evangelism or go to pray. and do all of those things . I don't have to split my time between washing my clothes in the morning . And try to later join them for evangelism and evening, I can actually be in church from morning and I can come back, I have ready-made food for me.

I have clothes done for me, and all of that, even what we have seen too is we have children, abroad that subscribe for Eden for their parents at home here in Nigeria. Oh, wow. Wow. Yeah. Right. It was like, oh my goodness. My parents, like, I'm not comfortable with the current process they have right now, or even the person that comes around. the person is not really nice. I don't like to really treat them. I just want Eden to take care of their feeding, their laundry or cleaning, or even if the parents say, we don't want anybody handling our food ,we would cook it ourself they said, you know what? Let's Eden take care of your laundry & cleaning so that we know that the only thing you do is to cook, maybe because you need to manage your salt and all of these things for older people or for cleaning laundry, Eden then just takes care of it for them. And they just pay they subscribe with their international card and then boom, every month we just charge their card and their parents get the offering and everybody is happy

Host: That's a really nice one. 

Prosper: Yeah. Okay. 

Host: So, we would talk a bit on emerging technology. So there's the whole rise of emerging technologies, like advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, robotic process automation , AI/ VR and all of that. So are you guys currently leveraging any of these?

Do you think there's any value that these sort of emerging technologies can unlock for you even if it's not today, at least in the future, what are your plans around them emerging tech, 

Prosper: I think right now we don't like to leverage any of them yet, but in the future when we have a lot of data, definitely artificial intelligence will be one of those things that will be a key part of Eden medium.

And just very simple examples that you can see right now is we've even seen customers request for it. So customers pick meals every week, but as a customer or as a human being, once you start doing something almost every single time, the same thing you start to get bored, 

You start to look for ways to automate that. And one of the competencies from customers is like, well, Eden You guys are great. It's good that you guys just allow me to pick my meals every Thursday and Friday, but you see that Thursday I don't even want to pick menus again. I want the system to just automatically pick my meals based on my past recommendations or based on my past or my history of the meals have picked 

Do you understand? So this is where artificial intelligence comes to place . It's like, look at the history this customer has had for the past four weeks right now. It's kind of possible with our system, but not really possible in a way. And I'll explain why, because our menu changes every week because we try to be creative with the menu.

We don't want people to get bored. Which is one of the early feedback we got: people started receiving the same type of meals every week. And they started getting bored of the menu. So every week we play around with the menu, we change items,we change completely. Sometimes we change the sides and the main just like that.

We shuffle it around. . So because of that, you can't just take somebody's history and use it and replace it with what the person is meant to have the following week. But with artificial intelligence, if you have a lot of data, we can actually employ artificial intelligence to go and study the type of meals that customers have had over mine.

Study those types of meals that can now be fed into a recommendation engine. That will just go ahead and pick meals for you if you cannot pick your meals yourself. So if you cannot pick your meals yourself, after a certain time, the system just picks it , and uses the artificial intelligence recommendation to pick your meals for you.

And by the time you get those meals you'll be happy that you didn't have to pick the meals yourself because the system would understand you enough to be able to pick the meals that you desire ,the kind of meals you would love to eat . 

Host: Absolutely, It makes sense. I suppose, even from a nutritional perspective, as well as in terms of calorie counting, just maybe knowing who your client is and knowing what sort of certain calorie, contents, nutritional values of meals I think that could be a way where maybe analytics can also be applied in the future. Of course, just to make sure that the people that are getting the food that they're getting it's tasty, but it's also from a nutritional perspective as well.

Prosper: Very true.and one of the things we want to do in the future too, is, integrate with like health companies. So when you have like companies like say pharmacy, pharmacy is a startup, that offers drugs to you. I mean like, healing drugs on a recurrence basis , you have a plan. So our plan in the future to is , to be able to like integrate with companies like that. So with that recommendation system, with AI plugged into our system, it would be, if you are losing weight, for example, you say for your plan for the next six months or three months is to wait the system can just take in your allergies, take in your health status at that point in time, like, oh, this person is trying to lose weight and then use the algorithm to determine the type of meals to recommend for you based on low calories,. Based on more fatner, based on the type of drinks you would like to have cause we offer like fruit juice and all of that in a bottle . You can choose that because you want to lose weight. You will drink more of like ;your veggies, all of those different things, smoothies, that kind of stuff.

And then I can see how It's can really just help the system in the future 

Host: well done. Yeah. Thanks. great responses. So we are going to go into maybe a bit, just some personal questions before we round up. We're almost done, but before I get into these personal questions, I want to ask, you know, you guys recently raised 1.4 what was that in terms of the use of funds? How are you guys trying to sort of channel where that money is going into? Is it mostly recruitment ,upskilling? What would you say has been the significant use of that fund that was recently raised? That's the first question

The next question is Eden, why the name Eden, is that Garden of Eden, I just wanted to get an understanding of that 

Prosper: Okay. So the first question is mostly on recruiting and then vertical integration, when you vertically integrate your services. You have to spend significantly more money on all the things you need to buy and put in place and all of that.

So that's why we raised the money. And then for number 2 that's a very interesting question. Why the name Eden? When we came together, we came up with all of those names but they did not just fit into the purview of what we wanted.

Like we want to better people's lives we want to 10 X, the quality of life. So let's go back to the beginning of the world, in the beginning ,

We had the Garden of Eden and people did not have to lift anything. I mean it was after they left the garden of Eden that the curses followed them. In the garden of Eden. There was no washing of clothes. There was no cleaning, there was no cooking of meals, everything was delivered to you on a platter

That's how we chose the name, Do you know what we want to build a business that symbolizes, you know, 10 X in the quality of life and what other name than to give it Eden which comes from the garden of Eden. In fact, the name of the app that people download on the app store is called Garden . So when you come it just says welcome to the garden of Eden, I think it has just it 

Host: Nice one, nice one I can see that this is a very well thought out business.

Well done for that. Okay. So we're going to ask some personal questions now. So let's talk about predictions.What was the last prediction you got wrong? It could be about anything. 

Prosper: Very interesting. The last prediction I got wrong I mean, if we're talking about most recently, I can talk about the African cup of nations because we had like Salah. And then when you get the history of Egypt right now, steam holds the highest number of African cups of nations. We've won it seven times. So I just expected that Egypt was going to beat Nigeria, but I got that wrong, very wrong .

Cause I watched that match and I was like, what the hell is salah even in this game? What's going on? 

Host: you are sounding like an Egyptian, what is going on 

Prosper: Egyptians will say , you shall see them no more. That's exactly what Nigeria did because that match, we pressed them a lot. We missed a lot of chances to score, but you could really see that Nigeria had the upper hand in the first half and second half.

Host: It was a great, great display, great attacking.for the first time we've seen Nigeria information setups to be so attack minded it was nice to watch. Okay. So, what's one viewYou seem to find that very few people agree with?

Prosper: Very, very interesting the view I try to find a very few people agree with. That's a very interesting question. Okay I don't believe in actively seeking out mentors . Yeah. That's, that's something people would just like, say what Prosper what are you talking about. Yeah. [00:37:00] So I have mentors from afar, but I don't see them.

I don't actively go to meet them and I say, I want you to mentor me. But they are my mentors but they just don't know they are my mentors and the reason why I hold that view is growing up. I saw how people were just like witty , because that's what all our parents told us. Oh, you must have your mentor, you must follow this person's life and see great things . I believe in standing on the shoulders of giants, but I've seen so many popular beliefs that if you don't have your mentor you cannot really know the things that you're meant to know.

And that's not true. Many of our mentors too so some of them do not have mentors. It was through enough trial and error.then what we have known in the knowledge economy is that this, our mentors have distilled most of their knowledge into books or recordings. Blog posts, articles. Many of these are online that you can buy, you can purchase the good thing too is even on Twitter, you can follow them.

You can see how they think , you can read your thoughts. You can bookmark them to read for later. And that's what I actually started doing at the beginning of my career. When I joined Andela and I joined Andela in 2014. And one of the fields that changed my life was actually just following my mentors on Twitter.

They did not know that they were my mentors, but I was actively reading their books. I will go and buy the books that they've written or I will read their articles. I would like their tweets. Sometimes I'll even engage with them. I even have what I call a twitter list . So Twitter list, you create a list you put ,maybe, Laravel developers.

and you put all your mentors inside that list so that by the time you just go to that column, you will be seeing all your materials and all their tweets and everything they talk about. And to my knowledge, it literally just 10x, just by following them , a few of them I emailed them but I know that they are very busy. So being respectful of their time, no answer , I did not take it personally because I just understand that they're busy, but soaking myself from afar, in all of their thoughts in all of their books and all of their materials made me, made the mentorship easier.

So you did not have somebody that was now coming to meet me every time. Like have you done this, No I was the one putting the targets for myself. I'm like, looking at them oh, this is what this person has done. Like, okay, maybe I can do the same. So for the things that are really not clear, I can reply them on twitter just to ask questions or send them an email 

Like send them a code email for the folks that responded to me. But for the ones that never responded, I do not even hold it against them because now that I'm even in the position to mentor people, you understand how it is. So having to actively seek outs and one thing I've seen is that a lot of young people, for some, are lucky enough to get people that they actively seek them out.

And they agree. But for many , for the majority, they don't see those people. So they start feeling left out. They start feeling that they're not succeeding in life because this person has a mental attitude and that's really not true. There are so many things you can do with you. You can change your life just by looking at other people like I am a Christian so this thing takes me back to the Bible. You remember the time where the Centurion, I don't know if you're a Christian, but a centurion went to meet Jesus and say, oh,he didn't even meet Jesus to be healed. And you're like, oh, okay. Maybe I'll bring him to him so that I can heal him. And I said, no, I don't even need to bring him to him.

Just say the word. And I believe that he is going to be healed and Jesus said a word and from afar this person was healed. That's mentorship from afar. You don't even have to lay your hands on the person . You can just study the person, follow the person ,and you will be good so that's one of the views I hope 

Host: Nicely put prosper. Very nice one. Okay. So we have a question from a previous guest who was on the pod and we normally ask people, and we are going to ask you as well to also ask a question to the person coming on the next episode? His question was, he wants to know what your thoughts are on, the evolution of the Nigerian tech ecosystem. What are your thoughts? Do you think it's a bubble? Is it going to crash? Is it just, FinTech, FinTech, everybody just raising money. What's your view on the evolution of the Nigerian tech ecosystem?

Prosper: I think this is the beginning of greater things to come , I like to tell people that you have not seen anything. We're just literally scratching the surface of what is possible . So when you look at companies like Andela, Team apt, interswitch like all these companies that have existed in several years ago, you discovered that they played a role in the companies that we have and the startups we have right now all so we also have follow-up Africa, Google developer groups, open source Africa. and so many other communities that we have that have also played a role, Now, it's almost like seed and harvest time , there were times all, these things were non-existent.

We didn't really have developers, like working remotely and earning dollars. We didn't have a lot of startups that could raise money as easily. It was a pain to be a founder, like, because you could not raise money. Many startups went down and all of that, but. I want to believe that all those periods are what you call the gestation period. You could not see the growth but things were moving. All the actions that we took, all the communities, all the evangelism, all the startups, everything, all those things worked together for good for what we are having right now. So what we are having right now, when people say, oh, everybody's raising money.

Everybody's doing FinTech. It's going to be a Bubble. I laugh because I'm like, when you don't actually see a 10x of what you have now, what are you going to call it? A 10x bubble? It's not a bubble market like India, India. Like you look at your population. Nigeria has tons of people, Africa too has that.

And we are just getting to the stage where these people were here four years ago, three years ago . And you're telling me it's a bubble? Just say you are afraid of doing great things and I understand we'll remove you and bring in the people that are ready to do the work . This is just the beginning of great things to come this year, you're going to have more companies raise a lot of money.

They're going to have more community aligned events. They're going to have younger people join tech. They're going to have older people that thought they never had an option to get into tech as well. Infact right now, we have young people that instead of them having to spend four years in the walls of the University from secondary school, they just get into tech , we have a lot of them now that they're already working as engineers, as designers, as marketers

So what they now do on the side is to enroll into Harvard , or enrol into Nexford. A Nexford is also a startup that offers university, like curriculums and studies, they do that on the side and they work on the side and at the end of the day, that's a very much more balanced knowledge than just spending your four walls in university.

I mean, let's look at the current state of education in this country , you don't even like it. Imagine just subjecting children to do that for four years.and at the end of the day they come up with nothing, meanwhile, there's a balance of them still leveraging the tech community while still having a university education on the side.

That's like killing two birds with one stone. So again, the future of the tech of Africa is coming in the next three to five years . It's will almost look as if the windows of heaven , was opened because all these things that we are building right now, Eden in 5 years will be more greater than the way it is right now, 

So, what you're going to have is you're going to have engineers, developers, employees. Those once too will grow up and probably leave the company and start their own companies.become founders like that. So the bigger ones will mentor younger ones, the younger ones too will grow up and it will just become a pipeline.

So you have, you're just going to be generating a pipeline of tech, enabled people, a pipeline of startups, the pipeline of companies, a pipeline of collaboration. Now we are hearing stories of companies here in Nigeria, buying companies in the UAE, this is something that would have never happened five years ago.

And this is just the beginning because in the next five years, you have to have companies in Nigeria, buy companies in the U.S , basically, they're going to have companies. I mean, you have Paystack & flutterwave that already have employees scattered across the U.S, London and all of that, that worked for Flutterwave and Paystack we are going to have more of that in Nigerian companies scattered across the world, because now you can create a company from anywhere you can be in Nigeria but In your HQ. I mean, you created a company in the U S. It's easier now, so you are going to have a lot of startups leverage that, so that at the end of the day, they can hire anywhere. So you have tons of people working remotely. You have people building companies like backdrop.

So you are building it locally here, but you're doing it for the world. . And that's what Estonia did back in the day in fact, that's what they are still doing now Estonia, Built Skype. They built so many startups just from the small country and it will significantly change the way of life of Estonians and even just revenue for the government.

When you've got other sectors and you compare them to the tech sector , then it almost feel like the tech sector is just like the one helpingNigeria right now, because when you look at a lot of other sectors, we are not hearing as much great news, as you want to, things are just dilapidating .

You know, things are really bad. But with the tech sector it is like tech sector is just taking off, it's like there's a bad environment, but these people are still taking off. So this is just the beginning, things will happen this year, next year and in the next five years. And we are going to see it . 

Host: The future is very bright 

I think as you were just talking, something just came to my mind. would Eden life think about doing lesson teachers in the future, you know, you're talking about education and the education system. That could be something, I guess there's also value. 

Prosper: I mean,right now we have companies like Ulesson 

That's what Ulesson does once you just subscribe on Ulesson, all your children have access to Waec curriculum, Neco curriculum and all of those things. So the way that kind of integration would be with Eden is that Eden already that the primary Unit Eden takes care of is the home, so you can literally just say that everything that can be done in the home Eden is literally going to provide it . , we have started with the first three services but every other thing that has to do with your home, you want your passport renewed Eden will be able to handle it later. You want your car serviced Eden will be able to handle it , you've given birth to children now,you want your children to have some specialized type of homeschooling. Why won't Eden be able to do it? 

Host: You've opened my eyes to how broad the potential for Eden 

Prosper: it's really limitless. Yeah. 

Host: Yes it is. Okay, so what's one I mean, we have to say disruption is interrelated.

So what's one view or what's the question you'd like to ask our next guest. We don't know who our next guest is, what would you like to hear from them? 

Prosper: I think my question would be how many years would it take from now for Nigeria to be among the top 10 economies in the world.

Like if you were to look at the current system now and start to change the system. So change the system from like politicians to building an accountability system. Instead of just having individuals, please do this for me. Oh, I know this. person you build an institution. that is stronger than even the biggest individuals.

If you start to change that system gradually, because I like to tell people that Nigeria's problems are not the obvious problems, they are wicked problems. It's not because we don't have technology, it's not because we don't have people that cannot do it. They're just weekend problems.

Wickedness are bound . That's why Nigeria is the way it is . If you want to change the system gradually, replace the old system of just doing things turn by turn and start tackling just problems. How long will it take from now for Nigeria to become a top 10 economy in the world. Good question. That would be my question for the next guest. 

Host: That's a great question. Thank you so much for your time. Prosper a tech bro, who is trying to take us back to the days of the garden of Eden, and we know that you are going to be successful because we can feel your passion from here, honestly. So, thanks a lot for your time. This brings us to the end of our podcast and we've thoroughly enjoyed having this conversation with you. Thank you and enjoy the rest of your day. 

Prosper: Thank you. Thank you for everything. Thank you for the questions. Really appreciate it. I really had a great 

Host: Thank you.