Gbenga Sesan, CEO of Paradigm Initiative organisers of Techtiary Forum has said that, they will wind down the activity of Techtiary Forum in order to scale up work with tertiary institutions in Nigeria.
The Paradigm Initiative CEO made this assertion at the 2017 Techtiary Forum, tagged “Geek Entrepreneur-Beyond Coding” held yesterday in Lagos
Techtiary Forum is an annual event meant for student in tertiary institutions in Nigeria, geared towards engaging students in tertiary to have a career path so that when they graduate they will not start looking for jobs.
Speaking at the event, Mr. Sesan said that” this is the last Techtiary Forum because we are scaling it up, we are basically democratizing the program such that we can now have a lot more focus on campuses and we have set up the idea on working with tertiary clubs on campuses.
“Right now, we have about sixteen of them already, so we are now doing that in a lot more schools so that we can have these clubs and the students will use their time in school to pick up skills and business ideas”
“We want to deepen the program in schools so that students can stop wasting time and actually use these years in school to build themselves and become empowered even before they graduate”
Mr. Sesan, further stated that, there is no criteria for this student program, anybody student is welcome as long as you are passionate and willing to commit to the process.
He added that the choice of their panelist was informed by their desire for the students to have someone, who will give them practical experience, somebody they can relate to and not someone that will do PowerPoint slides for them.
Luther Lawoyin CEO Lucy .ng, who was one of the panelist, narrated how he started his online business to the participants, “The idea came about in 2014. We had weddings concurrently in the family but it was a big headache to get branded gifts to give away at the wedding events. Going to the brick and mortar stores where these items are sold is chaotic and full of poor branding vendors, and because these items are usually bought in large quantities it was a real headache.
“We found that this huge niche market was fragmented, under served and unstructured with no known market leader.
“The majority of people had to go to brick and mortar stores, which are very chaotic and have an ugly user experience, or at best buy from semi-professional vendors who sell via social media at higher costs.
“It is even more of a headache to find unique gift items. There are limited options for customers, as products are as dispersed as the brick and mortar stores. We had to create a platform where all items can be viewed at once,” he said.
Lucy.ng started as a bootstrapped entity before securing pre-seed funding in 2015, but Lawoyin said there had been a very good product-market fit from the start.
“We had our first paying customer the day after we launched in beta, and since then we have served many individuals and corporate companies -notably Deloitte, Phillips Consulting, Shell and Google Nigeria,” he said.