Amazing Gloo CEO’s Glootian Response On Gloo Pivot

The CEO of Gloo. ng, Olumide “D.O” Olusanya, has published a Glootian Response after his ecommerce operation failed and he pivoted the startup to something new. If you run or plan to run a digital business (and especially an ecommerce venture) in Nigeria, read his experiences. As he works on the clearance sales of old Gloo to make way for the new Gloo, Olumide is using the lessons from ecommerce to engineer a new dawn in his mission. He will find new markets and territories: you can learn from him.

What is the Glootian response to situations like this that is seemingly unresolvable and “impossible” to win? Was I scared? Oh, yes. Everything, I have in my life is ALL into PayMente Limited, the corporate entity behind Gloo. I sold ALL my assets and cash from the previous cash out I had had from my previous venture two years before Gloo to fund Gloo.ng’s Pre-Seed and Initial Seed until I had liquidated every single thing I had as networth that could be liquidated before seeking external funding. Plus, three months in, I had asked my wife to resign a very lucrative job to join me in building out this vision. So, ALL the source of income for my family therefore came from Gloo.ng. At this point Gloo.ng had not been able to pay me a salary for over 8 months! My battle-hardened management team, including my wife, had only been drawing half of their paltry salaries for the 8 months! All of them with wife and kids of their own and were as well the primary income earners for their respective families. I had a son who had not asked to be brought into all of these. I was 45years old and pretty much consider myself “unemployable.” So, yes! The fear bubbles up. But I knew and had internalised how to USE it…how to channel it. But my biggest success was that I had replicated this mindset and internalisation in my management team and even the junior staff such that we did not lose a single staff at that perilous time when Konga and Jumia were laying off as much as 60%-70% of their staff. My team rallied! Like the Glootians they are!

He saw customers “glooed” to the service before that was not just enough. Then he pivoted, and numbers are moving north. I am sure these new customers will be “super-glooed” now.

The fact that customers loved the service translated into our numbers in the level of increasing basket sizes they were increasing trusting us with as we expanded into adjacent categories like cosmetics, electronics and white goods, etc, for which our core customer demographic of busy homemakers still controlled the buying decisions in their respective households.

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