How we built Paystack and struck a $200m deal

American financial services company Stripe recently acquired a Nigerian start-up Paystack for a reported $200m (£146m).

Paystack was co-founded by Shola Akinlade in 2016 as a solution for merchants in Nigeria and Ghana to get paid by anyone, anywhere in the world. It now processes over 50% of all web payments in Nigeria, as well as payments for over 60,000 organisations, including FedEx, UPS, South African mobile operator MTN and many others.

So how do young entrepreneurs know when to sell or grow their business? The Paystack co-founder Shola Akinlade told us:

"The work of an entrepreneur is to build and grow your business. The work of investors is to look for good businesses".

He said some successful companies die because of a misjudgement of the market.

"People thought the market was small, think about the number of people doing online payments in Nigeria in 2016... the interesting this is that five years later, Paystack alone is doing five times more than what Nigeria was doing in 2016," he says.

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