Ifeoma Nwobu - On Her Transition Journey from Supermodel to Tech Co-Founder
Interviewed by Chiamaka Dike
The subject of today’s piece lives in Lagos, Nigeria. She was a supermodel for five years before becoming a co-founder for Sendstack, a mobility tech company solving issues of last-mile logistics in Africa. She shares with us her experience, her challenges and achievements, and tips for women who would want to transition into the industry.
Ifeoma Nwobu
Chiamaka: What inspired you to be a model in the first place?
Ifeoma: Modeling for me was one of those things that was largely influenced by my primary environment. I come from a family of creative and beautiful people - my dad is quite tall and my mom was so beautiful and when you have a natural gift, it’s only natural to also start to think of ways to use that gift to fulfill your purpose. This is closely followed by the need to monetize some of those gifts. I knew I had what it took to be a model so I went for it. Thankfully, I had my elder sister who supported me by giving me some direction on how to get into the industry because she had also tried that as well.
C: Why did you leave the modeling industry?
After my fifth year, I knew that phase of my life had reached its natural end because I started to feel an intense desire for something more. Funnily enough, a lot of people expected that the next step was to go international as a model but I had tried that and it never worked for me. In retrospect, I now understand why that didn’t work out. I mean, it would have been nice but I don’t think that was God’s plan for me. I probably would have had to drop out of school at the time too.
C: Wow! So how was the journey into being Sendstack’s co-founder?
I: I wanted to have the power to make more decisions and do things for myself. With modeling, it felt like everyone else called the shots all the time, people or brands would only reach out when they needed you and that meant making money was largely dependent on people not my abilities so, I started to get very uncomfortable with that dynamic and think of ways I could build wealth for myself. Beyond the money, I also just wanted a deeper knowledge of purpose and who I was called to be ultimately, modeling was a part and probably the beginning of it but definitely not the whole nor the end. So, one thing led to another, I met my co-founder who was my employer at the time and the rest is history.
C: Did you need to have any foundation in tech before joining?
I: People tend to see tech from a unidimensional perspective but I think that’s changing now. Aside from the really traditional industries, a lot of organizations today make use of technology in one way or the other.
I started out learning how to code, but that didn’t really work out. In the process, I realized that there were non-technical skills that are super integral. I went back to the drawing board and started to review the skills I had acquired from my previous experiences. They were mostly skills around marketing, sales or running the day-to-day of a business and I knew that all I had to do was to scale up those skills.
Sometime in 2020, I got an email from Emeka Mba-Kalu who asked me to join his team then, I was skeptical at first and tried to sabotage the opportunity by ignoring the email for a while but I got the leading to accept the offer and thankfully, the role was still open. I joined the team to lead growth. It was for a retail automation product called Scrader and I quickly bought into the vision of the company as a whole. A few months after, I made the request to become a co-founder —
C: Wait, you MADE the request?
I: Yes I made the request. I asked for it because deep down, I knew how much I cared and I needed the right motivation to keep me going with the overall vision. I have always been unashamedly ambitious so making the request was a no-brainer.
Emeka, on his own end, took a bet on me and for this, I’m forever grateful. He had worked on other startup ideas before we met & he could have probably gotten a co-founder from his network of people then but I think that beyond having the knowledge or skill set, it is easy to identify people who are driven and you always want those kinds of people on your team, right? I definitely think there was a divine alignment in our paths crossing and that’s really how it all began.
Eventually, we decided to make the pivot from pure e-commerce to logistics because we really wanted to build a product that was primarily impactful to the businesses we were serving. We had seen people building solutions for payment and inventory but there weren’t any logistics products that took into account the problems peculiar to the Nigerian or African context. At the time of Scrader, we couldn’t find suitable logistics partners to handle the demand or that had the technology to scale operations for these businesses, so we decided to build it ourselves and that’s where we are now.
C: Amazing! So would you say you’ve had any challenges so far? What are your achievements?
I: I would say that it’s very humbling to realize that no matter how intelligent you are, you cannot do everything on your own - you always need people. I would say that finding the right talents when working with limited resources as an early-stage business has been…interesting. Then we also have the environment we operate in which can be unpredictable sometimes but I think that’s also what makes you a good entrepreneur.
In terms of achievements, I can be insatiable with hitting certain milestones and sometimes, I find myself just wanting to move on to the next thing. However, one thing I’m grateful for is the fact that we’ve had paying customers since day zero. We’ve had people who may not be able to literally run their business without our solutions, customers that actually depend on us, and seeing that all of this has happened in less than a year - that screams “impact” more than anything else. We also got into the OnDeck (ODX) Accelerator early last year. Recently, I was nominated for the Aurora Tech Awards by InDrive and I consider it a privilege because I’m considered for such recognition because of what the team at Sendstack is doing. Nonetheless, the biggest impact remains in the fact that we’re changing lives, whether anyone can see that yet or not and as we grow, we will tell more stories of how we are building the number one logistics lever that will power the growth of businesses all over the world.