the day I met "Aje Bi Idan"

I was on a bus, and a man came to sell something to the people there. He called it “Aje Bi Idan”, meaning ‘It works like magic’ in Yoruba.

He sold a cream for hair growth and another for black hair dye. Of course, he talked about its properties, how you only need to apply it once, how you’d see the difference immediately, yada yada yada...

He made about ₦2000 in that bus. People would consider that unaccomplished or think, “What a hustler, thank God I have my office job,” but if you do the calculation, you’d see something interesting.

Office workers work for 8 hours for 5 days a week.
Let’s assume he works for 6 hours a day during peak periods, servicing at least 20 buses and he gets ₦2000 for each bus.
Multiply that by the 20 buses, that’s ₦40,000 per day.
If he works for only 5 days in a week, he has earned ₦200,000 that week. If he does that for 4 weeks in a month, he gets ₦800,000.

Of course he has costs, but he is definitely still earning a substantial amount than a handful of office workers. All he needs to do is just show up and talk in each bus. That’s why you really can’t judge a book by its cover.

Something was also interesting to me about this.

I realized that this ties a bit into the exact model that Paul Graham, founder of YCombinator, outlined in “How to Make a Billion Dollars”. It was quite fascinating, really.

Let’s say I do ₦300k in revenue every month (aka MRR), and every month, I increase the amount of my paying users by 10%,
By the end of a year, I’d have ₦6.49 million. And my monthly revenue would have increased to ₦874k!

By the end of five years, I’d be at ₦92.9 million MRR, and I’d have made ₦1 BILLION in total😱

Just imagine!
It’s that straightforward.
I didn’t say “easy” though. It’s not really easy to have a growth rate of 10% every month consistently, but these are the numbers and it’s that simple.

That salesman just needs to be able to increase his operations to do 40 buses per day, then hire some people and get it to a 100 per day. By then, he should be at ₦4 million MRR!

This scenario is different from the compounding example above, but it all speaks to one thing:

“Make some money and grow your operation.”

It was really mindboggling once I did the math and it really made me appreciate what the salesman was doing.
Building a great business rarely comes from one big event; it’s really just small things that happen over time.

Anyway, this was a really cool experience for me, and I hope it was too for you. See you in the next one!