Douglas Kendyson, CEO of Selar, has achieved remarkable success with his e-commerce platform, paying out ₦9.8 billion to 241,000 creators selling digital products in 2024. This achievement is a testament to Kendyson's vision of creating a marketplace for digital products, which has grown exponentially since its inception.

Kendyson's journey to building Selar began during his university days, where he developed a fascination with e-commerce and built several online stores, including a food-ordering platform that won a grant at a campus pitch competition. His admiration for Paystack, a company that launched a cheaper and more accessible alternative to the expensive Interswitch API, led him to land a job at the company just two months after graduation.

At Paystack, Kendyson worked on developing third-party integrations with banks and plugins for various CMS and e-commerce platforms. This experience seeded an idea in his mind: to create a marketplace for digital products. He noticed that Nigeria's knowledge economy was growing, with course creators becoming internet celebrities, and saw an opportunity to create a platform that would enable them to sell their digital products.

In 2016, Kendyson quit his job at Paystack and joined Flutterwave, a competitor to Paystack, to work on Barter, a virtual card service. However, he left Flutterwave in less than a year and landed an engineering job at a Dubai fintech, Sarwa, which relocated him to Dubai. After being dismissed from Sarwa, Kendyson returned to Nigeria and focused on building Selar, which had been slow-paced until then.

With a lean team of 30 employees, Selar has achieved profitability, and Kendyson attributes its success to attention to customers' needs and relentless execution. He has also learned to not obsess over competition, focusing instead on building a solid product and making it great. In 2024, Selar paid out ₦9.8 billion to 241,000 creators, and Kendyson hopes to double revenue to ₦20 billion this year.

Kendyson's enthusiasm about profit-sharing reflects a deeper belief: Selar's strength isn't just in its business model but in the team he has built. He has struggled with hiring and letting people go, but has learned to make tough calls and has built a team that is passionate about the work and capable of stepping up.

As Selar aims to double revenue to ₦20 billion this year, Kendyson's confidence in his team will be tested. However, he remains optimistic about the company's future, saying that the real question isn't whether Selar will keep growing, but how far they can take it.