10 Mar 2022
Episode 2: The Indicina Story, with Yvonne Johnson
Launch to Seed is back with another insightful episode – and this time, we are joined by Yvonne Johnson, the entrepreneurial mastermind behind Indicina, an API-driven credit infrastructure company, which is a product of her invaluable technical expertise, grit, and hard work.
With extensive experience and expertise in multiple verticals, including technology, investment banking, investing, and advisory, Yvonne is uniquely positioned to build Indicina. As a software engineer who sealed her financial management path with an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, she understands what’s required to build a successful business.
In conversation with Ozzy, Yvonne details the lessons from her professional journey, explaining how the technical and investment know-how came in handy in her entrepreneurial journey. She shares the idea that led her to Indicina, the process behind launching and growing her business—including how she decided on her co-founders (the company’s CFO, CTO and Chief Data Scientist) and how she continues to grow her team. She also shares the lessons learned about credit, investment and banking in today’s times. Indicina has already raised over a few million dollars in venture capital and is eyeing an exploding growth trajectory in the years to come.
The lessons from today’s episode are a surefire way of setting your entrepreneurial thought process right. Listen up for entrepreneurial advice from one of Africa’s trailblazing startup founders.
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KEY TAKEAWAYS
What Indicina does: In simple words, Indicina is an API-driven credit infrastructure that aims to bridge the credit gap by providing a digital financial analytics layer to lenders. Over the years, the company has grown to over 40 employees spread across six different cities worldwide and has over a hundred clients.
Realising the power of technology in transforming the banking space: Towards the end of Yvonne’s time in investment banking, digital finance was on the rise. Sensing this early wave, Yvonne realised that technology could bridge the gap between retail consumers and banks and marketing by manifold times.
How Yvonne decided on her business idea:
Having extensive experience in the banking sector, she knew it wouldn’t be feasible to compete with banks as a lender because banks have a massive advantage when it comes to lending.
Yvonne realised that the missing credit infrastructure presented a huge market opportunity. In this era, where data is almost a commodity, there’s true value in real-time analytics. Hence, powering credit decisions using real-time data analytics was a sustainable business idea.
Yvonne shares that being an angel investor helped her make fundraising decisions well. Knowing the market both as an investor and a business owner made her decisions better informed.
Marketing for a B2C business model is different from a B2B model. The latter requires more patience and relies heavily on the product and brand.
A role that Yvonne never thought she would be an expert at is sales. Yvonne didn’t know she could make an excellent sales executive until she did that for herself for her business. She realised that she had what it took to get buyers to buy from her business offerings.
Remember always that you have to convince yourself before you convince anyone else to invest in your business or buy from it.
KEY QUOTES
“A lot of motivation (for Indicina) did come from my experience at the bank. I could appreciate the challenges that banks face in serving retail consumers – there's just a lot of structural barriers that are limited (to) who they can
