From Paystack superfan to CEO: The life of Selar’s Douglas Kendyson

Douglas Kendyson calls himself “God’s favourite,” and his journey so far reinforces his belief. After graduating from Covenant University at 19, he transitioned from a curious website developer to one of the earliest employees at Paystack—a company he idolised—and later, Flutterwave. After two cushy jobs in Dubai, he’s now building Selar, an e-commerce platform that, in 2024, paid out ₦9.8 billion to 241,000 creators selling digital products like ebooks and courses, according to the company.

Kendyson, now CEO of Selar, arrives at Basilico, an Italian restaurant in Victoria Island, a few minutes late. We settle in—he orders BBQ lamb chops with fried egg and yam, while I go for the barracuda, an overpriced fish served with mashed potatoes.

Over our three-hour conversation, Kendyson is strikingly candid. He tells me about a former Paystack boss who urged him to get a mental health assessment—advice that led, years later, to a borderline personality disorder diagnosis. He admits he nearly stayed back in Dubai, afraid returning to Nigeria to build Selar, after japa, would seem like a failure. He tells me of his deep affection for his mother, who raised him as a single parent, and a cherished relationship with an ambitious journalist with “a beautiful beard.”

But when it came to the mechanics behind Selar’s rapid growth over the past four years, his response is vague at first.

“There’s no exact thing. Just a lot of intentional work,” he says after a pause.

That work began in his early university days as a freelance web developer in 2013. Years of tinkering with his own devices had made him adept at repairing computers, but it was in university that he learned software development—and started charging for his skills. One of his early clients was the renowned musician Cobhams Asuquo, though Kendyson now believes he was underpaid—about ₦70,000—for two websites. He went on to make a business of it. His fascination with e-commerce took root during this period as he built several online stores, including a food-ordering platform that won a grant at a campus pitch competition.

At the time, enabling online transactions on e-commerce platforms meant grappling with the expensive Interswitch API, a ₦150,000 hurdle that often deterred clients. It is easy to understand his admiration for Paystack and its founders, Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi, who launched a cheaper, more accessible alternative. He became a superfan, actively engaging with the company on Twitter and their public Slack channel, and sometimes sharing feedback directly with CEO Shola Akinlade.

All that enthusiasm was rewarded when Kendyson landed a job at Paystack, just two months after graduation. According to him, Akinlade offered him the position on the spot at their Shonibare, Ikeja office.

“It was a product I was very excited about, and I was just happy to have a job,” Kendyson recalls, a smile spreading across his face.

Kendyson recalls working long intense hours at Paystack with two other engineers, developing third-party integrations with banks and plugins for various CMS like WordPress, Joomla, Magento, and e-commerce platforms like Opencart, Drupal, Prestashop, and Abantecart. 

All of that work, against the backdrop of his experience developing e-commerce sites, seeded an idea in his mind: to create a marketplace for digital products. 

At this time, the most reputable e-commerce platforms, like Jumia and Konga, were all selling physical goods they had sourced themselves or from third-party sellers. 

While these companies grew quickly, Kendyson noticed that Nigeria’s knowledge economy was growing, with course creators like Tricia Biz becoming internet celebrities for their expertise as business coaches. The model was also simpler to operate as there were no physical goods that required cash-bleeding logistics, warehousing or delivery.

“People were always training people to do things, and people were always paying for resources. Even though it wasn’t as mainstream, I knew there could be something here. I just didn’t know how big the market was, but I knew that it existed,” he says. 

Three months into his job at Paystack, he and five friends began working on Selar. But with little progress and demanding day jobs, one by one, they dropped off—until he was the only one left. Eight months later, he quit Paystack, which has since grown a reputation for high employee retention. Kendyson admits that it was more about him; he just strongly felt like his time there was up and refused to stay any longer despite persuasions from the company. 

A few months later, he joined Flutterwave—Paystack’s competitor—to work on Barter, a virtual card service that has since been discontinued. But that stint was also brief—he left in less than a year.

He struck gold again with an engineering job at a Dubai fintech, Sarwa, which relocated him to Dubai. The job paid him about $4,000 every month—Kendyson admits he had incredible luck with jobs for a then-21-year-old. However, he was dismissed over a year later following a salary negotiation gone south.  

He was offered a 10% raise and a free apartment in Abu Dhabi, but after reading “Never Split the Difference”, a book on negotiation, he pushed for much more. Having experienced substantial pay increases before—his salary had jumped from ₦150,000 to ₦250,000 after a year at Paystack in 2016—he expected a bigger leap. However, during negotiations, he unintentionally came across as rigid, even insulted by the offer, and was ultimately let go.  

Kendyson called his encounter with the book “unfortunate,” yet he remains an avid reader of self-help books, favouring them over fiction because he struggles to visualise what he reads. Lately, he has been drawn to psychology books, which he says help him better understand people and mental health.

Until Kendyson was fired, he had been working on Selar at a relatively slow pace. That changed when he landed another engineering job in Dubai at an open banking startup that paid him about $5,000 monthly. By then, a persistent feeling had taken root—that he could make Selar a success. He ramped up his efforts, shipping new features, cold-emailing popular creators, and pitching his platform as a way for them to sell their online courses for free.

By the end of 2020, more than 3,000 creators had sold courses, books, and other digital products worth about $270,000 on Selar.

He quit his job and returned to Nigeria to focus squarely on Selar with over $20,000 in savings.

“If I had stayed back in Dubai to run the company, that money would have lasted me four months, but in Nigeria, it was worth about one year of runway,” he says.

Kendyson describes the return as the most anxiety-inducing of his life. Nonetheless, he believed Selar could become the largest creator platform in the country. 

In early 2021, when he returned, was the ZIRP era. Many foreign investors were scouting for and funding ambitious ideas. Selar, which was gunning to be something like Teachable—an online course platform that was valued at $134 million in the previous year—easily fit the bill.

But Kendyson could not get himself to finish a pitch deck.

“When I got to the “How much do you want?” section, I had no idea what number to put,” he recounts. “I was just frustrated by the whole process.” 

Instead, he set a personal challenge: see how much traction the company could gain in three months.

“ The numbers had to be solid—it had to be an easy sell,” he says.

By April, the company had grown its creator base by 133% and sold ₦220 million ($550,000) worth of digital products. Annual sales rose from ₦1 billion in 2021 to ₦2 billion in 2022, then doubled to ₦4 billion in 2023.

Three years later, Selar remains bootstrapped but has grown to 1.5 million users across 194 countries.

I ask him again how the company has achieved such impressive growth without VC funding.  He says the same thing as before: “We threw everything at it and hoped it clicked.” 

In the early days, Selar grew almost entirely on the strength of its product and word-of-mouth.

“We didn’t start doing ads till like 2022,” Kendyson adds. “Before that, it was all product marketing. We built something people wanted, and they told others about it.”

Beyond organic growth, Kendyson attributes its success to attention to customers’ needs and relentless execution—something he learned from Paystack. Kendyson describes himself as a sponge, absorbing lessons from every company he’s worked at.

“I got the part of Paystack that’s about having a solid product and making it great. I also got the part about [experimenting] but in moderation.”

He also learned to not obsess over competition.

“We focus on ourselves. I don’t go through competitors’ dashboards. I don’t check what they’re launching. I care about my customers, not what the competition is doing,” he says.

That philosophy has paid off. With a lean team of 30 employees, Selar is profitable.  But more importantly, to Kendyson, the resulting success is shared. In 2024, every employee received a share of the profits from a new feature rollout, amounting to about ₦800,000 each, on top of their regular salaries and a 13th-month paycheck. It was a milestone for the company, but for Kendyson, it was only the beginning. He hopes he can repeat it this year and the next, and eventually make it a part of the company’s culture.

His 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—and that didn’t come easily. Hiring, Kendyson admits, has been one of his biggest challenges as a founder. He has also struggled with letting people go.

“It was the worst stress of my life,” he recalls about his early experiences building a team. One of his hardest lessons was understanding the tradeoff between time and money. “I learned that when you’re not paying for something in money, you’re paying for it in your time. And for different things, you have to decide—is it your money or your time you’re willing to give?”

Very often the work of some early hires didn’t meet his standards, and he found himself rewriting copy, redoing designs, and micromanaging. Eventually, he learned to make tough calls.

“Good firing never comes as a shock,” he says emphasising that he often gave employees multiple chances to improve. 

Kendyson is excited about the team he’s built.

“It reminds me of that Beyoncé interview after Destiny’s Child restructured,” he says. “She said, ‘Everyone here can sing lead.’ That’s how I feel. Everyone is passionate about the work and capable of stepping up.”

This confidence will be tested as Selar aims to double revenue to ₦20 billion this year. Unlike in the past, the company may not disclose its revenue figures, he says. But for him, the real question isn’t whether Selar will keep growing—it’s just how far they can take it.