How one enterprise client nearly broke, and built PaidHR

At last year’s Moonshot event, I met Seye Bandele, CEO of Nigerian HR tech upstart PaidHR for the first time. He was much taller in person than I imagined, and had a self-assuredness about him. Before that meeting, I had interacted with him a few times: once at the launch of the startup’s cross-border payroll products and at another during its Employee Wage Report (EWA) launch.

Bandele is precisely where he likes to be for this conversation: his own turf. He’s never been a fan of remote work, preferring the certainty of his Lagos office. It’s also how I think about his hands-on approach that has defined PaidHR’s journey since day one.

Before founding PaidHR, Bandele was a business development, strategy, and marketing professional. He’d previously held chief of marketing roles at Konga and Yudala, and ran a marketing consulting agency alongside Chikodi Ukaiwe (now CEO of Salad Africa). During his consulting days, Bandele worked with companies like Flour Mills and, notably, HR tech competitor SeamlessHR. When I ask whether his time at SeamlessHR revealed a market gap that inspired PaidHR, Bandele says he’s not ready to speak publicly about that transition.

Instead, Bandele’s nudge to start an HR company came from his longtime friend and co-founder, Lekan Omotosho. Omotosho, bored of building software for the government, was itching for a new challenge, a problem they could solve together.

Bandele did notice problems. While working at DealDey, he observed how companies struggled with a broken flow of information and communication between management and the wider team. Bandele encountered this problem at multiple organisations. And it inspired the idea for PaidHR, initially ideated as an employee engagement and feedback tool.

Day 1: Baptism of fire

In 2020, still running his consulting gig, Bandele began work on PaidHR. The vision was clear: solve HR tech problems for Nigeria’s small- and medium- scale businesses.

Together with his co-founder, Omotosho, they spent about three months studying various global HR software companies—Gusto, Swingvy, and Zenitz—before deciding on their product direction. The first version of PaidHR was a direct copy of Gusto. This San Francisco-based company provides cloud-based payroll, benefits, and human resource management software for businesses in the United States.

Bandele loved the business model of YC-backed Gusto, which he saw as desirable.

“We were no HR experts. It was just my co-founder and I talking to as many HR people as possible and shadowing many HR tech products that were already available,” Bandele says.

Omotosho, who had over 12 years of experience building enterprise software, built most of the initial product over 15 months. The first version of PaidHR was basic: a simple HRIS and payroll tool that didn’t even automate disbursements. “You’d process payroll, download an Excel sheet, and take it to your bank to pay,” Bandele laughs.

Bandele leveraged his network from previous corporate roles to get feedback on their initial product. An HR director told them their initial product was “rubbish” and needed to be rebuilt. So they did that.

Their initial model, based on Gusto, targeted the large small business market in Nigeria, which they estimated at 36 million businesses. (The Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN) estimates were 39 million as of 2022)

But the startup’s first client would redefine everything.

Transport Services Limited (TSL), a logistics and supply chain enterprise with 2,000 employees, became PaidHR’s first customer. It forced the team to scale their product ambitions from SME-focused to enterprise-ready overnight.

The early days were a blur of demos, frantic feedback loops, and rebuilding.

“We worked with TSL for six months, just taking feedback, building and rebuilding, changing workflows, and building in a lot of flexibility into the product that has now allowed us to be able to onboard any type of organisation,” Bandele recounts.

TSL’s demands pushed the team to rebuild the entire platform by June 2021. “We took down everything we had ever done and republished a brand new one,” he says.

In this period, the pressure was immense. In those early months, TSL contributed 80-90% of PaidHR’s revenue. “There were moments where they were going to cancel on us,” Bandele admits. “If that happened, we’d have no business.”

Bandele leaned on his marketing chops, acting as a one-person sales force to acquire new clients, while Omotosho built product features. By the end of 2021, PaidHR had eight customers, most acquired through referrals from TSL, and about $1,000 in monthly revenue.

Day 100-365: The first signs of traction

The first 100 days blurred into six months in survival mode and, eventually, a full year of relentless adaptation.

PaidHR’s first moment of validation came in early 2022. TSL’s annual renewal was up in the air. “We were worried: would they renew, or had they just been riding out the time while looking for alternatives?” Bandele says. When TSL delayed payment, Bandele made the tough call to suspend their service. “Immediately, all of them started calling. They paid on the same day, and we reinstituted the service.”

This was their company’s proof of value moment, a time that defines whether a product is a nice-to-have or a must-have. When a product is essential, users panic when it disappears. This moment can be the first indicator of product-market fit.

“That singular event gave us the fuel. I ended all my consultancy work and decided to face PaidHR full-time,” Bandele says. He made his first hire—a customer success lead still with the company—and rented a small office in Surulere.

PaidHR’s first angel check was $5,000 from Bandele’s friend. He would get another $5,000from another friend. And yet another friend from high school would connect him to the lead investor for their $500,000 pre-seed round.

By the end of 2022, PaidHR had 35 customers and $5,000 in monthly recurring revenue and had processed ₦7.24 billion in salaries.

The startup makes money through a mix of subscription fees paid by employers for its HR and payroll software, transaction margins on value-added services like airtime and bill payments processed through its employee wallet, fees and spreads from its earned wage access (EWA) product, and commissions on cross-border payroll transactions, including FX and disbursement charges.

Day 1,000: The pivots, rebrands and the pain

Three years in, PaidHR had grown to over 200 customers, serving enterprise giants like Oando and small businesses with just 10-15 employees. But the journey has been anything but smooth. Nigeria’s macroeconomic chaos—the naira devaluation and runaway inflation—and talent exodus forced constant reinvention.

The naira’s devaluation, for instance, forced a strategic pivot. “Our naira revenues were growing, but our dollar revenues were flat. Foreign investors just look at the numbers and think the company isn’t growing. We had to find a way to start making money in dollars,” Bandele explains.

This urgency led to the accelerated launch of PaidHR’s cross-border payroll product, which booked dollar revenues and helped unlock new investor conversations. By the end of 2023, the startup had processed ₦11.4 billion naira, and by the end of 2024, it had processed over ₦29 billion in salaries, all boosted by the cross-border feature.

Bandele’s marketing acumen has been central to PaidHR’s ascent. A natural at founder-led storytelling, he maintains a lively and unmistakable presence on X (formerly Twitter) where his wit and candour have earned him a near-influencer status. He never misses a chance to champion PaidHR—often with humour and self-deprecation. Bandele has made the company’s narrative almost inseparable from his own.

“I think this has fundamentally shaped how we market PaidHR,” Bandele explains. “If you speak in a way people understand and relate to, they’ll naturally gravitate toward you.”

The company also went through a rebrand in 2024. It changed its name from PadeHCM (which most people struggled to pronounce then) to PaidHR. Bandele claims the rebrand was a strategic move to reflect the company’s new specialisation and leadership in payroll for the Nigerian market. As the company grew, especially after landing larger enterprise clients, its product and market focus shifted. Initially, it aimed to be a broad human capital management (HCM) platform, but over time, the company’s strength and reputation became closely tied to payroll and related HR solutions.

Present day: The quiet breakthroughs

Today, PaidHR is profitable.

“We’ve done that consistently for a couple of months now. But that just means my revenue eclipsed my expenses. It doesn’t mean you have enough money to survive indefinitely,” Bandele clarifies. True stability, he says, will come when “my revenues are 3-4x my expenses every month, where we can post actual profits and invest in other vehicles or reserves.”

Slowly, PaidHR has become visible enough in Nigeria’s HR-tech landscape to attract attention from bigger players, from informal acquisition discussions to deeper synergies.

“One of the things that gives me the most pride is the kind of conversations and people who are now in my circle. The governor of a state once requested a meeting with me. The MD of a major bank is on my cap table,” he said.

“When a company like Oando trusts us to run their payroll, that’s huge,” Bandele reflects.

Despite the growing validation PaidHR has received and its steady march toward sustainability, I ask Bandele whether he ever fears that, one day, he might still have to close the doors for good.

“As a founder, that fear is here and present every day. 95% of startups fail within the first five years. The data is against you. You’re working in a country where everything is stacked against you: the poverty capital of the world, disposable income is low, literacy is not great, talent is leaving in droves, the economy contracted, and the currency lost 70% of its value last year. Bro, everything is against you,” he says.

For Bandele, that tinge of uncertainty never goes away. “If something happens to PaidHR, will I be able to live with that? No startup founder will be able to live with it. By nature, you’ve gone into this with a lot of risk. You just have to keep pushing,” he says.

His advice to fellow founders is as sobering as it is galvanising: “Founders who make it have a healthy amount of delusion. You just believe that, with all these odds stacked against you, you have a chance.”