African Startup Selar Paid Out $12.8M to Creators in 2025

Douglas Kendyson launched Selar in 2016 without a grand plan, and nine years later, his platform has paid out $12.8 million to African creators in 2025 alone.

The e-commerce startup helps creators across Africa sell digital products and services. This year's payout nearly doubled the $6.6 million Selar distributed in 2024, showing how a bootstrapped company can grow without venture capital funding.

Kendyson's first customer wasn't even from Nigeria. A friend in France who released a music playlist became the platform's first seller after Kendyson convinced him that fans wanted to support him financially, not just listen for free.

Then reality hit hard. "Where are the rest of the people?" Kendyson remembers thinking during those first 100 days. His team was all engineers, great at building products but clueless about getting customers.

For three years, he kept refining the product and hoping users would magically appear. "People do not just come because you built something," he learned the hard way.

His early hiring decisions made things worse. In 2020, he hired two social media employees at $52 each per month, thinking they'd figure it out. He brought on a junior developer to save money, assuming he could manage them easily since he coded too.

Instead, he spent all his time reviewing work and giving feedback. "You save money, but you lose weeks," Kendyson said. He eventually fired the junior team and increased his budget, choosing his sanity over cheap labor.

The turning point came from an unexpected place. In 2018, Kendyson worked at a Dubai fintech company where he watched professional marketers work their magic through positioning, partnerships, and consistent messaging.

He returned to Selar in 2020 with fresh knowledge. The team started cold messaging strangers, posting consistent social content, and even running ads. "We were finally learning how to move beyond 'we built something' to 'people are actually using it,'" he said.

The Ripple Effect

Selar's growth proves that African creators can build sustainable businesses without waiting for perfect conditions or massive funding. The platform's success creates a multiplier effect: every dollar paid out to creators supports their families, funds new projects, and proves that digital entrepreneurship works across the continent.

The milestone Kendyson cared about most was hitting $74,000 in sales in 2020. Even as numbers grew into millions, he battled anxiety about sustainability because digital product sales can fluctuate wildly from month to month.

But the numbers kept climbing, and Selar kept listening to what creators actually needed instead of what Kendyson thought they should want.

Today, thousands of African creators rely on Selar to turn their knowledge and creativity into income, proving that sometimes the best business plan is simply building something useful and staying flexible enough to evolve.