An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Do not take things personally — i.e. when people don’t respond to your email or LinkedIn conversations. I have learned that people are busy with their daily lives and, as a founder, you will have to knock on a lot of doors to get your startup out there. Have a thick skin because you will hear a lot of ‘Nos’ before you get to the ‘Yes.’ Keep going, because at the end of the day the vision is yours to realize.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Toju Ogbeide.
Toju Ogbeide is the founder and CEO of Goodszilla, a marketplace sharing app that donates a portion of sales to a Canadian charity.
Toju had the desire to help others, but also understood there wasn’t much a single person could accomplish by themselves. When starting his own company, he took this into consideration, and his desire to help others translated to the creation of Goodszilla, a digital marketplace facilitating donations and assisting charities.
While growing up in Nigeria, Toju was saddened by the injustice, conflict, and poverty he saw in the world. Years later, after moving to Canada as a young graduate student, he became involved in student organizations and social justice volunteering. His vision with Goodszilla from day one was to create a socially conscious, transparent, and accessible marketplace that would allow users to buy and sell both goods and services while helping important causes and charities. Toju has a Computer Science background with a Masters of Management from the University of windsor, with work experience ranging from Technology startups to Telecommunications.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
The Start of it All
I grew up in Nigeria as the son of a doctor. But I was saddened by the injustice, conflict, poverty and need I saw in the world. Although I wanted to do something to help, I felt my own options to help were too limited. I used to tell my friends “I need to find a way to share resources with those who can actually support others.” Years later, I arrived in Canada as a young graduate student with an interest in computers, IT and business management. I was also very involved in student organizing, community and social justice. Through a friend, I got involved with the Rotary Club, where I was the head of the service committee. I discovered Canada by volunteering at different organizations, and as I built harm reduction kits for Casey House, cooked food for the Fort York Food Bank and sang Christmas Carols at the Bickle Centre, I noticed how Canadian non-profits and charities had to struggle to get enough funds to keep going.
The Goods That Started it All
One day, while going through a life transformation, I decided, as we often do, to clean up my apartment and declutter my closet. I pulled out a pair of beautiful English leather shoes that I’d never worn because they were too small. As I stood in front of the closet, I asked myself: How can I transform these goods into goodness?
Is There A Better Way?
I thought of the current options available to me: I could walk or drive to Value Village or the Salvation Army and drop off my goods, which would have to be sorted, kept in store, or more often, sold to a middle-man who would ship the goods to Africa or Asia where they would be dumped in landfills, or sold cheaply in market places where they would displace locally produced clothing, shoes and textiles. As a diasporic African, I was familiar with such problematic processes. There had to be a better way.
That’s when I had my Lightbulb Moment. How could I combine my skills in IT and business to create a better option? I spent days thinking about this and soon the answer arrived. I would build an online marketplace to bring buyers and sellers together to support nonprofits and charities working for the greater good. This is how Goodszilla was born!
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
Goodszilla is disrupting the donated goods space. Think of it as a virtualized Goodwill. Now more than ever with the pandemic sending items to donation centers requires a lot of effort and organizations are no longer receiving items. Goodszilla offers an opportunity for individuals to monetize items and give proceeds to their favorite charity. With Goodszilla, businesses can put excess inventory to good use by listing items, campaign style and supporting a good cause with proceeds. Charity organizations can easily create a charitable marketplace on Goodszilla where their donors can list items on their behalf. Charities organizations who would originally not have the means to receive, sort and store items and then sell to fund their good work can now digitally rely on Goodszilla to do this for them.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
The initial name of the app was called Trash app, and the concept was to post items you no longer used for $10 or less, with all the proceeds going to a charity. I picked the name because I thought it was trendy, only to realize that the transaction fees from payment processing companies made the $10 items unrealistic, and the name would mislead people into thinking it was a dump yard. So, I scrapped that idea. I have learned that no one really knows how things will turnout until you test the hypothesis
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
Sunil Sharma was one the first startup mentors I met when I started working on Goodszilla, I met Sunil at the WebSummit in Lisbon when I went to exhibit Goodszilla. Sunil encouraged me to enroll at the Founder’s Institute in Toronto, which is a pre-seed program for startups. From there, I was referred to Parkdale Center for Innovation where we are currently incubating. Rusul Alrubail is the executive director of Parkdale Center and has been very helpful in our journey, providing much needed startup resources and also giving us our first earned media opportunity in the Toronto Star, a major news publication in Toronto. Yaron Vorona is a serial entrepreneur and a friend, who has been instrumental in helping make introductions to the right connections. Colin Webster, founder of Reboot Canada Charity and co-founder of Risc Capital, helps me with advice when it comes to raising capital.
There are many people who come together to help someone create their vision and dream.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
It’s clear that we are in unprecedented times. The pandemic has created a lot of disruptions in people’s personal and professional lives.
But there are positive disruptions. If there are pain points in an industry and one figures out a way to eliminate such paint points, that’s a positive disruption. Uber is a positive disruption to taxis; Uber provided a new source of income using private cars and made it convenient. Disrupting an industry required extensive research in order to accommodate existing customers and also be robust enough to scale easily. Disruption becomes negative when proper research and industry analysis are not carried out. One could have a positive idea but execute it poorly, but ultimately, every idea comes from trying to solve a pain point. Timing also plays an important role when it comes to disrupting an industry
Can you share 3 of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
- Be consistent in delivering value to your stakeholders — Mustefa, program director at Parkdale Center for Innovation, says when you’re consistent in driving value to your stakeholders, they will be the amplifying voice of your platform.
- Finding the right investor is like a relationship. Your values and long-term plan have to align for it to work. When I started looking for investors, I created a list of investors not considering their area of focus and type of investments. I learned to streamline by looking into past investments and areas of focus such as impact investing.
- Do not take things personally — i.e. when people don’t respond to your email or LinkedIn conversations. I have learned that people are busy with their daily lives and, as a founder, you will have to knock on a lot of doors to get your startup out there. Have a thick skin because you will hear a lot of ‘Nos’ before you get to the ‘Yes.’ Keep going, because at the end of the day the vision is yours to realize.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
We are gearing towards the holiday season and we know a lot of brands are becoming more socially conscious. This helps create an opportunity to partner with brands using Goodszilla as a platform to make an impact. We are also looking to put a lot of new excess inventory to good use, and leverage the reverse logistic space because we know most brands do not re-list returned items and are looking for ways to make an impact and save on taxes.
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
How I Built This by Guy Raz. This is a podcast I would recommend to anyone starting out a business. Guy has interviewed founders and CEOs about their journey and I can say I learned a lot from hearing these conversations.
A friend of mine introduced me to a book called New Power, which was very insightful. It talks about the power in creating a movement and how to make it work for you in a positive way.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“An idea is a vision only you can see clearly; it requires consistent work and effort towards realizing this vision in order to get others on board.”
When you have an idea and start conceptualizing it, you often see a lot of doubts from people close to you. Maybe they don’t believe in the idea, or they’re worried you’ll spend too much money on it. It’s up to you to prove your business and your concept. Many have had ideas, but only a few have taken it a step further. It’s almost the same as an investor asking for metrics and traction. As a founder, you always have to keep moving the needle.
If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
A movement of turning goods into goodness. We understand how impact-oriented late millennials and Gen Z are becoming more conscious about their shopping, thrifting, and recycling. If we could all passively shop and give back, imagine the impact we would have.
All while getting a tax incentive! Brands and big corporations need to do better with excess inventory without burning or engaging in environmentally unfavorable practices in the name of saving brand value. These are items that can be put to good use and I commend those for taking the right path
How can our readers follow you online?
LinkedIn — Goodszillapp
Instagram –@ Goodszillapp
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Meet The Disruptors: Toju Ogbeide Goodszilla On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
