I'm taking matters into my own hands.

An escrow platform should exist and I'm building it.

I have sold stuff on Instagram for the better part of the last 5 years. One major problem has always lingered: “Absence of Trust”

As a vendor, I’d typically spend about N100,000 on Meta ads every week to reach new prospects and I’d get about 100 - 150 people reach out depending on the quality of the ads and Meta’s Algorithm.

Out of all these people, we’d only make about 10 sales.

Why?

Nobody trusts us and everyone wants to pay on delivery.

Then we should just allow customers to pay on delivery, shouldn’t we?

Well, it gets tricky. Because we have lost a lot of money to this.

Most of this money is lost in logistics costs and even missing packages.

As I type this, we have products stuck in GIG offices across the entire country.

Some customers will tell you to send them the product and then refuse to pick up your calls or your rider’s afterwards.

Or they collect the package and refuse to make payment. Some would even tell us they’re not satisfied with the order hence they are not going to pay. They will also refuse to return the goods.

Now we’d have to incur between 6000 -7,000 loss because dispatch riders and logistics companies have to get paid whether or not these packages are delivered/paid for. They made the trip and they burned fuel. Didn’t they?

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So that’s the problem.

Now I’m taking it upon myself to build a solution.

I’m calling it Midddleman and it is an escrow payment platform.

Midddleman will give buyers the confidence of paying before delivery and protect sellers from losing money and customers.

How does it work?

Well, I can’t share too much now because it’s been designed to be stupidly simple. A little too simple if you ask me.

This is one of the reasons I’m shocked/worried it doesn’t exist yet.

But then, the buyer pays the seller and the money is secured by Midddleman until the transaction is concluded.

Vendors get to own an escrow account that gives prospective buyers/customers more confidence in their business and their promise to deliver as agreed. They get to collect their money before delivery and limit the risk of losing customers who would otherwise insist on POD (payment on delivery).

In the event that the transaction goes bad, both parties are able to log a dispute and reach a conclusion that’s mutually beneficial.

But it’s not as simple as it sounds…

Quite honestly, the fintech is the easy part.

In reality, this solution is more dispute-tech (I’m tempted to actually say vayolence-tech) than fintech 😅

Maybe that’s why nobody has risked building it yet.

Because we ultimately will have to make tough decisions on every disputed transaction. Who gets the money? Vendor or buyer? And how much do they get?

Imagine having to make 10,000 such decisions every day at scale.

It’s tough, but we’ll give this a shot.

Please get familiar with the name: “Midddleman” with 3 Ds

We’re the D in the middle 😅

That will be all for now

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Online vendors can join the waitlist 👉 here

Potential early-stage investors can book a conversation 👉 here.