Lotanna Ezeike, 23, is the founder and head of business development at XPO. He hails from the home of Big Ben – London. His app XPO is always on the UK AppStore charts and has also been ranked as the best app for influencers. He is a busy man, but he did find time to sit down with us and share some facets of his journey with us.
Q: Your app – XPO is more or less always charting on the UK AppStore. What exactly is it that XPO does? How did the need for it arise?
Lotanna: Well, I started working on XPO after I saw influencers waiting for months on end to get paid for the work that they’ve already done. They’d partner with a brand, post about them and the customers would quickly trickle towards the brand. The brand reaped the benefits of the partnership immediately but what about the influencer? Why should the other partner have to wait that long when the other one isn’t? What XPO does is cut the waiting period for influencers. XPO pays the influencer within 24 hours after the influencer puts in a payment request, and then the brand pays us money in 30-120 days.
Q: That is a really innovative concept, but where does the money that you pay to the influencer come from?
Lotanna: Wherever we get an immediate payment request from an influencer, we request the capital from our partner Sonovate and then we charge 10% on the invoice value from the influencer.
Q: What is the dynamic and distribution of responsibilities in your team?
Lotanna: We are a team of four at XPO, I am the founder and head of business development, I have two co-founders Tomi Aiyeola and Franck Ndame. Tomi is the head of marketing, Franck is the CTO. And Ahmad Karkouti is the senior software engineer at XPO. We have a great dynamic, we are each other’s strength and support system.
Q: What are your plans for the future?
Lotanna: I want to partner up with brands like Boohoo to offer XPO as an alternative payout option to the creators and agencies they work with. I’d also like to scale up our operation and help out more influencers.