After the pandemic altered how we work due to draconian lockdown orders across the world, it dawned on us like never before that the world had changed. Technology offers a new path to productivity and effectiveness in the corporate arena. Multiple companies sprung up offering solutions for the new social distancing age.
How the journey started
At the time, the founders of Revent Technologies, Babatola Awe and Akintayo Okekunle, saw an opportunity for a new solution to enhance productivity and keep people sheltering in place. So they started Flowmono, a sort of DocuSign-esque company with a cloud-storage feature. The idea is that users will use their platform not just to sign contracts digitally but also to save their documents all in one place.
“We saw a rise in organisations and people looking for better ways to work remotely,” Awe, the CEO, told Technext at Flowmono’s Lekki office. “And you could see the impact on companies. Collaborative tools become more prominent across the globe,” he added.
Today the company is focused on three products, Flowmono E-Sign, Flowmono Drive and Flowmono API. But it also has other features in the works, including contract management, payroll, procurement, vendor management, business process management, expense management etc. Already it has landed a major bank as a customer, vastly testing the limit of the young startup that has yet to raise funding. Awe said that the bank ditched DocuSign to come on Flowmono.
“Almost every week we are releasing new features to enhance the experience of using the product,” Awe said.
Flowmono’s pitch for the companies that have come on board is that they can take their business wherever they go with its products.
Here is how the Flowmono e-signature works.
Users need their documents signed. On the platform, they share the document with the partner they need to sign. The partner receives it and signs. Then Flowmono Drive comes in to help them store the document in the cloud if they want.
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“Flowmono is saying it’s beyond singing. After you sign, what next? So we say now that you’ve signed, let us begin to curate other things that can happen within the organisation, including approval workflow, document review, document recall and every other document you want to sign,” Awe said.
The post-pandemic world has created more flexible corporate arrangements, and some companies have become completely remote while others employ a hybrid system thanks to Zoom, Google Meet and Flowmono. Since 2020, there has been a surge in data breaches worldwide. According to IBM, the cost of a data breach averaged $4.35 million in 2022. How does Flowmono make sure that Flowmono Drive is secure?
“Most data breach happens from the inside but many people don’t talk about it. How does it happen? It’s all about looking for the weakest link and sniffing in on passwords. Or when people connect their laptops to unauthorised wifi,” Flowmono’s CEO said.
“Security has been always at the highest of what we do from the very get-go. We’ve undergone the Nigerian Data Protection Regulation and we are currently undergoing the Global Data Protection Regulators certification, to make sure we meet both the Nigerian and global standards in protecting our customers’ data.” he added.
The internet also poses a great problem not just for Flowmono but any tech company with a product that works only online. The CEO says that the startup has its eyes set on the global market.
“While Flowmono is proudly African, we are building our product for global standards. This is why we’re getting licenses like the GDPR to meet international standards,” Awe said.
For a company like Flowmono that has an attractive product and solves an important problem in the startup world, it’s almost uncanny that it hasn’t raised. What keeps the company going, especially with competitors for talent that have raised funding?
“What we’re trying to do is achieve market fit, make sure people are using our product and it’s solving their day-to-day work processes. We understand our vision which is to become the next African unicorn business. That goal, to want to solve problems for our clients, keeps us going,” Awe said.
“What determines your success is largely the decision you make and the people you have on board. There is a mindset that you require to run a startup and it demands you to shift your mind to being more of a big picture person, seeing the future and not necessarily the now,” he said.
“We decided that we were going to use our minds and skill to make money and from that money, we will float and build our products. Then we will have a bigger bargaining chip when we go to raise. We want our investors to see value in what we are doing. Value is what we value. And if we don’t have value, we don’t want your money,” he added.
Flowmono’s ambitious dream is to help companies use less paper, save trees and make working more flexible in the near future. “By 2030 we will be helping at least one million SMEs and corporates, in general, to be working towards that near zero paper-based organisation,” he said.
Any freelancer, small business owner, or leader in large enterprises can subscribe to Flowmono and witness firsthand how its e-signature tool is making everyday work life simpler.