Lessons from the University to the Field
A Q&A with Nthabi Mosia, Co-Founder & CMO of Easy Solar
Nthabiseng (Nthabi) Mosia, Alexandre (Alex) Tourre, and Eric Silverman founded Easy Solar with a vision to transform the face of energy in a country that’s been in the dark for too long. Today, only 11 percent of Sierra Leone’s 7 million people have access to electricity. Easy Solar’s mission is to bring new hope and opportunity to the country by making high-quality solar energy available and affordable for all. They do this by distributing a suite of high-quality solar products on affordable payment plans to communities underserved by the grid.
We sat down with Nthabi Mosia, who founded Easy Solar while in school at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, to ask her for advice about starting a business as a student and to learn about the lessons she’s learned from building Easy Solar.
What inspired you to work in the energy sector?
I grew up in South Africa, and around when I was in high school, we had power outages consistently. Because most houses in South Africa don’t have a generator and most people can’t afford a backup system, we lived by candlelight on some nights. I remember I studied for some of my final exams by candlelight. I think when you don’t have something you realize how central and core it is to what you’re doing.
But I think South Africa is still really privileged in contrast to the rest of Africa. When I was working as a management consultant, I was doing projects across the continent and realized that you can’t really talk about wide-scale development unless we fix the power issue. I was fortunate enough to only have to study by candlelight a few times in a night or a week or a month depending on the load shedding schedule, but some people have to read in toxic kerosene fumes. When I first was in a house in Sierra Leone that was using kerosene and I had to breathe in those toxic fumes, I couldn’t even stand it for five minutes. I felt the impact right away, and people have been living like that for quite a while. I think what inspired me to work in this sector was a personal dissatisfaction or inconvenience that morphed into being frustrated with the lack of development. It was thinking about the 600 million people without power and what that means for Africa.
Tell us about the creation of Easy Solar. How did the idea come about? How did you research, test, and develop your idea?
Easy Solar came up as an idea when we were still in grad school. It’s been through many, many, many iterations. It started off as a communal charging solar kiosk, and it eventually morphed into its current mode where we distribute solar products with affordable payment plans through a network of community-based agents and shops.
When we were deciding where to build a company, we asked ourselves, “where is the strongest need?” There were lots of other companies doing things in different parts of the continent, but Sierra Leone seemed like a huge, untapped market. Eric knew the landscape really well from living and working there for a few years during Peace Corps. He speaks the local language, which is so important when you’re running these types of businesses, especially when you’re doing distribution. Market need, limited competition and local context; those factors made us focus on Sierra Leone.
While Alex, Eric, and I were in grad school, we developed an initial idea, entered it into the D-Prize and won, and received seed funding. We entered a few other competitions and hackathons throughout school and won some of them. We tapped into the networks at our school to help refine and polish the idea into what it is now.
How did you meet your co-founders? What advice do you have for students forming new teams?
The co-founders story is always interesting because we are a very different mix of people. Eric I had met through a class we were doing on energy access in the developing world. Alex, who is an engineer and computer scientist by training, was also studying at Columbia’s School of International Public Affairs, where we all met.
All three of us founders were really committed and passionate about energy access for different reasons. There are a lot of competing factors when you’re starting a business in school. People may be really excited at the outset, but for one reason or another — a grad school loan or a family commitment — they might fall out. I think it’s really important to have conversations upfront about whether starting a business is something you really want to do and how long can you commit to it.
Another thing that I think has really allowed us to flourish throughout a bumpy but enjoyable road… in 4 wheel drive… very Sierra Leonean-esque… has been our complementing skills and personalities. You kind of want it to be like a marriage. You balance each other out, but you also drive each other crazy and push each other to be better. I like that about the three of us. We’re never complacent with each other. I think because we’re so different.
At the end of the day, we always say, “Our mission is the company’s mission.” So, no matter what personal dynamics get in the way, that brings us back. Which is why passion, focus, and commitment should be the driving forces behind how you build your team.
Tell us about a time when you adapted your business model based on feedback from customers.
Initially we thought we could come in with full solar home systems and Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) financing. But when we did a survey of the Sierra Leonean landscape to figure out whether people would be able to afford a solar system or solar lantern, we realized that average income in Sierra Leone was slightly lower than we had expected and that it’s more of a cash based economy compared to Kenya or Tanzania.
The survey helped us realize two things. First, we can’t rely on mobile money, and second, if we came in with a Solar Home System, we’d either not get enough penetration or we’d have super high default rates, which was happening a lot in the industry. We developed a tiered sales approach in response to those findings.
We come in with an entry level lantern that can charge your phone and that retails $15–30, depending on the lantern, and people can finance anywhere between 4 months on the smallest lantern to 7–9 months on the larger ones. This makes it a price point that almost anyone can afford. We use the payment data to evaluate whether people can qualify for higher purchases, like a solar home system. We’re still a solar home system company, in essence, but we do more of a credit appraisal process. The benefit of that is that we know our customers before they buy a $200 home system.
A recent Lean Data study found that delivering quality customer service is one of the biggest challenges energy access companies face. Easy Solar has exceptional customer reviews, so can you tell us about Easy Solar’s strategy for ensuring quality customer service?
Being a distribution company, we see ourselves having two key assets. The first is our agent network that forms our distribution network. The second is the payment information and data.
With our distribution network, we want our agents to be able to sell a continuous pipeline of products to customers. We really want to minimize churn. So, in addition to thinking about a lifetime customer relationship, we think about a lifetime agent relationship. Our first agent is still with us. He’s like “Mr. Easy Solar” in his village. We train agents, and we make sure they’re really well branded. We make sure we instill the company’s mission, vision, and values in a way agents can understand through frequent training. We also make sure we have someone on our management team visit agents on a weekly basis. With all of the agents, we try to invest in them as people. That really frames the relationship that this company is a family where people can improve and better themselves and their community. When our agents are interacting with customers, that comes through. We think that happy employees — happy agents — are the first ingredients for happy customer service relationship.
As a company, we really put the customer at the center of what we do. We haven’t perfected it. I’m not going to sit here and say we have happy customers all around. We try and focus on why customers are unhappy — they can’t get a hold of an agent or there’s an issue with their product, and there’s no replacement stock. Those are things we try to focus on and improve the time-to-service delivery.
Based on your experience of starting a social enterprise in school, what advice would you have for other students looking to launch a social enterprise?
You need to know when and how to ask for help. There are three ways we asked for help.
First, make sure that you’re using the school’s resources as effectively as possible, both in a class context and with professors. For example, in our second year of school, we adapted all our classes to make sure either we were focusing on something that was relevant to the business or to Sierra Leone. There’s always trade-offs you have to weigh around how much time you focus on school versus your business. As much as possible, try to find an overlap between school and business.
Second, if your school has an entrepreneurship program, tap into that. Seek out mentorship programs, hackathons, incubators, workshops, grants and tap into all of it.
Third, ask for help from people already in your industry. We were fortunate enough to be in contact with people who were at a later stage in the entrepreneurship journey and were actually willing to chat with us. You’d be surprised how many people are willing to take 30 minutes out of their day for someone who is in a position that they were a few years ago. Those conversations were the most valuable. People can give you a reality check on what will work and what won’t, and they can help you think about your challenges differently. And don’t take no for an answer! Sometimes we had to hound people for time, but those 10 minutes of time we got were still so helpful for us.
What are the biggest pitfalls or mistakes you’ve seen social entrepreneurs in this sector encounter?
The first one that comes to mind is having a solution-first approach, not a problem-first approach. You need to be willing, at every stage, to accept that you might be wrong about what you’re doing. There’s a balance between having confidence in the fact that you’ve got a good idea, and being willing to adjust or amend it. The customer, at the end of the day, is the one who knows what they need.
The second one — and I think it’s linked to the first — is not necessarily respecting the local context enough when you’re building your team or thinking about people and culture. A lot of people I’ve seen who are very passionate about social entrepreneurship don’t fully understand the context of the problem or maybe haven’t experienced the problem themselves. We were three expats coming into Sierra Leone, trying to build a business that lasts. One of the first decisions we made about building our team was to bring in Sierra Leonean talent to build their own company. It was 2 years before we recruited a foreign national. We’ve had times when we’ve gotten survey results that we don’t understand or that frustrate us, and one of our Sierra Leonean managers will say, “Of course that makes sense”.
Lastly, I think a lot of people think a good idea and a good team is enough, but just from a personal perspective, you have to be willing to put in the work and you have to have the right expectations. Sierra Leone has some of the best beaches in the world — and that’s not a shameless plug, it’s really true — and I didn’t see a beach for the first 6 months I was there. That’s because, especially as a co-founder, if you don’t do the work, no one is going to do it for you. And it’s not always going to be fun. Be very open to having nights — or weeks — where you don’t sleep. We lived and worked in the same building and drove each other crazy. I think you need to have the expectations that the day to day sometimes just is not great. You need to know why you’re there and return to your mission. It’s going to be a ride, and it’s going to be amazing once it pays off.
But it might not pay off. We always profile the successes, but sometimes you will fail. Failure is not failure until you leave it there. If it doesn’t pay off and the business is not successful, be willing to go back and ask if you’ll try it again from scratch, or if you’ll start a new project. Humility means being willing to fail and knowing that you’re still learning something along the way.
Want to learn more about Easy Solar? Get a firsthand look at Easy Solar’s impact and experience the power of solar through Acumen’s docuseries, ENVISION. ENLIGHTEN. EMPOWER.
