How Mark Essien survive as a CEO during the one year running of Hotels.ng

UOB #FoundersView is a short Q&A (interview with successful founders) column to educate, inspire, motivate and empower up and coming startup CEOs, Founders, and Entrepreneurs.

After Mark Essien, the CEO and founder of Hotels.ng, the biggest hotel booking portal in Nigeria saw our tweet here, he was interested in revealing his tips and secrets to us.

Though we realized that the up and coming founders find it so easy to launch startups these days, but the challenge is that more than 95% of them fold up before or after a year of launching. So when we pointed out this challenge, we decided to reach out to Mark Essien who Hotels.ng is now three years under his watch to share with us his success story.

In this exclusive short Q&A (interview), we (including you) will get to learn about Hotels.ng ups and downs from founder and CEO Mark Essien.

UOB: How did you survive as a CEO during the one year running of Hotels.ng?

Mark Essien: We have been through 3 years, a year where we were properly funded in which case it was simply a matter of building the business and trying to get to some form of revenue.

We have also been through a year where we had no money, we had run out of money and surviving was an everyday battle, we always had to think, “where would we find the next money for salaries?”

we had to constantly be cutting cost, constantly make sure that people were able to bring in money that exceeded the amount that we had to pay for their services. 

I think that surviving a start-up is a very interesting experience but the good thing out of it is that you learn from all the ups and downs that no matter what, you would always find the way through and that gives you the confidence you need to actually build a successful business.

Please kindly share your thoughts with us after reading using the below comment box. You can also follow the discussion here on twitter and on our facebook page. Thanks!