Douglas Kendyson

Douglas Kendyson is a Nigerian software engineer and entrepreneur best known as the founder and CEO of Selar, a bootstrapped platform that lets African creators sell digital products such as ebooks, courses, templates and memberships and get paid in local currencies.

Kendyson graduated from Covenant University at 19. He had been repairing computers for years and freelanced as a web developer from 2013. Two months after graduating he joined Paystack as one of its early team members, working on integrations with banks and plugins for content management and e-commerce platforms. Three months into that job, in 2016, he and five friends started Selar as a side project; the friends eventually dropped off and he carried it alone. He later worked on Flutterwave's Barter virtual card product for less than a year and at startups in Dubai, including Sarwa, before returning to Nigeria with more than $20,000 in savings to run Selar full time.

Growth was slow at first. Selar's first sale was a friend's music EP, and its first big milestone was ₦100 million (about $74,000) in sales in 2020, the year it introduced a paid Pro subscription. Sales then roughly doubled every year: about ₦1 billion in 2021, ₦2 billion in 2022 and ₦4 billion (about $4.4 million) paid out to creators in 2023, when the company had 21 employees and about 150,000 creators. Selar makes money from transaction commissions, subscription plans and a foreign exchange spread.

In 2024 Selar paid out ₦9.8 billion to 241,000 creators, and by early 2025 it reported 1.5 million users in 194 countries with a team of about 30. In 2025 it paid out more than ₦18 billion (about $12.8 million). The company has never taken institutional funding.

Kendyson matters because Selar is one of the most prominent bootstrapped software companies in Africa, built around the payment rails he helped create at Paystack and proof that the African creator economy can sustain a large local platform without venture money.