Toju Ogbeide is the founder of Goodszilla, a second-hand marketplace that facilitates fundraising partnerships between sellers and charitable organizations. The company has recently set its sights on Shopify’s 1.75 million merchants with the introduction of a checkout plugin that helps online businesses seamlessly integrate donations into their checkout process. With a strong background in computer science, Ogbeide has the product development piece handled. Now, he’s turning his attention to sales and marketing with the hopes that his plugin will have a meaningful impact on the charities and merchants he partners with.
Whether it’s Goodszilla’s online marketplace for second-hand goods or their brand new Shopify plugin, it’s clear that Ogbeide’s computer science background and master’s degree in management are being put to good use. The suite of tech solutions he and his team have developed are well positioned to not only help reduce landfill waste, but also to support charities in need of funding to carry out their work. The next challenge Ogbeide and his team now face is getting the word out about their products; in particular, their new plugin product. “The marketplace has been there,” says Ogbeide “but the plugin is a new product. So how do we get that out there? How do we [connect with] other Shopify stores?”
As a Parkdale Centre program alum, Ogbeide was grappling with these questions when he came across the Racialized and Indigenous Supports for Entrepreneurs (RAISE) program through Parkdale Center’s newsletter. RAISE is a provincially funded, comprehensive grant initiative to support Indigenous, Black, and other racialized entrepreneurs in Ontario who are on the road to starting or scaling their businesses. The program provides access to business development training, business coaching through the Parkdale Centre for Innovation, culturally responsive support services, and access to grant funding. “I was like, this is what we need at this time. Because, as a business, there’s always a need for […] funding to be able to get us to where we need to get to,” says Ogbeide. His grant application was successful and Ogbeide and his team now have their sights set on putting their provincial grant funds to good use to help get the word out about their new product.
While Ogbeide has exciting plans for how he’ll spend his funds to help Goodszilla scale, he notes the educational component of the program was equally as valuable for his business. Ogbeide has been through other similar programs and incubators and was impressed with the comprehensiveness of the Digital Main Street educational modules. “I recommend businesses to just go through them even if they’re not applying for grants, [because there’s] something that they can learn,” says Ogbeide.
Equipped with new knowledge, Ogbeide and the rest of the Goodszilla team are now focused on the sales and marketing efforts for their Shopify plugin. They are in the process of creating new advertising assets to help explain their unique value to Shopify store owners through engaging video footage. The final product will be shared on their Shopify app store page and deployed as Facebook ads targeted to e-commerce entrepreneurs. Interestingly, Ogbeide shares that the new assets are not only an effective marketing tool, but also a great timesaver for their sales team. The video answers many of the questions the Goodszilla team had to field manually prior to this new content being available.
The grant will also help the company cover the cost of interns who are taking on tasks like social media content creation, graphic design, and sales. Ogbeide says that having a team of interns in place has helped free up his time to focus on what really matters in terms of building and scaling their business. He is working on cultivating strategic partnerships to help take Goodszilla to the next level. In particular, Ogbeide is excited about building relationships within the liquidation space to help divert excess inventory away from the landfill. It’s his goal to connect with liquidation partners in order to turn what most consider to be waste into funds for charities through sales on Goodszilla’s second-hand marketplace. Ogbeide is just one example of the many innovative entrepreneurs the RAISE program supports as they work to scale their businesses and create positive change.
