From Medicine to Mobile Millions: Andre Deette’s Journey Transforming Africa’s Commerce

What we talked about.

In this episode of The Sunny Ray Show, host Sunny Ray talks with Andre Deette, founder of Flood, a platform connecting offline retail stores across Africa to digital audiences through partnerships with telcos and banks. Andre traces his path from studying medicine, which he abandoned after realizing it was not his calling, to selling his first business, an educational and encyclopedia sales company, at age 27, then losing everything a year later. He describes a decade abroad in London and Asia building early fintech products, including prepaid card platforms for blue collar workers in Indonesia and the Philippines. Returning to South Africa, he joined Price Check, building one of the world's first barcode scanning apps for price comparison, which won a major international award. He later led the streaming service iflix through rapid expansion into 28 countries before its acquisition by Tencent. The conversation closes on why Silicon Valley style e-commerce models fail in Africa due to poor infrastructure, and how Flood addresses that gap by working with existing telco and bank distribution networks.

A med school dropout turned serial entrepreneur explains why Silicon Valley e-commerce fails in Africa and what actually works.

The questions, and the answers.

Can you give a quick overview of what you're building today with Flood?

We feature offline bricks and mortar stores on a digital platform and partner with large players like telcos and banks to solve the distribution and trust problem in emerging markets. We connect with a telco or bank so every small shop, even a mom and pop store in a township, can be found digitally and take part in the digital economy.

Did you study medicine before going into business?

Yes, I did a couple of years of med school but realized I wasn't excited about working with sick people. Seeing 40 patients a day telling them to take an aspirin wasn't the direction I wanted, even though I respect the calling doctors have. In my third year I read Think and Grow Rich and got fired up about the potential in the world instead.

You sold your first business at 27. What was it and what happened after?

I got into direct marketing selling Collier's Encyclopedias door to door, then built an educational system teaching kids to learn using colors and visuals. We grew it from a small dingy office into three cities before I sold it to my senior management. A year later, at 28, I lost it all again because I thought I was a big businessman.

How bad did it get after losing the business, and what kept you going?

You move into the back room of friends and buy an old classic muscle car, an old Ford Capri with a V6 you can rebuild on weekends. You end up servicing your own car and going back to selling stuff face to face. It teaches you to rebuild from nothing.

You left South Africa for nearly a decade, London then Asia. What were you looking for?

I wanted to spread my wings geographically and learn how business is done in a first world economy like London and then in Asia, where you're dealing with billions of people. My biggest lesson was that problems exist everywhere, but coming back to South Africa, people speak my language and I understand and can solve those specific problems.

What was early fintech in Asia like before it was a buzzword?

We built payment gateways and one of the first prepaid Visa and Mastercard platforms for blue collar workers across islands in Indonesia and the Philippines, since getting cash from an employer wasn't easy. We used SMS, MMS and USSD so people could check balances and pay locally without needing to send cash to an island every weekend.

When you joined Price Check in 2010, what did you build that stood out?

In 2013 we built what was probably the world's first barcode scanner into an app, letting you scan a product in store and compare it to the online price so you could negotiate a discount. That crossover between online and offline won us app of the year, beating 150,000 other apps.

You later led iflix. What was that experience like?

Iflix was a streaming service out of Malaysia that got studio content at 20 percent of the price Netflix or Disney Plus would pay, so we could sell it cheaper in emerging markets. We raised a couple hundred million dollars and scaled into 28 countries in 14 months, going live in some countries in six weeks, before the business was acquired by Tencent.