I first met Teniola Adedeji, CEO and co-founder of Pharmarun, at a health tech panel discussing the early days of launching Pharmarun. She told the audience that Pharmarun started with one simple observation: no single pharmacy ever had everything a patient needed. “People would wait, substitute, or send relatives across cities just to find medicine,” she says. That pain point became the seed of a platform now connecting 1,000 pharmacies and serving over 115,000 Nigerians.
Adedeji is my guest on today’s edition of Day 1–1000. She tells how Pharmarun grew from a WhatsApp lifeline during COVID to a nationwide healthcare platform.
This is the story of Pharmarun as told to .
Day 0: A name before its time
I’ve always known I wanted to run a pharmacy business. What I didn’t know was how restless I’d feel inside the four walls of a traditional community pharmacy. In 2020, I scribbled a name—Pharmarun—registered it, then tucked it away. I didn’t have a business yet, just a conviction that one day I would reimagine how people in Nigeria accessed medicine.
At that time, I had a half-formed dream: something like Jumia, but for pharmacies. It wasn’t grounded in problem-solving yet. It was simply the vision of a different way to practice pharmacy.
The problem revealed itself during COVID. Pharmacies rarely had all the medications patients needed. Customers begged for substitutions, waited days for stock to arrive, or sent relatives across cities and villages with shopping lists that felt like lifelines.
Because I was in pharmacy networks, I knew where to find even the most elusive items. On WhatsApp, friends would message me: “My dad’s pharmacy is closed. He needs this drug urgently. Can you help?” I could. And soon it wasn’t just one or two people. It was 20. Then 50.
That WhatsApp “side service” became the proof point: this wasn’t just a favor. It was a problem worth solving.
Day 1: Day One with Lola
By late 2021, I began to think seriously about scale. My best friend, Lola, was a product manager at MAX, the logistics startup. I would pick her brain endlessly: How do we test this? Can we build a simple site? How do we know if there’s demand?
At first, I hesitated to ask her to join me—her career was flourishing, and I didn’t want to drag her into uncertainty. But eventually, it was obvious: we did everything else together; why not this?
In 2022, Lola became my co-founder. That was Day One.
We launched a Wix website, opened social media pages, and waited. The response was immediate. Strangers—not just friends of friends—were asking us to source their medications. The problem was real, and people were ready to pay for the solution.
The first month was chaotic. Most orders still came through WhatsApp, and Lola and I did the legwork ourselves. I’d dash out of the pharmacy to pick up meds, while she juggled logistics and customer updates. We weren’t just running a startup; we were delivery drivers, customer service reps, and pharmacists rolled into one. I remember thinking: If this feels this hard now, maybe we’re onto something real.
Day 50: First pitch deck
We built our first deck which was very messy. We applied for a fund run by Eloho and Odun. We didn’t understand valuations, problem statements, or what a VC wanted to see. But that first interview forced us to articulate what Pharmarun could be. It was the first time I stopped calling it “a side project” and started calling it a company.
By the hundredth day, we had inched beyond friends and family. A health insurance company signed us to deliver medication to their clients. I still remember the thrill of our first bulk order — bagging medicines late into the night, personally dropping them off to see customers’ reactions.
We weren’t just solving a problem. We were becoming infrastructure.
Day 200: Scrappy tech, real revenue
We automated with no-code tools. A chatbot collected requests. We built a basic portal so orders could flow more smoothly. And we hustled: literally picking up medicines from pharmacies ourselves, hand-delivering them, watching the faces of customers light up.
Our first hires reflected the grind. An operations lead with pharmacy experience. A growth hustler who could knock on the doors of health insurance companies. The B2B route made sense—insurers needed reliable fulfillment partners. Soon, we signed our first corporate contracts.
That period was a blur of adrenaline and exhaustion. From a handful of pharmacies in Lagos, we grew to dozens across the state. By the end of 2023, Pharmarun had a network of hundreds, stretching toward every corner of Nigeria.
Growth came fast and with it, strain. Demand was surging, but funding was thin. We were running out of money, running on grit. In the middle of that storm, we entered Pitch2Win on a whim. The prize was only $10,000—not exactly what you think of when you’re staring at payroll and expansion. But against all odds, we won. In a hall full of fintechs, the scrappy health-tech startup took the crown. That validation was euphoric. It proved we weren’t delusional. The ripple effect was real: more traction, publicity, and eventual funding. That win pulled us back from the brink.
In hindsight
Looking back, our first 100 days were filled with wasted energy on product perfection. I obsessed over design sessions, wireframes, the “right” tech stack. In hindsight, I should have been laser-focused on users—getting them in, learning from them, adapting fast.
The other big lesson: co-founders matter. I wasted time searching for a “technical co-founder” because that’s what the ecosystem said I needed. But the truth was in front of me all along: Lola. From Day 1, it should have been us together.
The next stage was chaos. We were turning over staff every three months—some couldn’t adapt, others left when they realised the ambiguity wasn’t for them. We were scaling demand faster than we could build supply. Pharmacies in states we’d never set foot in were suddenly essential partners.
But through it all, one thing stuck: you need believers. The early team must be adaptable, ready to pivot daily, sometimes hourly. , you need process people—the ones who can take what’s working and scale it reliably. Knowing when to swap one kind of teammate for another has been one of our hardest, most valuable lessons.
If I can summarise all of the lessons I have learned along the way, it would be: For Day 1–100, you need to obsess less about perfect products, more about users. For day 100–500, you need believers more than résumés. Hire people who can thrive in chaos. For Day 500–1,000, structure catches up with you. Processes and process-driven people become the difference between momentum and burnout.
Day 1000-present day: A thousand pharmacies, 115,000 users
Today, Pharmarun works with more than 1,000 pharmacies across all 36 states of Nigeria and contracts with 20 of Nigeria’s largest insurers — AXA, Hygeia, Clearline, Red Care, THT, IHMS. Over 115,000 people have used our platform. We serve consumers directly, partner with communities, and insurers.
We’ve grown far beyond that WhatsApp group. But the essence hasn’t changed: make access to medicine fast, easy, and reliable. We’ve matured into a scaling company. Now we need process people, operators who can replicate success at scale. We’re focused on B2C growth, aiming for our first million users. And yet, the hardest part hasn’t changed: convincing pharmacies we’re collaborators, not competitors.
The hardest part has been building trust with pharmacies. We’re not here to compete with them; we’re here to connect them. But in a fragmented sector—where some chains are tech-enabled and others still record sales on paper—consolidation is painstaking. Training, onboarding, persuading: it’s the most laborious work we do.
What’s next for us? Now, it’s about scale. Marketing everywhere. A million users in sight. And beyond that, building the infrastructure that can truly transform access to healthcare in Africa.
Would I do it again? My friends tease me that my dream job is to be a housewife, playing with my kids while spending my husband’s money. But the truth is, I would do this all over again. The validation from a customer whose life we’ve touched outweighs the fatigue, the doubt, even the fear.
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