Deborah Adeoluwasina Wasn’t Looking for a Business Idea. The Business Idea Found Her on WhatsApp.
The businesses weren’t just buying airtime. They were trying to say thank you, and they had no good way to do it.
It started simply enough. Around 2020, Deborah Adeoluwasina was helping students buy airtime and data through a manual, WhatsApp-based system. Price lists were posted. Numbers collected. Requests fulfilled. It was unglamorous work, and it worked.
But something else was happening underneath it. Businesses kept coming, not just for airtime, but to run campaigns, reward loyal customers, and incentivize staff. One brand alone processed close to a million transactions through the system over just a few months. That wasn’t a side effect. That was the signal.
The problem, once she saw it clearly, was everywhere. There was no simple, scalable way for businesses to distribute rewards and incentives without wrangling customer data, managing manual processes, or navigating systems built for enterprises with budgets most SMEs would never see. The tools that existed were either too complex, too expensive, or both. So businesses improvised with spreadsheets, with WhatsApp threads, with processes that broke the moment they tried to grow.
Deborah rebuilt everything.
“The broken system was how businesses reward and engage customers, manual, fragmented, and hard to scale,” she says. “We built Swype to make incentives seamless. Businesses create campaigns, share a link, and customers redeem instantly while we handle everything behind the scenes.”
Swype is a loyalty and incentive platform that lets businesses create reward pools, distribute customizable redemption links, automate customer engagement, send birthday rewards without lifting a finger, and launch campaigns without a technical team. It has since expanded into vouchers, bulk SMS, email, WhatsApp automation, and a growing ecosystem where businesses can source rewards from one another.
From churches to corporates, SMEs to startups, the customers who find Swype tend to ask the same question Deborah heard from the very beginning: why wasn’t this always this easy?
What started as a hustle became a platform. And the platform is just getting started.
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