There are two ways to grow from Zero to $300m valuation in a year.
1. Grow your customer base like crazy.
2. Find more bag holders.
#2 seems a lot more common. Crypto didn't help matters.
1. Grow your customer base like crazy.
2. Find more bag holders.
#2 seems a lot more common. Crypto didn't help matters.
The easiest excuse I hear is that people don't have money. Yet, @PiggyBankNG got 4 million users who save money in one product.
If people are not spending but saving, that tells you what a market wants. It is something I analyzed and discovered with a friend as far back as 2005
If people are not spending but saving, that tells you what a market wants. It is something I analyzed and discovered with a friend as far back as 2005
My friend Usman Haruna and I used to just discuss ideas. One day, we realized that motorcycles were gradually outstripping the number of cars on the streets as a means of transportation but motorcycles were not necessarily cheaper than taxis or busses. They were quick and direct.
That made us understand that the consumer may want to save money but they also want to make money quickly. They also don't mind spending money on convenience. The Aboki at your street corner is making a profit from saving you transportation cost to the market. That was value.
We realized that βvalueβ of the perception of it was more important than low cost. Most entrepreneurs in Africa don't know how to communicate this. The discovery is typically made by the customers. Great entrepreneurs seek value and propagate it. Bad entrepreneurs seek money.
We were arguing if the motorcycle rider had better unit economics than the taxi cab man? Yes, they were cheaper to maintain and consumed less fuel but they carried only one person at a time. Then came Keke Marwa to bridge both. Still, motorcycles had more freedom to find clients.
We finally hit on something. Okada riders do not compete. They find more places with less competition. If they find themselves in a busy spot, they take what they can get and move on. The most interesting question was, why are Okada riders not rich? Opay came to answer it.
They needed an aggregator and something of more value built on top of it. Recently, someone here reached out to me to get some funding for a motorcycle to help @omnibizafrica do deliveries. I reached out to the founder with the email that this was yet another layer ignored.
We complain about logistics being the problem in eCommerce but there are millions of Okadas registered in our insurance database. Millions more unregistered.
In Africa, we keep looking but we aren't seeing.
In Africa, we keep looking but we aren't seeing.
I guess it is because it is easier to find bag holders than customers or partners. The problem with bag holders is that they get distracted quite easily. This is why times are hard now.
My friends in Kenya are shutting down an e-commerce company as they can't raise money.
My friends in Kenya are shutting down an e-commerce company as they can't raise money.
Ory Sasson, told me the first time that I pitched an agent business to him that the only way it is sustainable was to have the agents as shareholders. I never forgot. This was 2016.
*or the perception of it
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