Flutterwave’s Dev-centric Approach; My Hot Takes from the Developer Experience Meetup.
“Developers can now earn by integrating company payments with Rave, without the company even knowing — and this is legal,” Wale, a Flutterwave Sales Lead, said.
This announcement sounded so good to be true, and I had to confirm from a Flutterwave Developer Advocate, Raphael — the answer was in the affirmative.
“Freelancers can even use Rave to receive payment from websites like Upwork and Fiverr,” he added.
That would sound like enough gains for an event that was still in its first hour.
I have a story.
Flutterwave’s Developer Experience; Code and Beyond, is a part of a larger body of the brand’s community advocacy effort.
In attendance were people from the beginner to senior developer spectrum.
A little bit about Flutterwave?
The way the international community works is — more money, more respect. Africa has been a regrettable veteran of this world order, with brands and governments keeping Africa at the tail of its business priority.
Dior has more than 200 stores in the world, and about 3 in Singapore, a country of 2m people. However, Dior has just one store in Africa, a continent of 1bn people.
Hate it or leave it; this is the eyes from which the world sees Africa — the continent that needs more aids than investments. Aids never helped any country gain respect, rather they do the opposite.
Africa needs real freedom, not the one that comes from the blades of spears, but the one that oozes from a freshly minted currency of economic freedom.
Is anyone doing anything about it?
Maybe.
Flutterwave in 2016 understood the impact of attracting funds to Africa and Africans, and, decided to make things happen. Till today, the company has processed $2bn in payments, all without having a gateway through China, which is Africa’s biggest trading partner.
Fun Fact: Alipay has 105 million June Visitors to its platform from 199 countries, including African countries.
During the meetup which I expected to be saturated with technical content, I was amazed there were soft, juicy content for beginners and non-developers.
Judith Ifeoma spoke on ‘The Importance of Developer Experience as a Front-end Developer’ while Ifunanya Ikemma spoke on “Best Practices to Ensure Great Developer Experiences in Server Side Applications.”
In all of these, the focus is on the developer, and this leads me to Flutterwave’s dev-centric strategy.
Inbound marketing has taken another angle, and for whatever the value proposition is, the buyer persona must be in a sales flywheel, rather than a sales funnel. With Rave, Flutterwave is putting developers in the middle of its marketing flywheel.
Funny because people think Flutterwave’s primary buyer personas are companies just like the B2C acronym supposes. However the company understands that small business owners just want to receive their money at best rates. The choice of platform often lies on the recommendations of the developer.
John Odey, a Javascript Developer stated, “the highlight of the event was when they announced that developers can earn for life by using their developer referral codes, instead of receiving one time payment for a project the developer delivered.”
With all of these, Rave may likely be a B2C product, with the C representing the developer. No wonder the company jumped rain and shine, to hire developer advocates!
Flutterwave is arguably going for the jugular, and what are other payment platforms doing?
A leading company, Paystack and its 400k June visitors has seemingly dominated the Nigerian market with its 30,000+ merchants and various strategic partnerships.
However, is there a chance that the Flutterwave developer-centric approach is likely to unsettle the competition, not minding Paystack’s several strategic partnerships with companies like Lambda School?
About 37.9% of Paystack’s June traffic came from their several partnerships like Luno, Bet9ja, Lambda school and the rest, but 0.5% of Alipay’s June traffic (105m) could upturn all that, all things being equal.
Stripe? Interswitch? Great jobs from them all.
But!
More and more work to do for competitors.
My advice?
Make developers your target market and companies will fall in place. Those guys have huge powers. You know why? Most small business owners who don’t have technical experience, tend to listen to people who do.
Not like this is a secret.
Alipay as the Game Changer?
At the meetup, I asked Wale (the sales guy) about the nature of the Alipay deal, and he was benevolent enough to give me insights into the nature of the partnership. Presently, China contributes only 1.02% of Flutterwave’s traffic to its landing page, according to my research.
However, the Alipay deal is set to boost this figure to the high mountains, and I project — third.
Alipay and its 1BN users may not be wrong to partner with Flutterwave. This is because while Paystack seems to be the gateway to Nigeria for instance, Flutterwave is supposedly the gateway to Africa.
85% of Paystack’s traffic comes from Nigeria as against Flutterwave’s 58%, with a surprising 10% coming from the U.S. Asides that, there is a 17% increase in traffic from Ghana and 223% increase from Uganda, all in the favor of Futterwave.
What is going on over there?
With Flutterwave, Ghana sends Nigeria money, Nigeria sends Ghana money. The U.S. sends Nigeria money, and Uganda is asking for their share. With China coming into the mix, following the Alipay deal, this time next year may see Flutterwave’s $2bn in processed payment, looking like a joke.
But this comes with a caveat — that Futterwave must carry through with its promise of an upcoming release, as Mr Odey states, “that is something we look forward to.”
He continues, “the API has to be very cool and easy to understand. They should also provide ‘How to’ snippets for recurrent payments and setting Rave up to receive foreign currency.”
An interview with Kenny, one of Flutterwave’s Developer Advocates shows that the company has programs in place to solve Mr Odey’s worries.
“Hackathons and tutorials (visual and text-based), will go a long way in our overall dev outreach strategy,” kenny said, while trying hard not to reveal internal plans of the company. “We also have big plans for startups,” he quickly added.
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I am a marketer who attends developer meetups. If one must market, one needs to know the buyer persona.
Right?
Flutterwave is seemingly doing same by deepening its knowledge-base of the Nigerian developer through these meetups. The company is also strengthening its feedback pipeline by listening to voices like Mr. Odey’s and many other of Nigeria’s developers.
While this is a wake-up call for every competitor, it is kudos to Flutterwave and the organizers of the event.
