Our Experience(Belltro) in the Vodacom Digital Accelerator
Hi there 😃 it’s Belltro here! Well, I hope you are having a wonderful time and you are keeping safe. Me? I am fantastic, as you can tell from a big smile upfront. I am pretty excited too, as I recently came out of the Acceleration program that was organized by Vodacom in partnership with Smartlab. I‘m going through changes now, because who wouldn’t want to change after all those series of lessons of interest topics? (No one I guess).
The lessons in the Accelerator were very interactive and friendly, they cover almost everything from how to run daily routines to production and acquiring customers. All of the lessons were conducted virtually, no thanks to COVID-19 now we know our way around ZOOM 😁.
The Accelerator lasted for three months, but time passes very quickly, it starts to feel like the whole thing was just in one week. The devotion and passion from all the instructors were extraordinary, which made the sessions to be more engaging and fun to attend. Well don’t take my words for it, you can hear straight from our CEO Mr. Frederick.
I really learn a lot in the accelerator, the topics were designed to touch every bit of the challenge that any startup might be facing whether it’s on operation level, product level, or customer level. If there is one thing that I enjoyed from the accelerator was the one-on-one sessions between the mentors and individual startups, I mean it was great, you get to connect with a mentor and share in-depth the challenges you are facing in your startup, it was amazing!
Oh yes! one-on-one mentorship sessions between mentors and startups was an excellent idea. So how it worked was you (startup) identified what kind of skills, a knowledge that you are missing or challenges that you are facing in your startup, then you request for a meeting with a mentor who is an expert in that field, and the organizing team will schedule it for the first time, afterward, it is up to you and the mentor to decide when you should meet on the next mentorship session.
Our team had several one-on-one sessions with experts in marketing, customer care, business development, legal, and financing. These are the sessions that start as a normal online mentorship session and turn out to build a strong connection that is ambitious, encouraging, insightful, and supportive. On behalf of my team, I would like to take this chance to thank every mentor for their devotion to helping all the startups including continuously giving advice to these startups even after completion of the accelerator.
Yaay! Almost forgot the virtual party… well sometimes you gotta let go of all the work, all the hustle, everything aside, and just party!!!!
Imagine going to a party where you are actually not going anywhere. Of course! I am talking about the virtual party… the only party when attending you will not worry about getting back home safely 😅 It was epic, everyone was enjoying themselves.
After all the webinars, all the online meetings, and workshops for over three months, we finally arrived at the pitching day. Around eight startups Belltro included had a five minutes pitching of their startup idea to the judges. To make the Demo day more engaging, every startup was allowed to send two representatives to attend physically from all over Tanzania for the pitching day. Frederick, the CEO, and Ibrahim who is our business guy were the ones who attended the Demo day. As we all know practice makes perfect, so all the representatives had to arrive a few days earlier before the Demo day to rehearse and to familiarise themselves with the environment.
The Demo Day was a huge success and the all event was live-streamed so that everyone got a chance to see everything as it happened. We were the second startup to pitch our incredible idea of how to improve accessibility to customer services through messaging on the apps they already use and love like WhatsApp.
Although our team was not among the top three startups, we were able to learn something more valuable from that day, our solution could help most of the startups in the accelerator. So among the first adopters of our solution can be these startups.
We have started to look into how we can work with most of them. The future of customer services is Conversational AI. At Belltro we have made it our mission to ensure no one will miss out.
Asante!
