#datafree Moya App closing in on 1 million daily active users in South Africa

Disruptive innovation in action

In December 2018 we launched the #datafree Moya App in South Africa with the “Discover” feature to access a variety of internet services at no data cost to users.

Since then Moya’s viral growth has been nothing short of phenomenal and is on track to go past 1 million daily active users by mid-February 2020.

Moya is #datafree and works even when users have zero airtime or data balance on their SIM cards, across all mobile networks.

A technical glitch in October 2019 slowed things down a bit as did the festive season break last December, but 2020 growth is looking strong.

The Moya Discover audience platform available to advertisers and enterprises looking to reach mass-market audiences in South Africa is now 2x larger than top SA website News24 in terms of daily active users.

The tech industry — and every resulting industry — is built on the framework of technology disruption and innovation devised by Clayton Christensen who sadly passed away this week.

The crux of his theory is that big, successful companies that neglect potential customers at the lower end of their markets are ripe for disruption from smaller, more efficient, more nimble competitors that can do almost as good a job more cheaply.

WhatsApp messenger dominates emerging markets and is truly great, but it does not work unless the user has mobile airtime or data.

WeChat dominates China in many ways more than just messaging, but when it tried to enter the South African market with the backing of global internet powerhouse Naspers it failed miserably, because it came with no disruptive innovation.

Moya’s messaging services are every bit as good as WhatsApp plus adds the Discover feature with a growing array of useful and entertaining content services, all #datafree.

That’s disruptive innovation in action.

May you RIP Clayton and thank you for everything.