But first…
5am: Dawn breaks over scattered palm trees and concrete jungle that is Accra. I look out the window, mentally preparing myself for the long day ahead of us. Donning on our people’s traditional battle dress (okay, the company work polo), we head out on the daily route to 4 schools across Accra.
11am: We’re at Preset, one of the larger prep schools in the dusty Madina district of Accra, in front of a class of 60 students, doing a demonstration of our video learning app. Following that standard script we’ve used at countless other schools, we provide a free wifi hotspot for students interested in downloading the app right then and there.
“Does anyone have any questions?” I ask, hoping that everyone understood me, despite the thick American accent. A girl in the far back meekly raises her hand.
Student: “I can’t install the app”
Me: “Why not?”
Student: “I don’t have enough storage on my phone”
Me: “Don’t worry — I will find a solution”
Diverting other school visits that day, we embarked on a mini Ghanaian Odyssey to find a Micro SD card, finally securing our prize, before making it back to the school just in time before it closed. Catching Bernice as she was leaving the school, we helped her install the SD card, and then our app on her phone, before exchanging phone numbers for future followup.
7pm: At home, checking our app’s analytics, I noticed we had onboarded ~80 students that day, just crossing the 5k threshhold. I’m not sure which of those 80 students Bernice was, but I’d like to think of her as our 5,000th student — a symbolic reminder of the manual guerilla tactics we’ve used to recruit students thus far.
Now, 5k users is not a big number — but in contrast to just spamming ads on facebook or going for press releases, our school to school guërilla tactics and manual recruitment has provided us with something far more valuable than vanity metrics: a solid personal connection with thousands of students in Accra, as well as a much deeper understanding of their lives, and of the market.
Halfway there
Those personal connections, plus our internal data analysis, have helped us slowly improve our app. We’ve made solid progress to date, in terms of attracting students, fixing bugs and increasing retention, but we still have some way to go — for example, working in parents into the whole equation, as well as figuring out digital payments in a market where fewer than 1% of students have credit cards.
The decision to expand to Nigeria
Just this month we started a silent launch / roll out in Nigeria. For those that don’t remember, we’re focused in the short term on helping students pass the WASSCE, a college entrance exam taken by 3m students a year across West Africa, including both Ghana and Nigeria.
Besides Jollof, there are some material differences between the two countries that directly impact our company
- The population size is almost 10x bigger
- Phones are banned in Ghanaian high schools, but not in Nigerian high schools
- Most of our employees are in Nigeria. Nigeria is also a better place to find talent, mostly just because the talent pool is bigger
When we started, there were a couple of reasons we chose Ghana, but despite the advantages of starting in Ghana, we’ve been fighting against the disadvantage of not having a Ghanaian founder as well, both for understanding the market, and for establishing a Ghanaian office / entity.
With a number of staff already in Lagos, who understand the market, it should be easier for us to iterate, and test our product in Nigeria (not to mention that in any scenario, the lion’s share of our revenue will come from Nigeria).
Many of these factors led us to (1) Set up our office in Lagos, and (2) Start focusing on the Nigerian market as well.
The logistics
We’ve thus begun our move into Nigeria, first and foremost by changing our product’s name to Kemi’s Academy
This summer, Tunde will set up an office in Lagos, and by September (assuming paperwork goes through smoothly), we should have our full team actually working out of the same city (and room) for the first time ever! Then we can finally get back to doing what we do best:
