Relationship management is key to Credipple’s growth

This organisation’s growth strategy is to bring the creative and digital communities together in one place

JAMLAB Contributor
jamlab
3 min readJun 12, 2019

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Credipple founders: Kgololo Lekoma, Sibusiso Manentsa and Lethabo Sekhu. Picture: Beth Mahlangu

By Kgolo Lekoma

Earlier this year, Credipple started its stay on the six-month jamlab accelerator program hosted by Wits Journalism at Tshimologong.

Credipple is a digital start up that connects clients to trusted freelance creative and digital services

We do this by matching client brief with available professionals, project management, hosting industry events and facilitating knowledge transfer sessions with training and development partners.

Our goal has and still is to positively impact the creative and cultural industry by creating trusted digital channels where informal and small businesses can represent their credibility and access the micro job market.

Since joining the accelerator programme, we’ve had to do a lot of thinking and digging deep, which has led Credipple to be more client focused. This has enabled us to look at the same problems emerging professionals are facing but from the perspective of our clients.

Our programme facilitator, Indra de Lanerolle, helped us ask better questions regarding our assumptions and led us to implement better tests to validate these assumptions.

As a result, we experienced an improvement in the way we communicate with our clients. We understood their challenges better and they understood our value proposition. This iterative process guides us in developing the right services for our clients and a better business model.

A key learning that continues to put points on the board for us, is our understanding that business is between people and people. Great relationship management is key to our growth.

Jamlab has given us access to highly credible media industry stakeholders. These are intimate meetings that we as a team would never have been able to lock down.

Our name Credipple comes from the belief that credibility has a ripple effect. Without the association and collateral of being associated with Tshimologong and jamlab; it would be more difficult to build these relationships that bring credibility to Credipple.

At Credipple, easing collaboration is the base of the work we do, which is why we developed a shared portfolio management tool available at credipple.com to represent and acknowledge the relationships behind great work.

The challenges we continue to experience as entrepreneurs is operating in a slow market as media businesses continue to figure out better business models. Jamlab gave us a clear understanding of a number of ways to drive revenue in the media industry as shown in the How many ways are there to make money in the media article.

Operationally we are experiencing a need for interns as we struggle with capacity and dealing with longer payment terms for large clients. As a team all our funds are tied in the growth of the business and this means a lot of personal sacrifice.

The entrepreneurial journey is only made sweeter by the wins which you experience as a company.

Dreamers Wanted Games

Since Credipple launched in May 2018 we developed and launched the Dreamers Wanted Games.

A successful series of networking experiences designed to help emerging professionals grow their network and social capital in the industry. We continually facilitate knowledge transfer sessions to equip our community with information and digital resources to grow their business. This forms part of our growth strategy to bring creative and digital communities together in one place.

As a team, Credipple looks forward to the challenges that lie ahead and scaling our vision of connecting clients to our trusted network of creative and digital service providers.

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