Day Zero, Spreadsheets and Airtable.
Six (6) months ago i started piloting an idea born out of the need to solve a problem i witnessed first hand leading sales at OyaPay. While conducting market research, i realised that Micro and Small businesses typically face 3 challenges;
- Access to affordable Capital
- How to increase customers
- How to grow revenue
While OyaPay catered to 2&3, the importance of “affordable” capital and how it can directly influence growth as it relates to customers and revenue became clear to me. So my journey began…
Spreadsheet and Airtable
In August 2018, i moved back in with my parents. location was far sought of Lagos, i needed to be closer to the market, to get real data that will help me determine how much value we can create — market fit.
To provide a context; when we started MicroMoni, we had not built a thing, not even a landing page — just Google spreadsheet and Airtable. God bless Larry and Howie Liu.
In February 2019, we hit our 100th customer (78% of which were returning customers) with over 300+ pending request on the wait-list, we knew we had to start building something. Time to put all the pieces together.
This tweet from Olumide “D.O” Olusanya was the guiding light all through that early period of testing. I would wake up every morning, look at it and ask myself “Are we building a good enough solution to this problem or are we just an alternative? how painful is the problem to the target market and how large is the market?
You see, it is easy to get carried away in building a product for a personal problem you experienced. However, if the people who have same problem aren’t a lot or have access to better alternatives, you are screwed!
“ In a great market - a market with lots of potential customers, the market pulls product out of the startup” — Marc Andreessen
At this point, we knew how big the problem was, had identified the segment where value would be created most - they will do anything for that problem to be solved, we knew what type of tech we needed to build and how best to channel any incoming fund.
Introducing…
MicroMoni provides micro-loans to low income micro business operators in under-served communities by leveraging on independent agent networks.
We are also building a proprietary machine learning system that will use data from multiple sources to assess credit risks at scale which are then optimized for segments, business risk and timescale.
Simply, a micro retail business operator can walk to the nearest agent to request a loan, get it approved and disbursed same day to their bank account or mobile money wallet. No collateral, No rigorous paperwork and a convenient repayment plan.
“Agent networks are the backbone of African digitization as they offer an effective way of distributing digital services.” says Tidjane Dème, General Partner at Partech
So Far..
We are just getting started.
I am a strong advocate of financial inclusion and MicroMoni is on a global mission to provide accessible and affordable credit to the next 20 million under-served in rural Africa.
-Ibe
