Reviewing Mvesesani’s First Year
My goodness that went by quickly. It doesn’t matter how many times people say it, feeling it first hand always drives the point home, time really is the most valuable commodity a person has. Our first year whizzed by & we’re already nearly half way through the first quarter of our second. Crazy.
This report is late, not by intention but honestly through the fact that we’ve been so busy. Well at least I have, my co-founder thinks that because he wrote one tiny little itsy bitsy piece about taming some wild west or something somewhere in Zambia now he can take a break. I jest, he wrote something really interesting about our experience in the Zambian music industry. You should give it a read; we would love to hear more opinions on what we shared in that post.
For those that are just tuning in, Mvesesani launched its digital music store on the 30th of December 2016. The first to do so in Zambia, as far a we know anyway. Unfortunately, there’s no way to authoritatively ascertain this. Maybe someone needs to create a Wikipedia entry about us 😉 *wink wink*? We can’t very well write about ourselves, it’s way too tempting to start calling oneself a Zambian “Sergey Brin” or other such superlatives 😅.
The digital music space in Zambia has been really interesting since we launched. There’s some validation in seeing that other Zambian entrepreneurs saw the same problem we did & are trying to solve it.
Since we launched, two telecoms services have debuted music services and another 4 (at our last count) services by local entrepreneurs like us have entered the space too. More competition in the space leads to more innovation & this is always a good thing.
Music & its consumption is a complicated affair. With so many of us trying to make the ecosystem better we can surely expect a strong music industry in the next few years.
This preamble isn’t what you came here for though is it? I know, you came for stats. Let’s dig right in shall we?
I think the most interesting statistic we have relates to one of the biggest negatives that we heard when we were working to launch Mvesesani to the public. “But Zambians don’t buy music!” everyone said to us. Yeah, we agree there’s a lot of work to be done in getting more people to pay for Zambian music. We saw a lot of strong opinions on this last year. The reaction to Wezi’s ‘Nikukonda’ when she released it exclusively in our store was pretty loud.
One could really be so disheartened based on the reaction we saw on Facebook. Then again, that could just be a Facebook problem because when we recently asked what Zambians on Twitter thought, 69% of them thought Zambian music is worth spending their money on.
Oh wait, I was going to share an interesting statistic. After all the noise to the contrary; there are some amazing souls that would rather put their Kwachas where their mouth is and let their love of music do the talking. Our customers spent an average of K70 each during 2017.
Seeing this number was a welcome relief for us considering how passionately we were told before we launched that Zambian music fans weren’t interested in buying music.
Speaking of user spend. There are some serious music fans out there. Our largest individual sale totaled up at K376
While our biggest failed transaction; due to the customer having insufficient funds in their account, came in at a total of K447. Pity, that looked like someone was ready for a really epic listening session.
It’s been interesting to watch what music interests our various customers. You all have such varied tastes! Also of interest has been watching some customers test us out with first one purchase of a single song at K9 then coming right back to buy more music after being satisfied that our service works as advertised.
For my co-founder & myself, e-commerce has been something new to the both of us. We’ve really made it a point to study and learn from the last year to inform what we do going forward. Not everything is a success story and we’re not shy to tell you that we left some money on the table in 2017. Unfortunately there were some sales that we didn’t close. Thirty one sales couldn’t be completed because customers either had their cards declined or supplied incorrect information at checkout and even further, users didn’t complete their orders a hundred and eleven times.
That’s a hundred and eleven potential purchases that could each have turned into a referral for the next person to discover our store. Sadly, many of the customers that failed to complete these canceled orders didn’t come back at a later stage to retry their purchase or purchase something else.
We’re working on making the experience of buying from us better. Hopefully next year we have positive news to share in that regard. May no Kwachas be left behind!
Mind you, we weren’t just watching as these failed transactions occurred, we were pulling out our hair (anyone who knows me will attest to the fact that I have very little left to pull out now), writing follow up emails, checking if there was something wrong with checkout on the store’s website (this was a real fear when we faced our hardest months). We’re still working on figuring out why some months were less active than others but you can imagine the stress we were going through when we were having dips in sales like the graph below illustrates.
Anyway, as we covered earlier, we have been watching your taste in music with great interest & nothing speaks more than raw figures when they are directly associated with what consumers are willing to pay for.
We present to you the best selling artists on Mvesesani for the year 2017.
Finally this post wouldn’t be complete without thanking everyone that has in some way helped us on this journey so far. Every little bit helps. For helping us out when we needed that extra bit of money (bootstrapping ain’t easy!), sheltering us, being our taxi, motivating us, helping us look good, cooking our books & just believing in what we’re trying to do; thank you.
Andrew Chibuye, Chali Chibuye, Chanda Chibuye, Chando Karidza, Chisha Folotiya, Chishala Chitoshi, Christopher Mlotchwa, Danai Tembo, Debrah Haamucenje, Eitan Stern, Enock Kauseni, Fiona Ndlovu, Francis Banda, Imanga Kayama, Innocent Manganye, Jamiel Banda, Jonas Lumbila, Kyle Stone, Luciano Haambote, Margaret Chibuye, Modisana Hlomuka, Munkonge Luo, Nalukui Muchindu, Namukolo Siyumbwa, Nisha Thakur, Overs Banda, Sam Chirwa, Samuel Phatlane, Teboho Moloi, Temwani Kakwende.
You’re all super stars.
If I’ve forgotten to mention someone in the above list, it truly wasn’t intentional.
