User Acquisition in an African context
I very well remember my first day as a TrackApp Ambassador in downtown Kampala interacting with quite a number of small business entrepreneurs. To my surprise, I realized that the majority of them kept incomplete financial records, or no records at all. The reason they gave was eye-opening — they feared that they might “succumb to a heart attack,” after realizing that they actually made no profit. For many of these prospective TrackApp users, pen and paper was still king, or worse yet their financial records were stored in their memories. I learned then that I had an uphill battle ahead of me. One that involved not only convincing entrepreneurs to keep better records, but to do it all on their phone through TrackApp.
At the end of April, I met Mr Abdul Kiyimba an interesting businessman and co owner of a spare parts shop downtown. As I was pitching TrackApp to one of his co-owners, he paid little attention to what I was saying and seemed not to be interested in the whole idea of what TrackApp could do. He muttered, “That app can’t meet my needs, it cannot do what I want especially stock taking,” but as I continued to explain some of the powerful features of the app he seemed surprised. Later, I realized that he was coming closer and closer until he suddenly said, “You mean it can do all that, I will try playing around with it, help me download it.” Ever Since then, Mr. Kiyimba has been a consistent user and a TrackApp adviser. It has helped him make better decisions for his business — he is able to know his daily net income, his biggest expenditures and how to minimize his spending, as well as identify the fast moving items in his shop. This was my first of many user acquisition victories, and throughout the past 8 months of doing this work I’ve learned a lot about what it means to acquire users to a tech product in a place like Kampala. I wanted to share a few of those learning’s here:
- Unlike tech companies in Western countries, here you need to physically help people access your app. Most of our users are first-time smartphone owners and have never downloaded an app before from the Google Play Store. They have these tiny little computers in their pocket, but they don’t know how powerful they actually are.
- Word of mouth is so important, it can either make or break your product. Let me share a few examples:
-Sometimes I’d pop into a TrackApp user only to find out they uninstalled the app because their friend told them that I was an agent for the government secretly collecting tax information.
-Peer pressure is huge. If you pitch to one user, s/he will first ask if you talked to their friend in the next shop about the app. In case you did and the friend was skeptical then he or she will not bother trying it out,they will instead say that, “I trust my friend here more, if he doesn’t like it then who am I to use your product?”
-Alternatively, a user like Mr. Kiyimba mentioned above can bring you a dozen new users without any effort at all - Generally speaking new technologies are not trusted the way they are elsewhere in the world. As a social enterprise Numida truly wants to help small businesses grow which in a lot of ways is a radical idea so several small business owners are at first skeptical, assuming we have hidden intentions.
- Many of the small business owners I spoke to lacked self confidence because they are not very educated. They believe that technology like TrackApp is for highly educated people even though it’s designed specifically for them.
- Short term vs. long term value — more people choose the former. So if you offer an immediate benefit such as airtime, people will definitely sign up to your product — getting them to see the long term value is a whole other story.
- Getting honest feedback is tough! Several entrepreneurs I spoke to were shy to open up and tell me the truth about their experience with TrackApp for fear of not looking smart. For example, when I would demo TrackApp to a prospective user, they would tell me that they understood everything. It’s only when I would later follow-up that I would realize they didn’t really and thus weren’t using the product.
Working with Numida Technologies since March 2016 has been one of my biggest achievements and a rather great opportunity to fully utilize my skills and discover my hidden abilities as well as potential. I strongly believe in Numida’s mission of unlocking the potential of African small businesses through access to affordable credit. I have seen that in my country, Uganda, the lack of access to financing has always been a challenge that small business entrepreneurs face and I believe that with TrackApp, the lives of millions of entrepreneurs are going to change.
Maggie Birungi is a TrackApp Ambassador at Numida
