Opentraction: New Beginnings ✍🏾 📖
Announcing Opentraction, a collection of thoughts with actionable insights and stories with tactical advice about building venture backable startups in Africa.
What’s the backstory?
Starting a startup is one of the hardest things you can do, but starting one in Africa makes it even harder.
In more developed ecosystems there are lots of content & resources from experienced founders, operators, and investors sharing advice on how to start and grow a startup, unfortunately, the inverse is the case locally.
Whilst a lot of global advice can be applied locally, it comes with a lot of caveats. The African market has a ton of nuances that founders have to be aware of and take into consideration when making decisions that can have a significant impact on the eventual success of their businesses.
So we’ve set out to solve this problem.
We believe the best advice for African founders combines the growth mindset of Silicon Valley whilst understanding the gritty realities of operating in Africa.
This expert advice comes from founders, employees and investors of venture backed African startups who have been through some of the challenges of starting, gaining traction and raising funds for their startups
Who is this for?
Opentraction is THE newsletter for African founders who are just starting out i.e. somewhere between ideating your venture and generating less than $100,000 in annual revenue.
The goal is to interview the most talented people across industries, roles and companies (tech and non-tech), and surface actionable insights (how something works) and tactical advice (how to do something) for founders and aspiring founders.
It’s an authentic, honest view on what it means to start, grow and get funding for a startup on the continent.
Why are we doing this?
Our long-term goal with Microtraction is to directly or indirectly help 1,000 companies get funded a year and Opentraction is the first of many experiments that we hope will take us closer to achieving this.
What to expect?
You can expect evergreen & mostly timeless long-form posts that you can always come back to as a reference. We will also focus on quality over quantity. This means we can share as little as one or two posts a month and some times more
We are inspired by Paul Graham’s Essays, Firstround Review, Founders at Work, Venture Hacks , NYT Corner Office and many more. In our own little way, we hope to make a dent on the future of the African technology ecosystem, if we can help founders make new mistakes and move faster in the right direction then we have been successful.
I have a question for you…
What are the challenges you are facing today as a founder or future founder? Send an email to open@microtraction.com and share the top three (3) problems you need help solving right now and this will help us prioritise what we should write about first.
A few more things
- Join our mailing list. Get early access to posts and influence what we write by signing up to opentraction’s newsletter. Click here to get started
2. To make sure that you get each issue of Opentraction, you need to add our email address open@microtraction.com to your contacts list. 📒
(These articles will help you get started: Gmail — Outlook — Yahoo)
3. Follow Opentraction’s publication on medium. www.opentraction.com 🗞
4. Share opentraction sign up link with your co-founders, future partners & friends 🕺🏾💃🏾
5. Let the world know you subscribed to opentraction. Share it to Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn 🗣
Until next time,
YB
