Zippie Airtime Network: enabling saving and earning opportunities for mobile users in informal economies. The magic of blockchain!
The Zippie team is excited to announce the launch of Zippie Airtime Network in Nairobi, Kenya.
This new service explores ways to decentralize even further the mobile data retail industry by enabling consumers to save and earn from the mobile airtime they now just consume. The service provides opportunities for end users to earn with their mobile phones from their own airtime purchases, resales, and from those of new members they recruit into the community. This type of new services in the digital economy have great potential in providing usefulness and value to emerging african consumers of informal economies, in emerging markets like Kenya.
The Service
Zippie’s wallet is built with blockchain technology to allow for instant and secure person-to-person transactions. This functionality enables new business models where end-users are given the chance to become part of the sales network, opening up the opportunity to save and earn from it.
Although meant to be invite-only to exercise some control over the quality of the network, when recruited into the Zippie Airtime Network, consumers of mobile airtime are able to save and earn straight from their mobile phone anywhere at anytime.
How? Simple. A community member can:
- buy airtime at competitive prices and get % cash-backs for those purchases,
- resell their own airtime anytime and earn a % commission,
- and recruit team members to do the same and earn a % commission from that too.
The Kick-Off
The service kicked-off November 2nd, after a couple of months of concepting and testing it against potential users in the streets of Nairobi. A small selected group of highly engaged alpha testers were invited to the pilot and asked to bring a maximum of two friends who they knew would be great additions to the core network members.
The evening brought an explosion of constructive feedback, innovative ideas, and an overall excitement to (maybe) be at the start of a service that will reshape how mobile airtime is consumed and sold today. It has been an exciting past two weeks with lots of exciting new ideas coming from the participants on how to keep on making the service and community better, and with a very positive reaction in numbers and motivation from the new members they are recruiting.
For the Zippie team, as the initiators of this network, it is of great satisfaction how new opportunities enabled by tech like, are quickly understood and adopted in places where it can really make a difference to the lives of many.
The Zippie Airtime Network is really about community and helping each other, so we wanted to share some useful gear and support material with everyone joining us on that special evening. This included some useful gear like reusable water-bottles, and t-shirts to raise visibility and get others interested in learning more about it.
Some of the participants had also before the event let us know that recruitment fliers, both in paper and digital form, that recruiters could personalize with their names and contact info, would help them get people interested and help them communicate the service and the benefits for the community members.
Outcome of the First Days
Thanks to sessions like this, and from the daily feedback received on the service’s support channel, the Zippie product team is being able to quickly develop some of the fixes and enhancements, while the participants get familiar with the service and start evaluating their networks to be able to find the best recruits for their teams. Although the invite-only member recruiting officially kicks in next week, the network has already grown 400% and its members have started benefiting from all the earning possibilities mentioned above.
It has been especially gratifying after the event to see the members help each other out with inspirational and educational content to ensure that we all succeed. It’s also been highly rewarding to see core members already investing time to share tips and tricks with their recruits in an effort to create a quality network that will pass the knowledge along to those who they themselves recruit.
Stay tuned because we are convinced this is the beginning of something exceptional, something you don’t want to miss. Want to be part of this? Let us how we can help.
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