Roundtable Recap: November 11 – African Tech Entrepreneurs Emerging

I liked all of the companies that were presented at this week’s roundtable. And it was really cool to see a company from Tanzania. I LOVE the international nature of the 1M/1M initiative.

First up today was Joshua Schwadron presenting Betterfly, a startup he founded earlier this year that aims to offer an easier way to find the best individuals (not companies) providing various services. By using social media to spread the word, this free site currently lists over 10,000 service providers, ranging from hairdressers to personal trainers to piano teachers.

My first question was what categories is he focusing on as his market entry points. He told me music, yoga, weight loss and SAT prep since they have been the most popular so far.  The problem with this segmentation as a market entry strategy is that these categories are not synergistic.  He needs to target a customer who could use all of the related services offered. I asked Joshua to put the user at the center of his strategy, choose women or men of a certain age group who are tech savvy and then offer a few services that apply to them. Following along these lines, if you consider the four categories he mentioned, SAT prep definitely does not fit.  I recommend he pick one to three service areas that are synergistic to focus on as he goes to market.  Don’t spray and pray!

Next Taha Jiwaji of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, gave us an interesting snapshot of some opportunities opening up in Africa. He discussed Bongo Live!, an advertising and mobile services company that has subscribers and vendors as customers. Subscribers opt-in to receive advertising specials based on their interests, like coupons, special offers, etc.  He launched last week and through Google and Facebook advertising he has acquired 1,800 subscribers so far. Five bulk SMS vendors and two advertisers have signed on as vendors.

His main question was should he focus more on acquiring subscribers or vendors. Taha needs to grow both bases, but subscribers a bit ahead of vendors.  A larger subscriber base is needed to get better vendors to sign up.  We discussed marketing, advertising and direct marketing agencies as being the best channel partners for him. 

Again, a bit of spray and pray is going on here as well.  Taha is focusing on too many categories for subscribers.  I recommend he picks three categories to focus on.  Since two of the vendors so far are mobile/computer electronics businesses, that is where he should focus to start.

One very interesting point in the conversation was when Taha said he was surprised that job/career is the most popular category so far.  With no other job portal operating in Africa so far, I suggested that could be a separate venture for him to explore.  We discussed leveraging vendor relationships by, for example, offering to list the vendors’ job openings on his site. More to come from entrepreneurs in Africa I’m sure.

Last up, Adarsh Jain pitched Fippy, a web-based interface offering consumers customized mobile phone numbers in India.  As presented, this is a classic nice to have, but not a must have business.  Initially I thought he was targeting young Indian consumers, but then he started discussing small business owners.  Again some spray and pray.  I told him he needs to pick one segment to go to market. Marketing to consumers is very different than marketing to SMEs. In fact, I think SMEs is a much stronger starting point. The customized phone number can be representative of the business and a small business owner has a commercial interest in paying for such a service as a way of marketing and branding their business.  The right direction is for Adarsh to capture the same concept as the 1-800 toll free phone number service in the U.S.  Businesses pay for these numbers so consumers can reach them easily, think 1-800-FLOWERS. This venture is much better as a B-to-B business than as a consumer business.  I suggest he offers a service, like SEO marketing, that is related to his venture to continue to bootstrap this business.  His homework is to research the 1-800 service in the U.S.

It is clear to me, after doing these coaching sessions for over two years, that entrepreneurs need a lot more training on positioning and go-to-market. As such, I have created video lecture modules with case studies in the 1M/1M premium lounge on these topics with very specific guidance on what analysis to perform and how. The easiest way for me to teach a large number of entrepreneurs some of these basics is to have you spend 30-40 hours on the curriculum I have created, and THEN have you come work with me on refining your strategies and positioning.

I have thought a lot about how to make entrepreneurship education and eco-system scalable and accessible to a vastly larger number of people. The answer to that question, I believe, is the 1M/1M Premium Lounge. Over the upcoming months, the program will become much, much richer. But for the moment, we can get you started and give you a significant jump-start.

You can listen to the recording of today’s roundtable here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtable here.

This segment is a part in the series : Roundtable Recap
. March 25 – A Mixed Bag Of Advice . April 1 – Bootstrapping Tips . April 8 – A Focus On E-Commerce . April 15 – Small Is OK; The Goal Is Profitability . April 22 – The Original Runners . April 29 – Finding The Right Direction . May 6 – Defining Value Proposition . May 20 – Validation, Validation, Validation . May 27 – Is The Venture Worth Your Time? . June 3 – Defining Market Segments . June 10 – Efficient Targeting . June 17 – Online Education Startups . June 24 – Three Startups That Can Hit One Million Dollars . July 1 - Get Your Pricing Model Validated . July 8 - The EJ Methodology . July 15 - A Market Of Late Adopters . July 22 - Bootstrap Using Services . July 29 - Startups In Malaysia . August 5 - Paying Customers =>Validation =>Valuation . August 19 - Niche E-Commerce Is Great For Bootstrapping . August 26 - 85%-90% Of Search Traffic Comes From Organic Search . September 2 - Find High Velocity Channels . September 9 - Open Opportunities In Cloud Computing And Rural BPO . September 16 – 5 Cloud Computing Opportunities for Entrepreneurs . September 23 - Do Not Spray And Pray . September 30 - Investors Don't Fund Broad Ideas . October 7 - Try To Get At Least $2M Pre-Money In Seed Round Valuation . October 14 - Professional Investors Do Not Invest In $20 Million Markets . October 21 - Bootstrapping Comes In Many Flavors . October 28 – Convert Potential Competitors To Partners . November 4 - Premium Lounge Sneak Preview . November 11 - African Tech Entrepreneurs Emerging . November 18 - Not Coming To The Rescue Of Victory . December 2 - Niche Marketplace Businesses Can Be Interesting . December 9 - Where Should You Raise Money? . December 16 - Top 10 Tech Trends To Watch . January 6 - Top 10 Vertical and Social Web Trends For The Decade . January 13 - Top 10 Online Advertising Trends For The Decade . January 20 - Personalization Remains An Open Problem . January 27 - Non-Dilutive Financing Through Revenue Sharing . February 3 - Indian Entrepreneurs Are Maturing . February 10 - When Keywords Are Competitive . February 17 - Indian Company Plugs Gap In Google’s Enterprise Solution . February 24 - VCs, Angels, Incubators, Accelerators – What Are You Doing With Your Rejects? . March 3 - Spotlight On The Northwest . March 10 - Spotlight On India . March 17 - Spotlight On Latin And Central America . March 24 - 75th Session Spotlights The Midwest . March 31 - Microsoft’s $100,000 India Startup Challenge Grant . April 6 - 1M/1M Announces Important Partnership With MAD Incubator, Malaysia . April 9 - 1M/1M Announces Partnership With TiE Chennai . April 16 - 1M/1M Partners With Indian Angel Network Incubator . April 17 - High-Octane Energy In Pune . April 21- Incubators Are Reaching Out To 1M/1M . April 28 - Guerrilla P.R. & SEO Most Profitable Customer Acquisition Strategies . May 5 - Ownership Matters . May 12 - Two Really Cool Companies . May 19, Making Money From Blogs . May 26 - Twitter, LinkedIn - Why Not Affiliates? . June 2 - 1M/1M And Incubators - What We Have Learned . June 9 - Silicon Valley . June 16 - Exciting Companies Lined Up For Microsoft Startup Grant Finals . June 23 - New Assessment Tool For Entrepreneurs . June 30 - Continued International Participation . July 21 - Crowd Sourced Funding Exchanges - An Emerging Trend . July 28 - Investors And Incubators Need To Look At Pre-Incubation . August 4 - How Do You Bootstrap Freemium Ventures? . August 11 - Menlo Park And The Silicon Valley Renaissance . August 25 - How To Use Twitter For Lead Generation . September 1 - Fall Call To Action . September 8 - A View Into Israeli Start-ups . September 15 - Do Your Homework First . September 22 - How Do You Catalyze A Region’s Entrepreneurship? . September 29 - From Poland To Argentina . October 6 - Dedicated To Steve Jobs, Reinforcing Mission To Restructure Capitalism . October 13 - FREE Is Not A Business Model . October 20 - Non-profits And For-profits . October 27 - Check Out Stanzr . November 3 - VCs Are Not Always Right . November 17 - Business Schools And Early Stage Entrepreneurship . December 1 - 1M/1M Premium Company Freshdesk Wins Funding From Accel Partners . December 8 - Three Open Opportunities For 2012 . December 15 - Web 3.0 And Social Dancing; Romania Emerging . December 22 - Free Apps, Ad-Supported Business Models => Dangerous! . January 5 - ERP Galore . January 12-13 - Spotlight On IIT Kharagpur, India . January 19 - Are Media Sites Fundable? . January 26th - Spotlight On Jacksonville, Florida . February 2 - YCombinator vs. 1M/1M . February 9 - Are You Fundable? . February 16 - What’s Happening In Turkey? . February 23 - Microsoft Israel To Offer 1M/1M Scholarships . March 1 - Strategy Gaps Need To Be Plugged . March 12 - Winners Of Microsoft Israel Scholarships . March 15 - Spotlight On 3 Day Startup Tel-Aviv . April 3 - Rendezvous In Bangalore . April 12 - More From Indian Entrepreneurs . April 19 - Tyranny Of The TAM . April 26 - A Rare Women-Only Session . May 3 - Some Wonderful Opportunities With Corporate Partners . May 10 - BlueSnap-Elance Contest Applications Deadline This Weekend . May 22 - Winners Of TechHub-A&N Media Battle Of The Startups Contest In London Win 1M/1M Scholarships