Acquiring customers on a digital application in Africa is difficult. Consumers are in this weird place where they are leapfrogging a lot of crap services. However, they’re still in a very young industry and don’t have a lot of options. This means if there’s a product out there that meets their needs, and its shit, they can’t really just move onto something else. They’re dealing with a lot of first movers right now, and unfortunately a lot of those first movers suck. What’s more, the start-ups are generally limited to a few acquisition categories. If you are really bootstrapping, you’ll use Facebook, and hope like hell word spreads to those people without smartphones (70% of the market.) If you have a bit of a bankroll, you can pay a third party SMS provider. An SMS in Africa is about 0.4 cents. Conversion rates are around 1-5%. So that’s not good, but it gives you access to a far wider group of people. If you have even more money, you can go above the line, and print fliers. One anecdotal story I have from my time in Tanzania is after we launched a sports-betting app, we printed 10,000 fliers and gave them out a local soccer match. We had 30,000 hits the next day. You need to fit your content to your audience. Gambling and sports games go well, loans and sports games, probably not so much. At the end of the day, channel access is one of the most important parts of your business model. In Africa, it’s limited by the MNOs. I’ve seen many a startup get trapped in the MNO model. But the fact still remains that the MNO distribution channel is still the best route to customers. So if you don’t choose that devil, what do you do?