Acquisition in Africa

I’m a big fan of using it and have implemented it at the startups I’ve worked for in Africa.  The thing is, things are a bit different here.

Acquiring users in Africa is a weird beast.  Users exist in this constantly evolving landscape where they are leap frogging a lot of crap services, and they don’t have this built in acceptance of poor service on mobile.  Generally, they are becoming more familiar on mobile phones and how to use technology.  However, they’re still in a very young industry, and don’t have a lot of options.  This means if theres a product out there that meets their needs, and it’s 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 at acquisition.  This is partly because they don’t know what they are doing, and partly because there aren’t any tools to help startups acquire users.  If you are going for scale the majority of your users aren’t going to have an email address, and mailchimp simply isn’t viable.

Startups 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 smart phones (80% of the market.)  If you have a bit of a bank roll, you can contract a third party SMS provider.  An SMS in Africa is about 1 cent.  Conversion rates are around 1%.  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 or put up billboards.  But billboards are expensive, fliers less so.  I’ve had varying success with each category, but one success story I have is after we launched our sports bet app for USSD, we printed 10,000 fliers and gave them out a local soccer match in Tanzania.  We had 30,000 hits the next day.  That was more than our  MNO partner had ever seen for an app launch on their network before.  You need to fit your content to your audience.  We had the correct assumption that people that attend soccer matches would also want to bet on them.  It worked great and our app took off from there.   While that worked well, I still think acquisition is harder in Africa.  Metrics are more difficult to measure because you don’t have integrated tracking services on email or webpages. Most of your users will be on feature phones.  Your cost of acquisition is going to be higher, and your life time value for customers is probably going to be lower.  All of this just means you have to work harder to test your assumptions.  At the end of the day, when your product is taking off, it just makes it all the more rewarding.