{"id":208,"date":"2016-11-23T05:31:35","date_gmt":"2016-11-23T05:31:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jongore.com\/blog\/?p=208"},"modified":"2016-11-23T05:35:34","modified_gmt":"2016-11-23T05:35:34","slug":"aarrr-in-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jongore.com\/blog\/startup\/aarrr-in-africa\/","title":{"rendered":"Acquisition in Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Dave McClure has this <a href=\"http:\/\/500hats.typepad.com\/500blogs\/2007\/09\/startup-metrics.html\">pirate acronym<\/a> (AARRR) which he uses to help founders remember five important pillars of growth for startups. \u00a0They are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Acquisition<\/li>\n<li>Activation<\/li>\n<li>Retention<\/li>\n<li>Referral<\/li>\n<li>Revenue<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div>I&#8217;m a big fan of using it and have implemented it at the startups I&#8217;ve worked for in Africa. \u00a0The thing is, things are a bit different here.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Acquiring users in Africa is a weird beast. \u00a0Users exist in this constantly evolving landscape\u00a0where they are leap frogging a lot of crap services, and they don\u2019t have this built in acceptance of poor service on mobile. \u00a0Generally, they are becoming more familiar on mobile phones and how to use technology.\u00a0 However, they&#8217;re still in a very young industry, and don\u2019t have a lot of options. \u00a0This means if theres a product out there that meets their needs, and it&#8217;s shit, they can\u2019t really just move onto something else. \u00a0They\u2019re dealing with a lot of first movers right now, and unfortunately a lot of those first movers suck at acquisition. \u00a0This is partly because they don&#8217;t know what they are doing, and partly because there aren&#8217;t any tools to help startups acquire users. \u00a0If you are going for scale the majority of your users aren&#8217;t going to have an email address, and mailchimp simply isn&#8217;t viable.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Startups are generally limited to a few acquisition categories. \u00a0If you are really bootstrapping, you\u2019ll use Facebook, and hope like hell word spreads to those people without smart phones (80% of the market.) \u00a0If you have a bit of a bank roll, you can contract a third party SMS provider. \u00a0An SMS in Africa is about 1 cent. \u00a0Conversion rates are around 1%. \u00a0So that\u2019s not good, but it gives you access to a far wider group of people. \u00a0If you have even more money, you can go above the line, and print fliers or put up billboards. \u00a0But billboards are expensive, fliers less so. \u00a0I&#8217;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. \u00a0We had 30,000 hits the next day. \u00a0That was more than our \u00a0MNO partner had ever seen for an app launch on their network before. \u00a0You need to fit your content to your audience. \u00a0We had the correct assumption that people that attend soccer matches would also want to bet on them. \u00a0It worked great and our app took off from there. \u00a0 While that worked well, I still think acquisition is harder in Africa. \u00a0Metrics are more difficult to measure because you don&#8217;t have integrated tracking services on email or webpages. Most of your users will be on feature phones. \u00a0Your cost of acquisition is going to be higher, and your life time value for customers is probably going to be lower. \u00a0All of this just means you have to work harder to test your assumptions. \u00a0At the end of the day, when your product is taking off, it just makes it all the more rewarding.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dave McClure has this pirate acronym (AARRR) which he uses to help founders remember five important pillars of growth for startups. \u00a0They are: Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue I&#8217;m a big fan of using it and have implemented it at the startups I&#8217;ve worked for in Africa. \u00a0The thing is, things are a bit different [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-startup"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jongore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jongore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jongore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jongore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jongore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.jongore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":212,"href":"https:\/\/www.jongore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions\/212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jongore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jongore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jongore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}