The adoption rate of mobile is twice that of the internet, three times that of social media, and 10 times faster than PCs. — Emma Crowe, Somo.
Two years ago, Zoto started out as a mobile recharge app. At the end of our first year, we were celebrating 100k users. June would make it the second year, and we already celebrated 1 million users.
Exponential growth? In some way, yes. But we know there’s more, so we shared a slice of cake and are already looking on to the next target.
That isn’t the purpose of our post here today. Instead, we’d like to talk about the journey so far. The voluntary 7-day work week and sleepless nights, the unexpected crashes, making Android top charts, and that one time we got over 200k users in a few days.
We’re looking to share the experiences we’ve had along the way, in hopes of others learning from our mistakes, and ourselves learning from your feedback. Because we understand that this is how we grow together as an ecosystem, and we’re here to stay. So why not start now?
Everyone who has had to market an app in Nigeria today knows that the journey is a tough one. For the most part, you’re competing with our “oyinbo” counterparts, and their apps already have like a gazillion
downloads.
And even when you’re able to carve out a niche market for yourself, like Babymigo did with their app (which we think is awesome by the way), getting the word out, driving early adopter downloads and
engagement, then pursuing growth is always a problem. We faced those same things and more.
So here’s what to expect from us in the coming months.
- Our first major fail in product scalability and what it taught us
- Driving a culture of growth and experimentation at an individual
level for tech organizations - Growing a social community that supports your brand through
humanisation - Data driven offline marketing for digital products and how it
saved us millions - Creating a service-centric brand and how to get your whole
organization involved in customer service - What we learned from our first design sprint in building Zoto v3
Throughout this series, we’d be looking forward to answering your questions on anything app related. Our engineering and marketing guys will be following each post to make sure we answer every question we can, so don’t hold back!
If you’d like us to address anything more specific, start dropping your comments below, we’d see how we can fuse them into upcoming posts.
Jan. 18: Bonus Built in Africa episode: Town Hall meeting with Peter Salovey, President of Yale University
On March 25, 2021, Techpoint Africa will be hosting the brightest minds in decentralised finance/crypto at the Digital Currency Summit tagged “Building the money of the future” Click here for more details, registration and sponsorship. Location: Fourpoint by Sheraton, V.I. Lagos
Report: Millionaire West African startups” raised over $1.806 billion between 2010 and 2019, 97.9% of which went to Nigerian startups. Get a free overview and 50% purchase discount here.
Zoto is one of Nigeria’s fastest growing mobile recharge and payment solutions with over a million users. We’re here to share lessons learned on the way. http://zoto.com.ng