From Bumpa to Shopify and even Flutterwave and Paystack storefronts, there are a number of platforms that can help small businesses get online. These platforms have added benefits like logistics, payments, and credit.
While these platforms are great, Kenfield Griffith feels they do not cater to service-based businesses, which is why he created tappi, a Kenyan end-to-end digital commerce SaaS solution.
Griffith launched tappi in 2022 with Louis Majanja. According to my conversation with him, tappi initially tried to "boil the ocean. We believed every business could use tappi, but we quickly realised that it was the wrong approach. We had to narrow down to a certain sector of SMEs."
While narrowing down, they discovered that most merchandise businesses already had digital tools to help them scale. But service-based businesses didn't have software dedicated to them.
How tappi is helping service-based businesses
Besides niching down to only service-based businesses, tappi also stands out in the way it thinks about its solution. Rather than a platform that digitises businesses, it sees itself as the platform that brings businesses to the Internet, making them discoverable.
Griffith called it the "on-ramp to the actual Internet." A platform that provides business owners with the tools they need to become professional businesses.
Becoming a professional business is tappi's key value proposition — helping businesses find customers online and retain them.
A business increases its chances of being found when it is online. However, being online isn't enough. To Griffith, a key piece of the puzzle is to be a trustworthy online business and one way to be trustworthy is to exude professionalism which is where tappi comes in.
Before businesses are onboarded on tappi, they are first surveyed, and then they get a website with a payment gateway integrated. Interestingly, it does not end there.
Written by Omoruyi Edoigiawerie, a seasoned startup attorney with over a decade of experience. Learn more.
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With tappi, business owners can run ads on social media, send bulk sms to their users, get insights about running ads and even request customer reviews. It is essentially a platform that brings together all the elements required to be a digital business in one place.
These tools are available for barbers, dentists, and even therapists, people in the service industry who Griffith believes do not have enough platforms catering to their needs.
While these businesses could do for themselves what tappi is doing for them, it could be a lot more expensive.
"One of our customers hired someone to build a website. They were paying X amount of money to have that website serviced every month, but the person suddenly vanished and they didn't have the login information.
"The problem most businesses have is finding that one person that is professional enough to do it." tappi essentially wants businesses to outsource getting on the Internet while they focus on offering great service.
Are service-based businesses worth it?
While a digital storefront and other solutions exist for retail businesses, Griffith pointed out that creating a platform that caters to businesses in the service industry is just as profitable.
He said most service-based businesses, like barbing, for instance, offer recurring services, unlike retail businesses that could need new customers frequently.
Africa's food and services market size reached an estimated $5 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow a lot more in coming years. tappi is tapping into this market and has some traction to show for it since it started in 2022.
Total transactions on the platform have reached $3.4 million and businesses have serviced 180k customers through the platform. Investors backed tappi with a $1.5 million pre-seed in December 2024.
Griffith revealed then that the funding will go into three key areas: increasing its on-the-ground presence by hiring direct sales agents and "capitalising on its strong 90% retention rate."
The second area is exploring new partnerships with banks and fintech companies while strengthening current relationships with mobile operators, and the third is branding and marketing which will establish tappi as a trustworthy brand. Already, the startup has struck a partnership with Safaricom to support M-PESA’s network of 650,000 Kenyan micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) with its solution.
Before tappi, Griffith and Majanja founded Ajua, which provided retail, mobile, and big banks with customer experience management solutions. However, the co-founders transitioned to tappi when they realised they could serve the informal SME market on the continent.
“Ajua, being a profitable enterprise, continues to thrive under the leadership of the CEO, Richard Riley. Our passion for building tappi was driven by the desire to impact smaller businesses differently, leveraging the lessons and successes from Ajua building enterprise SaaS for over 10 years.”
The experience from Ajua is not the only thing Griffith is leveraging, he has a Ph.D. in Design and Computation from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) US, which he said was key in building Ajua and tappi.
However, building tappi into a profitable business like Ajua comes with unique challenges and the major one is getting people to pay for software as a service (SaaS).
tappi's solution to this is to bundle the subscription for the platform into other things the business already pays for. "
"A small business is already paying a monthly fee for their airtime, data, and even their bank fees. So we leaned into this and bundled our product into the data bundles of mobile operators. When you buy data bundle for your business, you're getting tappi."
Griffith is confident that this business model is scalable and all tappi needs is to onboard more businesses. Hopefully, he can replicate Ajua's success with tappi.
