🇿🇦 Secrets to Market Penetration in Africa...

Hi there,

Building a startup team? After an initial assessment for personality-culture-match, focus on getting the right skills mix – here’s a guide on what to look for in individual roles.

As always, we’re here to add value at every stage of your innovation journey:

1. Startup Phase

2. Growth Phase

3. Scale/Sale Phase

The Secret to Tech Penetration in Africa

SA’s growing tech scene is hampered by poor internet access, expensive devices and pricey data, so it pays to build with this in mind. Developing a 1) multilingual interface and support, with 2) offline functionality and caching, and 3) intuitive UI is key to penetrating the market for FinTech and other industries. Discover some more must-have features here. 

Guerilla Marketing Techniques for Early-Stage Businesses

Founder and guerilla marketer Gary Vaynerchuk sums up the key to getting marketing traction pretty well in just 3 minutes. 1) With your value proposition and business objectives ready, 2) create 40-50 (not 2 or 3) detailed customer segments and start generating content (organic and/or ads) for every segment. Then have a strategic person analyse content for qualitative feedback – when a post goes viral or over-indexes, 4) make it the brief for the next content/ad, rinse and repeat. 5) Kill off non-performing segments and content, and create 6) new cohorts in segments that perform well.

Sales on a Shoestring: Techniques for Founders Without a Sales Team

Number one for a solo gig is to automate sales with a funnel – you know, offer something valuable for “free”, get their email, then drip campaign and see if you can get enough conversions to cover your costs, then maybe make a profit. But in a startup, you might get your first 10 customers faster with enterprise sales – as the JobJack co-founder explains here. For a handy tool for getting lists of CEOs' contact details and outbounding them all in one platform, check out Apollo.

Are you in the start phase? Have questions? Hit reply and let us know how we can help.

Business Expansion Strategies

Using the Ansoff Matrix to evaluate how companies like Payfast, Yoco, Luno and Discovery used tech innovation to expand, we found core strategies including: 1) Market penetration: claiming larger market share, 2) Product development: solving more problems, 3) Market development: taking existing products to new markets and 4) Diversification: entering entirely new markets to spread risk.

Using Data Analytics to Optimise Your Innovation & Marketing

Need more data to innovate/penetrate? We recently explored the limits of FinTechs’ internal structured data (customers’ financial info) and looked at acquiring deeper insights by finding out how people behaved elsewhere (in non-financial settings). I.e. using big data to understand needs, an approach which inevitably requires some collaboration, including: 1) Secure data-share collabs with banks and other FinTechs, 2) third-party data aggregators, 3) blockchain/DLTs and 4) open-baking frameworks.

Developing Channel Partnerships to Accelerate Growth

60% of sales today happen indirectly, meaning on a different channel than your website or socials. Channel sales is a high-growth option using other companies or brands as resellers (buy-sell agreements), distributors, affiliates (working on commission) or value-added resellers (companies that use/enhance your product with other services to resell). It requires you to 1) recruit partners to resell your product, 2) manage, grow and support your partners (instead of just focusing on the end consumer) and 3) optimise results by incentivising the partner.

Need help growing faster? Maybe it's augmenting your team, or perhaps coffee with one of our growth experts — either way, hit reply and let’s find your solution.

Understanding Market Valuation for a Successful Exit

Setting up your business for an attractive valuation is crucial for a successful exit, and, depending on the size and nature of the company, buyers may use a range of different ways to value it. Likewise, it’s vital to be aware of the factors that could impact your perceived value, from 1) your financial health (are you making a profit?) and 2) growth potential to 3) what IP and technology you own, 4) the current market conditions (is this selling right now?) and even things like whether the business can function without the founder as the “face” of the company. 

Finding a Corporate Buyer for Your Company

If you’re positioning yourself for acquisition in the tech space, there’s a quasi-behind-the-scenes video of VC expert Mark Suster giving absolute gold advice for approaching potential buyers. Most people talk to the corporate development team when they want to sell, but Mark advises against it because it’s a long and laborious process with no guaranteed results. He advises instead to talk to the 1) product management team (to fill gaps in their own roadmap), 2) sales units (always looking for ways to sell faster/more), 3) direct to CEO or C-suite (if you can show buying you out ties in with their strategic goals).

M&A Insights: Preparing for Integration with Legacy Systems

A popular exit strategy, if you’re not listing, is to sell. But in many industries, like FinTech for example, that’s more akin to an M&A (they’re buying you to integrate with their system), and that means you need to make yourself attractive to integrate. We looked at options for using blockchain in finance to help with legacy system integration, including weighing 1) public blockchains against 2) private blockchains and 3) consortium blockchains – which seems much more likely considering the regulatory environment.

Want to scale faster? We have people that are comfortable with the discomfort of the scale phase. Hit reply and let us know how we can augment your team.

Have your say…

What’s happening at Specno

Focused on UI that converts and builds loyalty? Or perhaps you know a designer who needs to level up in the industry? We’re hosting DesignSynergy Cape Town to advance the UX/UI design community on Thursday 16 May 2024 at Specno HQ in Century City, Cape Town.

Our speakers are:

• Jackie Zhang, senior product designer at Bash

• Jandro Saayman, head of user experience at Ackermans

• Orisha Naidoo, senior product designer at Payfast by Network

What to expect:

🎯 Main panel discussion:

• Creating seamless experiences – How to enhance conversion and user loyalty.

📢 Breakout room topics:

• Portfolio tips and how to break into the industry.

• Cross-functional collaboration in teams – Strategies for successful collaboration between designers, developers, product managers, and other stakeholders.

To attend, simply hit “register” on LinkedIn here.

Hit reply if you think we’ve hit or missed the mark, tell us what you’d like to see or hear more of and, just in general, what would really add value to your journey…

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