Every day, new ideas are born and once in a blue moon, few of those ideas become highly successful businesses. Even though there are guiding principles in entrepreneurship, no one can authoritatively say which idea would become a commercial success – yet startups continue to start everywhere including harsh climates like Nigeria.
Startups in Nigeria have a very long list of problems and uncertainties to cope with and every form of support they could get would be appreciated. Even though startups focus on different things, no startup can say it is successful if it doesn’t have large number of users. Facebook would not be successful without its large number of users, the story is the same for Twitter, M-PESA and others. In true sense, when startup founders are doing interviews and running PR campaigns, what they are essentially trying to do is to get more people to hear about – and use their product. This is where they need money.
Not every startup can afford to advertise on Bella Naija, or Linda Ikeji – even those that are doing that are not all getting maximum returns for their expensive investments. The truth is no one can really say how to get people – real people – to download an app or use services being offered by startups. They can only do their best and hope the result would be worth the investment.
For some startups, riding on the backbone of very popular companies, products, services and platforms would really go a long way in potentiating their reach and astronomically increasing the number of people that will be using their products. This is why many startups in Nigeria and elsewhere desire to partner with telecoms companies, OEMs and the rest. There are also several other platforms that are looking to offer their services on already existing and widely accepted internationally acclaimed platforms, one of such is WeChat.
WeChat is basically a mobile communication app that has users in various parts of the world. It has a very large user base which continues to expand. The thing about platforms such as WeChat is the constant desire to make users to spend more time on the app doing one thing or another. This is why in addition to its native mobile communication service, users can do much more than chatting and communicating on WeChat. Probably because the Nigeria user base is growing, WeChat is choosing to open up its platform and adequately localize its bouquet of services and the best and quickest way to do this is to work with selected startups, two of such are Pass.NG and Traclist.
These services, according to WeChat Regional Manager for West Africa Idemudia Dima-Okojie, is the company’s way of creating a vibrant ecosystem with different services that are of value for WeChat users.
“While messaging is at the heart of WeChat, we are creating a platform that goes beyond simply instant messaging, a platform that provides a set of functionality ranging from service delivery & transactions, product discovery, customer relationship management, ecommerce, media distribution and much more,” he said.
According to him, organizations, businesses and brands can use WeChat Official Account which is an app inside an app that gives the opportunity to them to create a native experience within WeChat.
“This reduces the cost to develop a native mobile app, reduces time to market and provides easy access to healthy base of smart phone users,” he said.
Pass.NG which is one of the selected startups has had a very good 2015. Prior to its selection by WeChat, it had already won a startup challenge launched by major telecoms company Airtel. Essentially, Pass.NG is an examination preparatory and testing platform that helps its users to prepare for WAEC, NECO, UTME (JAMB) and post UTME to get admission into Nigerian universities. The success stories shared by the founders suggest that it is having direct (positive) impacts on the performance of the students in exams.
What could Pass.NG gain from WeChat?
Even though Pass.NG is popular, it can get more popular. Beyond gaining popularity, the service could reach even more people via the WeChat platform since the targeted demography is composed largely of tech savvy youths that are always chatting. Via Pass.NG on WeChat, they may finally get to understand why they should spend less time chatting on WeChat and spend more time reading instead.
As an incentive/inducement, WeChat is offering one month free subscription for users that subscribe via its official account on WeChat during the period of this campaign.
Traclist
For online marketplace Traclist, in addition to being able to creative a native app that runs on all on operating systems, it would be able to get more fashion merchants and buyers together on a secured and convenient platform to transact.
The online marketplace space in Nigeria is heating up with the millions of dollars invested already – yet none of the existing online marketplaces has the kinds of partnership Traclist now has. The startup is now able to reach users of the WeChat platform and the good part of it is that users don’t necessarily have to only access Traclist via WeChat – they only have to hear about it, see it, try it and if the product is really good and safe, the users can begin to use it subsequently.
But winning a major share of the marketplace market currently dominated by the likes of Kaymu, MoboFree, Jumia, Konga and the rest would not be an easy task and the founders know that which is why they need the WeChat deal.
WeChat will also benefit from the deal as its current users would see the need to continue to use it – it could also lead to the attraction of new users thus expanding its user base and allowing it to remain competitive in spite of the existence, popularity and availability of numerous communication apps in Nigeria.
Overall, WeChat seems to have finally realized that for it to remain strong in the Nigerian market (and elsewhere), it needs to give its users additional value to make them open the app over and over again. The fact that numerous tools can be used to communicate simply means only a platform that offers the widest array of services could and should survive. By attracting startups to its platform, WeChat seems to have a fighting chance to withstand the tide that killed MxIt and several other similar services.
