Recruit Much?
It’s 2017
I am at MTN and we have this grand vision of building Africa’s very own App Store/Marketplace. We want to elevate African developed Apps and provide a curated marketplace where you can find, use and enjoy them.
When you look at the Top 10 Apps across African counties, few if not none of them, are actually African founded, developed and run.
We want to change that and help in building Africa’s next unicorns (Or rhinos as i call them).
Why would we want to build an African App Marketplace you ask? In-App purchases, Airtime and Mobile Money and if we could zero rate the data then it would reduce the download friction many Africans experience
Sourcing of the Apps
If you search for African developed apps you might be lucky to find a website or two that features a couple of apps, generally what you will find are dev houses websites
We found a couple by scanning through Disrupt Africa and Venture Burn
We then ran a search on Apps Annie and this is that we found
South Africa
Top African Apps : Capitec, Showmax, EskomSePush and Mr D food.
Out of all of these only one is truly a “Startup”
Nigeria and Ghana
The standout Apps are : ORide, *OPay, Sokoloan and KIKUU
OPay is a real standout — It is the Number 1 App on the Nigerian Apple App Store right now but is it African? Looks African, sounds African but is it truly African? I did some digging and this is what i found
Opera founded startup OPay raises $50M for mobile finance in Nigeria. OPay, an Africa-focused mobile payments startup founded by Norwegian browser company Opera, has raised $50 million in funding. Lead investors include Sequoia China, IDG Capital and Source Code Capital. OPay founder Opera was acquired in 2016 for $600 million by a consortium of Chinese investors, led by current Opera CEO Yahui Zhou.
So on wards we looked and found a company by the name of Dots Recruit
Dots Recruit
Dots is an interactive mobile application for recruitment. This application enables Job Seekers to search for jobs that are suitable for their skills, qualifications and ambitions on their mobile devices. It also allows them to apply for these jobs by completing and updating their profiles/CV within the app.
Finally an African App developed for Africans by Africans
I recently caught up with the founder of Dots Recruit (Sipho) to find out about the App and where it is now 2–3 years later
Spoiler alert — You are probably expecting a magnificent growth story of how we on-boarded Dots Recruit onto the African App store and how downloads shot through the roof and revenue followed making Dots Recruit a unicorn/rhino
That’s not exactly how the story goes…
Dots recruit ended up closing down and the founders pivoted to a new exciting venture (that was initially meant to just be a feature on the app) armed with all the knowledge they had collected, think Google Photos emerging from Google+
Key Items from our conversation
At its peak Dots recruit had :
- 300–400 companies on-boarded, the business model was a flat monthly subscription fee where the companies could upload as many jobs as they wanted, the subscription amounts started from R1500 per company with a limited period free trial
- 100000+ job seekers on-boarded
- 100+ jobs posted per day
This looks like solid traction, but what became the issue is quality. Companies were paying for quality job seekers and out of the 100000+ job seekers they had 10% that were quality candidates. Money is the exchange of value and if a company does not find value in your offering they will not pay. If they had better quality job seekers then the companies would be willing to pay but to get quality job seekers you would have to pay high customer acquisition costs which they they did not have the budget for
I then asked Sipho if he had to do it all over what would he do different?
1-Start small — Target 5–10 businesses for the first year and work with those businesses to get the product and market fit
2-Pick an industry — Not every customer is your desired customer, recruitment is diverse and if you pick an industry work only with that industry so you can get quality job seekers for that industry, once you win that industry you can move to the next one
3-Do one thing and do it well — Do not change your product every week and add new features to satisfy each and every client. You will end up with a massive confusing solution that is a nightmare to maintain
4-Listen to your customers — Clients know what they want but often do not know how to articulate it or design it
5-Fail forward — Don’t stop innovating
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