Minafisi

Helping African SMEs leverage digital tools to position them better for the future of retail.

Problem

Over 70% of businesses in most African countries are SMEs. In Ghana, it is 92%. With the unemployment cancer that a lot of African countries are riddled with, we have a huge number of young people between the ages of 18 and 35 starting their own businesses. For these business owners, their priority is to get a physical shop to operate from. This is expensive, has limited reach and has led to a lot of congestion in our cities and towns.

E-commerce addresses these challenges stated above and the future of retail hinges on it. Unfortunately, those who are really taking advantage of the sector now and set to control commerce as it will be in the future are the 30%. 

Solution

Our digital platform allows any small business owner with basic English knowledge to easily create standard and beautiful online shops by themselves in record time and most importantly be able to manage their stock, sales and delivery from their dashboard at very sustainable cost. By integrating more local content, we are ensuring that our users and their customers can easily interact with our platform. Businesses can enjoy wider market accessibility, efficiency in running business, convenience for their customers, lower overhead cost and more importantly not be left out on the future of retail.

How It Changes The World

Ultimately, we are on a quest to foster the agenda of smart economies in smart African cities and make sure small and medium size businesses are not left out on the future of retail. We are also contributing to addressing SDG 11; Sustainable Cities and Communities.

Companies like BigCommerce and Shopify have already proven this kind of technology. What makes our solution innovative is the compatibility component we are introducing for this kind of solution to work for the typical African market. 

Aside the technicalities, we are building a brand that would be a part of the success stories of small African businesses. The opportunity to contribute to making dreams come true gets us going. Check promotional video for one success story in progress. Link to prelimary store setup of person in promotional video

With our platform, we are essentially taking the traditional business model and replicating it online so that it can position small and medium size African businesses better in the digital space. 

Technology is at the core of our solution. Without our online platform, our venture is non-existent.

By our first 6 months, we would have gotten to know our market well, use the feedback from the market to improve our solution. In the next 12 months, we are working towards getting at least 400 active users. That would be a good traction base to help us start raising major funding  to help us scale.

With regards to feedback, we are three weeks away from adding a marketplace feature to help drive traffic to the stores that setup on our platform.

In three - five years, we are looking to have grown to the point with a very robust platform and opportunities to have scaled to at least 6 countries in Africa; Rwanda,Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Botswana and Ethiopia.

Our growth strategy hinges on the African brand we are building and making sure that our market gets very tailored solutions to grow and  better position their businesses for success. We would focus on the needs of our market first before profit

We will reach them online through social media advertising and offline at SME gatherings like conferences, exhibitions and festivals. We have started building a online community around our product too.

Our main goal will be to educate and stimulate demand with our adverts, get signups and after that help them setup and retain them with excellent support services to grow their businesses

61 signups and counting from Ghana and Nigeria after launching Pilot phase on the 23/05,2018. Reaching out to them through mail was a problem so we added a mobile number section on signup on the 13/06/2018.

Particularly interesting is the kind of impact we are having on the few businesses we have started with. Coming on board Minafisi is like entering a whole new world of possibilities for some of these businesses. We are inspiring a better and interesting way of doing business for these business owners. 

See some recent users

Car Dealership

Perfume Oils Business

Electronic Assessories Business

In 12 months, we are looking to have gotten at least 400 active users on our platform. When we do, we would have started setting the pace for the kind of revolution we want to bring to the market. Our users will be able to do business more conveniently and effectively without having to worry a lot about the overhead cost of starting and running business the brick and mortar way.

We have plans of approaching our solution holistically in order that consumers can trust at least businesses that are ran from our platform.

We have a really complementary and passionate team behind Minafisi. I am the revenue driver with a lot of understanding of our market, some of which came from failing my first e-commerce startup. I work on strategies, partnerships and mobilize resource to make sure we succeed. 

We have a great team behind the technology of our platform. Mathe Zsolt and his team has over 20 years combined experience in software development.

We have recently gotten on board an technical support and customer service persons.

Main huddle now is getting a full-time team.

Revenue is mainly based on subscription fees. We are in our pilot stage and currently have only one paid plan but we would include others with the feedback we get from the market after 6 months. We would explore transaction fees especially after we are able to integrate our own payment gateway.

Our pricing structure is meant to be very affordable and for a huge SME population who do not have access to enough funds, that is the way to go. We charge 1/6 of the price of same plan for most of our competitors. This way, we can get more businesses signing up and using our platform without a lot of financial burden once we establish why they need our platform.

Solve will help our startup attract amazing opportunities suc as market accessibility, brand validation, network, funding and mentorship. We need these if we want to realize our full potential.

It will be difficult to be competitive with our current team structure and the funding grant from Solve can help us set up properly. We have a great opportunity in the market and we need opportunities to help us be the best we can be and Solve can help us.

On-the-ground Team - Almost all of our current team (volunteers included) and partners are not based in Africa or Ghana to be specific.

Funding - We are still bootstrapping and operating from a public library. Solve's fund can help us set up and start operating more efficiently and effectively.

Brand Validation - We need some validation to help us look good and be able to compete with international and local, direct and indirect competition.