It has been a remarkable journey building Twinpine over the last seven years.
We have grown from using a licensed ad serving software that served mobile ads on the likes of Punch, Vanguard and Guardian to building our proprietary technology and monetising for leading browsers, devices manufacturers and telcos in Africa.
Here are a few hard lessons from that journey:
The product doesn’t need to be perfect. It only needs to work
In getting off the ground, many entrepreneurs spend too much time trying to build the perfect product before taking it to market. Others waste time tinkering with design, speed and other nice attributes forgetting there are so many other levers that make a successful business.
The product doesn’t have to be perfect it just needs to work. Once a product does what it promises then its time to hit the streets.
A great product by itself doesn’t pay the bills.
Invest in sales & marketing early enough
This connects to my first lesson. There’s the talk about building a great product and customers will come. Similar to the saying that you shouldn’t try so hard to network, once you have value, successful people will want to associate with you. Well, I’m happy to tell you both aren’t true.
Once you have a value proposition, the next problem to solve is selling it. Don’t wait for organic growth. It may not come and even if it does it will never help you reach your potential.
Marketing is super important to business success. Of what good is your value if no one knows about it.
If your marketing is done right, your sales should be straightforward.
Think about your survival. A lot
Things change fast, especially in digital and technology. Almost every two years we had to deal with a new industry concept: real-time bidding, ad exchanges, programmatic, DSPs, SSPs, DMPs and so on.
What helped us get this far was to think about our differentiation, daily. It was this thinking for example that pushed us to innovate around customer engagement and retention solutions for financial services companies in Africa.
Technology easily scales globally. Make sure your product isn’t a feature at another company.
Be sure what you’re investing in now will be relevant in 5 years.
Be and stay lean
Our market is special. Many African tech startups have died due to a combination of lack of access to funding and a poor financial management culture.
Since no one will fund your product market fit, it may make sense to build something that makes money from day one and be lean in operations.
We bootstrapped for seven years and we didn’t have time for excesses. No lavish offices, salary packages and unnecessary business trips.
Even after raising $5 million earlier this year, this culture remains the same.
Focus on the value you’re creating
What makes your business valuable. A business is not the ‘sexy’ software, nor the lovely office, neither is it the swag. You don’t measure business success by how many employees you have.
A successful business is measured by its ability to be sustainable and competitive enough to generate profits in future. Every business needs to define what those words mean for them.
Build products that are aligned, solve your customer problems, leverage partnerships and build an ecosystem.
Think about the things that will make you successfully long term and focus on them.
Build your own talent and keep them
Every technology based company around will tell you of their struggles hiring and keeping technology talent. Even talented digital professionals are hard to come by. There’s not a lot in the pool to select from.
Three years into our business we lost some of our best people and that had a great impact on our performance. We also in the past struggled to attract tech talent as other companies offered much higher pay.
We have paid more attention to talent and it is paying off.
The result is all that matters
No one really cares about the peculiarities of your market or how tough your competition is. No one cares if you can’t find the talent you need. Your razor sharp focus to solve these problems will lead to your long term success.
This point serves to capture my points above and so many others I can’t cover.
It is the absolute resolve to win in your chosen market that will lead you to the right questions. If you find answers to those questions, you will be fine.
Whatever you do find a way to win.
In closing, a lot of credit has to go to the visionary Elo Umeh and technical genius Deji Balogun who have been behind the scenes putting in the work to get the Twinpine business to where it is today. They have been consistent, working day and night, non stop for seven years to get us here. Thats what it really takes to be successful.
I remember the early days when we wrote on our walls “Everyday we try to take over the world”. Well, seven years later, we’re still on that journey.
