Dear African Web Entrepreneurs, Develop Your OFFLINE Growth

It is crazy out there with all the talks of digital disruptions they are throwing on Africa’s offline industries. The web entrepreneurs will magically grow from one customer and take 30% of the total market. Yes, you can use your app to onboard 16 million bank customers in three years when it took you 123 years to get 14 million customers.

Sure, there are millions of people in Africa. You can get a digital business to take your percentage. Give him 10% of the 1.2 billion people and he will smile to the Forbes billionaire party. But what if I tell you that the person with that projection is wrong? Except blogging, which is a digital native business (even that could need offline sales efforts), I will recommend you get build an OFFLINE Growth team even if you run a digital/web business in our continent.

That is how it will be till 2022, at least. The money is still offline and I want us to respect that.  You also need to understand that the people are still offline. Every data from Konga to Uber to PrepClass and more will tell you just that. These are hard numbers from people pushing the envelopes. I explain in this video.

My prediction of 2022 is explained in this piece.

In today’s videocast, I make a case that Africa will enter the era of affordable broadband internet in 2022. That will be the year we will begin a new dawn of immersive connectivity where you can eat and surf all you can. Industry players will take off the Internet meter and then focus on service, experience and quality. From satellite broadband vendors to the MNCs with balloons and drones, the sector will become very competitive and service will drive growth. This has happened in the past – every decade, Africa experiences a major industrial transformation. We saw that in banking and voice telephony. 2020s, starting at 2022, will be the decade of immersive connectivity.