Lessons Since Announcing the Launch of Tunzaa’s Android App
Understanding Tunzaa’s Journey From Our Point of View
I’m excited about Tunzaa’s progress since we officially announced the landing page for early access users on the 20th of April, 2021 to announcing the Android app on the 16th of June, 2021.
2 weeks have gone by since we released Tunzaa mobile app publicly for Android users via Twitter & Instagram. Tunzaa can be downloaded for Android devices on Google Play Store from this link here.
Background
With help from some friends, between the 2nd and the 5th of April 2019, I commissioned a survey to understand “HOW PEOPLE IN TANZANIA TOWNSHIPS MANAGE PERSONAL EARNINGS, SAVINGS & EXPENSES”. This survey took place in Tanga & in Dar es salaam and we spoke to hundreds of people on the ground and online.
Here’s some of the insights that we gathered at that time
While a lot of stories can be extracted from the survey, I found the following narratives very interesting. The people we spoke to mentioned that their priorities, among others, are:
- To be able to keep track of their savings (for the few who manage to put money aside)
- To have ways to separate emergency funds from other savings/goals (rent, fees, bills etc.)
- To learn and to develop saving habits
- To easily keep track of their earning and expenses (81.9% of the people we spoke to mentioned using notebooks to keep track)
- To assist them with budgeting and financial planning
What did we do next
We went back to the drawing board and worked on different versions of paper prototypes iterating what would later become Tunzaa.
I had amazing support from Mag. Johannes Siller (partner at Ellipsis Digital), Philemon Msuya (CPA), Dr. Steven Moruo, Ahmed Mohamed Akram and just to mention a few.
We organized several user experience (UX) focus group sessions and spoke to different people including financial industry experts, bankers, vendors, engineers and more. We showed them the mock ups of the app we envisioned at that time and learned a lot (compliances especially).
I assigned the first team of software developers to build a working prototype. It never saw the light of day (expensive lesson). I assigned another developer to build the platform, again, it was never finished (interesting story, maybe someday I will share it). And then 2020, COVID-19 outbreak happened and I had to put a break on Tunzaa’s development work to save Ellipsis Digital (and I did).
That’s it, Lean Development it is
In April, 2021 I decided — after failed attempts to launch and an attempt to sabotage our efforts (will share this someday as a lesson) — to build everything from scratch.
I made two very important changes — the development approach and most importantly, I changed the team.
Instead of working on the platform to completion, we adopted lean methodology, which allowed us to build, launch, test, learn and repeat the process.
On the 20th of April, 2021 I announced the official launch of Tunzaa on Twitter — without having any working technology at that time.
Adam Nasango (him and I attended the University of Dodoma) worked on the User Interface design of the current version of Tunzaa and shared this beautiful design of our app on Figma.
We shared the design with a specific group of people who signed up for early accessand started to collect feedback while building the platform.
Thankful to the amazing engineering team, Kenneth Simon (front end developer) & Amani Mawala (backend developer), are working tirelessly to build Tunzaa. Together we’ve built APIs, a marketplace app, business app and a dashboard for our internal uses (all between 20th of April and today, on going).
So, What is Tunzaa?
Tunzaa is a secure way to sell and buy services & products from businesses that accept payments in installments from everyday Africans.
Buyers pay using mobile money wallets and we’ve included gamification in our platform aimed to improve the financial habits of our users in the process.
That didn’t make any sense…so, again, what does Tunzaa do?
To understand the value of Tunzaa one has to be cognizant of the day to day socio-economic activities in African cities like Dar es salaam (Tanzania).
Like most African countries, people in Dar es salaam earn their living from working on informal day to day jobs such as riding passenger motorbike taxis, running small street stalls and similar jobs.
The majority of the working population earn less than 5 USD per day working in these informal jobs.
It requires some serious financial discipline to achieve one’s financial goals in such environment.
That is where we come in, we use gamification and hooks (think of them as reminders) to wire in positive financial habits to our users.
The idea is to let people pay for services and goods in small amounts of money over a period of time and gamification makes the whole process engaging and rewarding.
Read more about Tunzaa in this article penned down by our Customer Experience Manager, Maryam Baba, “How Tunzaa Is Helping Young Africans Develop Positive Financial Habits”.
Lessons Since We Launched Tunzaa’s Android App
Here’s are some of the things that, I personally, have been learning ever since we made an announcement.
Build & Launch [VERY FAST]
I’m naturally a perfectionist and therefore I tend to take a lot of time making sure everything works as expected. This is, unfortunately (a long expensive lesson), not effective. Exposing yourself to the public by announcing your product before building it gives you a required energy to make sure you live to your promise and that’s exactly what Tunzaa team managed to achieve.
First Paying Customer is Your Teammate
On the 20th of June, 2021 (4 days after announcing) I received a notification that someone is actually paying on Tunzaa.
At first I thought one of us is testing payments so I didn’t really pay attention to the transaction until the next day when I checked the dashboard. I was so happy about it.
I called the customer and thanked him (it was proof that we did something someone wants) and we had a chat about how he found out about Tunzaa, the experience and of course if there’s anything he didn’t like (of course, there was).
We quickly wrote the changes to accommodate the customer and released updates on Google Play, he was happy with the changes and he decided to buy another product on Tunzaa.
The Next Step
We are in the early days of Tunzaa regardless of our history and what’s important for us right now is finding a Product/Market fit. After that we will shift our focus to growth.
To accommodate all these we are doing a lot of ground work, Maryam & Jasmine Lupatu (Operations Manager) are talking to businesses and customers with the help of Bernard Mwakililo (Digital Marketing Manager)& Goodluck Koba (Multimedia Artist) to understand Tunzaa’s sweet spot. Engineers continue to work on Tunzaa (no major features, just improving the current platform).
We are also planning an iOS launch in the next few days.
I don’t know what tomorrow will bring for Tunzaa and that’s what makes this journey very interesting for us. Until then we continue to build and grow our user base (now at +500 user accounts, +100 business accounts, 5 pending orders and a little over $50 in revenue organically).
