How stupid people make ideas happen in Africa?

Two years ago my partner and I started, what all the people in our entourage believed to be a stupid adventure, selling handbags on Facebook in Kinshasa (DRC).

From an initial investment of 370$ in 2015, we made 200K$ in turnover the next year.

How did we do that?

Well, we just decided to stay in tune with the label our idea was given by asking ourselves stupid questions.

Seing how the banks and the telecom operators were mushrooming in DRC, plus a timid but vivid emergence of a middle class 2.0, we asked ouselves two simple questions.

Bear in mind that this was a straightforward reasoning process, therefore there was really nothing hidden on the other side of the visible.

What questions to ask?

The first question was to know what the next step of the development of the world of services in Kinshasa would be. It did not take an Einstein out of us to realise that the rise of e-commerce was the answer.

The second one was to know, due to the slowness of the internet connection, whether it existed a platform that could bridge the gap and allow us to reach out to people and make this idea happen.

Again, the answer spoke for itself, it was Facebook.

Everything was set!

How to get started then and what product to start with?

We had no sufficient money at hand to manufacture our own product so we chose the simplest and easiest route, we decided to search for something affordable that we could easily sell.

To find out what to sell, we continued to proceed the same way we thought was our method, our formula, asking ourselves simple questions.

What are the products congolese people like the most?

Actually there are a lot, but knowing the limits of our financial capabilities and our willingness to stay Lean in running our experiments we quickly realised that we needed to find something very easy to handle on both sides, for our target and for us.

Stated in the fact of practical life, the product we wanted to give a better offer needed to be easy to describe and used on daily basis.

How to communicate?

Beside the product, we needed to find an original way to communicate, through Facebook, to an audience accustomed to seing and touching a product before deciding to buy it.

This was another ball game but remember, we didn’t think we were smart hence we just borrowed the concept behind Henry Ford’s secret of success.

Being very functional in our endeavouring happened to be a blessing once again, for we settled on an item which ended up being a real hit, the handbag.

We also managed to find a way to maximise both the activation process and the retention rate to the point that most of them have become our natural ambassadors.

What next?

Today we are growing and have diversified our offer.

We believe in the existence of an African e-commerce typology which lends itself better to socio-cultural considerations.

We are currently working on a new approach to extend our actif users’ portfolio.

This adventure is still ongoing and our biggest wish is to make a wonderful story to be told to brilliant people.

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