The Fun of Running a Virtual Business

It all begun on a Thursday morning after we had been made aware of the impending adventure some few days back. We were seated in our lecture room when the Master of Simulation aka MS (yeah, just like in Master of Ceremony, MC) came to give us a brief introduction to the simulator hereby called Marketplace Live and set the rules for what will become a 7-day long business simulation exercise full of ups and downs.

On this day, we had a lecture on culture which was supposed to prepare us for building the culture of our virtual companies. It is said that, building the culture of your company is as crucial as your desire to see your company succeed (are you confused? Never mind am the only who says this).

But wait, something very interesting happened prior to the lecture on culture, it was the team formation. The MS selected 7 people hereby called buyers from amongst the 26 in class and gave them $1,000,000 to bid for the members of their team. This exercise exposed the miserly in the class. Though the money was virtual, some buyers were unwilling to spend (can you believe that). Eventually when the spending begun, guess how much a valuable human being was bidded for, $50,000 (he knows himself) and no one gave a counter bid. And so it happened that we all finally had team mates, some were in groups of 5, some 4 and others 3.

Day 2 which was a Friday started the whole game officially. All the teams by now had a name for their companies as well as all the culture. Company names included Pineloop, Horce Inc, Torus, Iris, AWC (aka AWotse Computers), AxiComm Inc and OakMac. I was the buyer for the Horce company and formed a wonderful team of 4 (you will see why we're wonderful later).

From day 2 to day 4, companies put in place strategies and investments into winning market share and having a good balance scorecard score.

Day 5, a Tuesday was the investor fair. Companies that needed capital injection could raise up to $4,000,000 to continue to push their companies into taking control of the micro computer manufacturing industry. My team needed to raise the maximum amount and so we participated in the investor fair. As at this quarter, our company had just 1% of the total market share, this position was a difficult one for us, we were not strong per our books to make a strong case for the investors to believe in us.

At the fair, our only point of argument was that we had a market research which no team had and so we could use this to soar up our market share by 15%. Though we spoke confidently, some investors did not believe we could salvage our current situation.

But funny enough when the time came for the real investments even though our books told a different story, out of the 6 investors present only 2 declined to invest in our company; can you believe that? A company that was in debt, had a meagre 1% market share and virtually had no proven industry expertise was able to raise 4 million dollars in investment! The excitement amongst my team members was just overwhelming.

But as the saying goes, don’t just talk the talk but walk the walk; and that’s exactly what we did. The next quarter did not only see us move from 1% market share to 16% market share (we predicted this, yes we did), but we were also out of debt, we had lots of resources at our disposal and most importantly we now had a deeper understanding of our industry and knew exactly what to do to grow from strength to strength.

Meanwhile on the other side, some teams were still gambling, others were neck deep in debt, while the rest wondered what the heck just happened to their market share! Well, business is like life itself, you think it's a game  but then things get real and you realize it's no longer a game.

After Day 6 came day 7, the day for the announcement of the winners of the whole simulation exercise. To keep things short my team won (that is Team Horce). We emerged from the bottom to beat the top giants in the market. We were the black horses, yet we never despaired. Interestingly, the market giants at the start of the game now were market followers, some knee-deep in debt.

It was a week long of mixed feelings, frustration and happiness all bundled up in a “game”. It brought our emotions and joys of being an entrepreneur to reality. Virtual world or not.

Valuable lessons were learnt on business, risk and most importantly team work.  That is after all the entrepreneurial life.

Thanks to: Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology, MEST 2015 year group, Kingsley Abrokwah (@Paapakwame) and Anirudh Narla.

5 Promising Ghanaian Tech Startups that May Soon Become Multinational

Ghana's technology and software industry is relatively a younger one and with this comes many challenges for those who are in these fields. Countries like Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria have received some level of international recognition for their software industries. In some of these countries, they have had huge multinational companies buy out some of their budding startups.

In Ghana, the software industry is growing and already is seeing some promising startups that may soon become multinational. In this article, I take a look at five of such startups that are ready to be sky rocketed.

1. RetailTower

RetailTower is an ecommerce marketing solution. RetailTower enables merchants to create campaigns on price comparison engines.

They seamlessly integrate between e-commerce platforms and comparison shopping engines. With a few clicks, merchants can export their inventory product descriptions, images, and prices from e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, Magento, and osCommerce to publish their products on shopping websites.

RetailTower has over 11,000 online retailers who are all outside of Ghana an indication of their potential in terms of growth and expansion.

The company was adjudged the Utility APP of the year 2013 at the Topappawards, Ghana.

2. Dropifi

Dropifi is a smart contact widget that helps small businesses better analyze, visualize and respond to incoming messages. They promise to help small businesses offer better customer support, capture lead and drive sales through the roof.

Dropifi has over 8000 small businesses as customers all over the world which include TKC Apparel, Colombia International, ALMA Soul among others.

With the nature of their business and customers, it is expected that, they will soon have offices in some countries in Europe and the US to address their growing customer base.

Dropifi has been featured on many international platforms including Forbes, the Huffington Post, TechCrunch and were recently selected as the first and only African startup to be among the 500 Starups.

3. Leti Arts

Leti Arts is a startup that is focused on Africa's superheroes. Leti Arts is bringing Africa's rich folklore to life through the media of comics and mobile gaming.

This tech company is set to launch The Epic of Ananse, an exciting new comic book series and mobile game that reimagines the ancient fable of the African trickster god.

With their target market and intentions of running TV series around these superheroes, they might soon expand into other African countries. Already, they have offices in Ghana and Kenya.

Leti Arts has been featured on the BBC World Service, Polygon and were recently selected as World Summit Award (WSA) Nominee. They were winners of the Entertainment APP and APP Developer category of the TopAPPSaward 2013, Ghana.

4. mPawa

mPawa is a job matching service developed by Innokiq. mPawa supports the posting of jobs and the onwards notification to blue collar workers in Africa.

They wish to bridge the gap that exists in the current blue collar recruitment space; that is getting blue collar workers into a centralized location and allowing employers to easily reach them.

Their focus on the African continent and the successes in the countries they are already in indicates a possible expansion into other African zones.

mPawa has offices in Ghana and Kenya.

5. SMSGH

SMSGH is a Ghanaian tech company that provides bulk SMS, corporate SMS solutions, mobility and web solutions among others.

Their story of three young graduates coming together to build Ghana's first non-telco internet SMS messaging gateway and software is an inspiring one.

The have not only succeeded in building an idea into just a company but a company that sees millions of cedis as yearly revenue. Their turnover is expected to reach GHC10 million in 2013.

SMSGH processes about 10.8 messaging requests every second and over 28 million business-critical & subscriber messages monthly with more than 7 million mobile subscribers relying on them to inform, alert, notify, transact, interact, monetize and share mobile data.

Their vision of becoming an international brand for business messaging is on course and we might soon see them expand into other African countries.

They were adjudged the APP company of the year 2013 at the Topappawards. One of their products, Mpower Payments was also adjudged the most innovative new app 2013, finance app 2013, top user experience app and was the overall winner, the top app of the year 2013 at the same Topappawards, Ghana.


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5 Very Important Things Ghanaian Businesses Take For Granted

Content marketing involves investing time and energy into websites and features such as blogs and FAQ sections. It is becoming common for businesses in Ghana to have websites however these websites are left so dry of content that they were better not in existence. Hardly does one come across a blog or FAQ section on business websites in Ghana.

Take for instance websites of UT bank, RLG, Kasapreko and all the other big businesses in Ghana and you will realize they invest less into content marketing. They either have a newsletter form (which is not taken seriously) or an FAQ section which doesn't serve its intended purpose fully. What is absent is blog sections. Ghanaian businesses just hate blogs.

The primary goal with content marketing is not typically to make a direct sale (although it happens), it is to deliver content over an extended period of time, preferably through email or other means.

The secondary goal is to become a “thought leader” in your industry. The benefits of this is that your content gets you on the radar of larger publications, who will then link to you naturally.

Now let's take RLG for a case study. Assuming RLG had an active blog section on its official website that regularly churns out important articles about the world of technology as it relates to Ghana. After sometime, tech savvy Ghanaians (who have the potential to use RLG products) will begin to visit this blog for news and updates about technology. The more people visit this blog section the higher the chances they would visit other sections of the same website and as people visit sections that explain RLG products, they get interested in what RLG offers and eventually these site visitors become RLG customers.

This is a very low cost marketing strategy which startups especially must adopt since they do not have much financial resources to engage in the very expensive traditional forms of marketing.

Another benefit of the blog section is that, these regular articles that the business produces get crawled by Google and other search engines and kept for future potential customers who may be having their Zero Moment Of Truth (ZMOT). ZMOT is that point in time when someone decides to look up information, reviews etc. on a particular product the person intends to buy.

What form of advertisement is better than having tech-pundits, bloggers, social commentators among others referencing the blog section of RLG for a particular piece of fact or statement they are using?

The most benefit a business can derive from content marketing in my opinion is trust. The more valuable the information you put out there, the more people (who are potential customers) trust your business and the services or products you offer. These people will consider you an expert in your field of business since you have for a long period satified their information need. They will forever remain loyal customers and will refer many other people to your business.

Note: There are other forms of content marketing that a business can engage in.

2. Email Marketing
Do you know what smart entrepreneurs or businesses do with the traffic they receive from content marketing? They build an email list. Outside of direct sales, there is no better business outcome attached to first-time visitors than when they subscribe to receive newsletters and email updates from your business.

So after all your efforts in content marketing (created a blog section on your website etc.) and you are beginning to see several visitors to your company's website, it will be dumb on the part of the business if it does not collect emails.

I know in Ghana, we are not very good at this email thing. Nevertheless, they are people like me who do everything with our emails (I am sure there is a lot more of us with the popularity of social media).

Email marketing basically involves putting a 'Subscribe to our Newsletter' form on your website and other channels and using the emails you collect as a competitive advantage. If on your site, the 'Subscribe to our Newsletter' should be seen on all pages of the site especially where the blog section is. And make sure it is very conspicuous.

The more the visitors to your blog section, the higher the chances they will subscribe to your newsletter in order not to miss future 'juicy' information.

After collecting all these emails, the business can now be sending regular personalized messages to these potential customers. And trust me, there is a 99% probability they will respond positively to your messages if crafted well than they will do to your facebook page posts which might not even get to them because of facebook's new policy for pages.

People feel privileged to be on the email list of companies they trust and will be glad to share whatever information you send them with friends. In fact, most businesses abroad have had their product launches gone viral because the people on their email list decided to share the next 'coolest' thing with their friends who in turn reshare to their other friends. Wouldn't you wish to be the first to know via email what promotions MTN will be launching in the next couple of days? Wouldn't you, thinking to be very important to MTN and the first to hear such news tell your friends about it? This is how email marketing works.

According to ExactTarget, 50% of online users bought something as a result of an email which is higher than any other marketing channel.

To be continued ...
This article will be continued in the second part (3 remaining points will be talked about). You can visit http://www.opinionghana.com for more interesting and intriguing articles or like the facebook page www.facebook.com/opinionghana for the best articles.