“Just thinking about who are the early adopters: Ghanaians are actually not early adopters of anything.”
-Nelson Klutse, Co-Founder of Suba, MEST Incubator
It’s a problem many innovative startups in Africa have faced: how to get African consumers to try something new. A combination of cultural conservatism and fear of being cheated often makes it difficult for new products to grow. So how do African entrepreneurs address this problem?
##Building a Game Development Company in Ghana
“The African market is very, very, very funny. It will shock you what appeals to the average African consumer.”
-Eyram Tawia, Co-founder of Leti Arts, MEST Incubator
When we asked Eyram Tawia about how he tackled the problem of early adopters in Africa, he started by pointing out that it’s really much more complicated than that. When they released their first game in the Apple App Store in 2009, the problem wasn’t a lack of early adopters.
The problem was much simpler. Their local market didn’t have phones and weren’t able to make payments through the App Store. So, they had to shift their focus to the African diaspora. But there they were competing with all the games available to anyone living in those outside countries.
What Eyram ultimately realized was that he couldn’t rely on the fact that he and his companies were Africans making games for other Africans. The games had to be good, able to compete with anything made anywhere. In other words, instead of focusing on the difficulties of growing in Africa and using this early adopter problem as an excuse, Eyram and his team focused on building something that could succeed anywhere.
The team over at Suba learned something similar themselves.
##Avoiding Excuses
Nelson Klutse knows that Ghanaians aren’t big early adopters. It was certainly difficult for his product, the photo sharing app Suba, to compete with popular apps like Facebook and Whatsapp for mobile customers’ data. However, he ultimately comes to a similar conclusion to Eyram.
“If people really wanted to use it, they would.”
-Nelson Klutse, Co-Founder of Suba, MEST Incubator
The reason people weren’t downloading Suba wasn’t just that they weren’t natural early adopters, it was because because they didn’t know the data charges. Not knowing how much it would cost them to download and use the app meant it was too difficult to become a user. Suba had celebrity endorsements on their side, but the key issue was simply the cost of data.
In both cases, these African entrepreneurs realized that simply saying “Africans aren’t early adopters” would have been an excuse that prevented them from seeing the real problem in front of them. For Eyram, that was making sure Africans could pay for his games and that they were fantastic to play. For Nelson, it was about eliminating the barriers to download his app.