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Good morning.
1. ?? Mother of all growth hacks. Fibre.ng has launched Express (beta), a service to let people who live in Lagos convert their expiring annual leases to Fibre monthly memberships.
+ Context: I think this move is smart because it provides them with growth opportunities on both sides of the marketplace – demand (since signups will increase, and when those people want to move, they won’t want to go from paying monthly to annually again), and supply (since Fibre would have already established a relationship with the landlords). ?
2. ?? Craft Silicon is launching Little, their ride hailing service in Kisumu. They also announced 140k downloads and 4000 driver sign-ups. Not bad. Wait, didn’t they announce last year that they were coming to Nigeria in early 2017? How far? ?
3. ?? And the winner is…Nigerian startups, as IroFit, Kudi.ai, and Paylater were 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place at the Ecobank Fintech Challenge held last night in Lomé, Togo. They won cash, support, & partnerships from Ecobank, who will help them scale to other African countries (they are present in 33 of those).
+ IroFit’s flagship product is called ZirooPay, a mobile app and a dongle (similar to Jack Dorsey’s Square) that does not require an internet connection to process card payments for small businesses. (Surely, I’m not the only one who pronounced it ZeroPay, and found it funny that they were the zeroth runners u…nvm).
+ Kudi.ai and Paylater are both more consumer facing, with the former letting users send money and pay bills via FB Messenger, Skype, and Telegram bots, and the latter offering really quick short term loans via their Android app.
+ The biggest takeaway, though, is the number of people who’ve decided to focus their energies on fixing the different parts of the fintech value chain in Nigeria. Some people may disagree, but I think the rational position is to see it as a good thing. ?
4. ?? NCC: Etisalat’s license is not transferrable, which is their way of saying that whoever takes over the telco and their 21 million subscribers has to come and officially “inform” them of the deal. [Link].
+ Etisalat’s November 2016 investor update // they have the highest ARPU of the big 4, with the fewest subscribers.
5. ?? Nigerians in Nigeria may have experienced unusually poor internet service in the past few days. This infographic helps illustrate how it’s linked to a cable cut in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Portugal.
+ Techpoint’s Muyiwa Matuluko wrote a good report. Link.
6. ?? MTN has launched contactless payments for mobile money users in Benin.
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Things, but interesting.
+ Naval Ravikant, with the best tweetstorm you’ll read today. Link.
+ Paystack is hiring a Product Implementation Specialist. Link.
+ Hacks and Lessons from Ventures Platform founder, Kola Aina. Link.
+ South Africans can’t quite decide whether or not they want to use the internet.
+ North African winners of the FB Bots for Messenger Challenge. Link.
+ The Web Foundation’s new CEO is Adrian Lovett. Link.
+ Ire built this bot to troll people who ask you for follow backs on Twitter.
All done, for now.
Thank you for reading.
