GlamAfric is fixing problems in the Beauty space for Africans at home and abroad

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GlamAfric, is a marketplace built to help transform Beauty & Wellness experiences for Africans at home and in diaspora. Through our Our Mobile & Web platforms, Clients would be able to find and booking Beauty & Wellness appointments simple, fast and available 24/7. It will also empower professionals with tools to market themselves, manage their back-office, increase bookings and manage their businesses online.

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We launch our BETA on the 30th January, and would open to businesses / professionals for registration. Go to www.glamafric.com and give us feedback pls. Mobile APK and IPA should be ready in two weeks. Happy to share for BETA testing if you are interested. Hit me up, thanks.

See full article here - My ugly journey through Africa’s Beauty Industry. | by Chika Uzor | Medium

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This looks a little rushed out. UX is a little off. Pay attention to the fine details.
Take a look at https://www.styleseat.com/ also https://www.vanitee.com/

Please give Nigeria the best as well. Lets not crowd Nigeria with the half baked copy of what the west has. Read your blog link and the rhetoric seems to have been one of many Nigerians in diaspora expect for the quality.

When your product succeeds, as I hope it will, it will be the standard for the beauty industry. So be a fanatic on aesthetics. Or get a product owner who is. In a month or thereabouts there will be another one or two companies trying to compete with you in the same space. Obsess with the experience and design.

Please don’t rush products out. 1st in the market advantage only takes you a little. And in this case you are not the first even in Nigeria. There is www.tiro.com.ng

As someone who has been involved with the beauty industry pioneering platforms in Asia and America. I believe Nigerians deserve better.

Again, this is an attempt to UP the level of service businesses are offering to Nigerians.

Remember the law of copyright, when you copy, the least is to replicate the same level of delight in a product.

Overall, this has a great potential especially if you are in Nigeria and you can focus on it.

Question:
I see you are using stripe. Is stripe available in Nigeria?

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Brilliant feedback Mate… very much appreciated. We are currently working on the bits of UX that are off and also improving on the look and feel. Its been a few weeks since we dropped this MVP and the learnings have been immense. User feedback has also influenced our Mobile Apps offering which would be out in a few weeks. As we’ve always had a mobile 1st strategy, i expect it to be a much better experience for Clients and professionals, however, we’ll make sure the website offering is improved.

We are aware of some of the competition you’ve mentioned and can guarantee that some of the product offerings on our roadmap would enable us stand apart from the crowd. We are very excited about what’s to come.

Building up our team in Nigeria now that we have started to identify product / market fit and would be focused on Nigeria for a significant period of time before looking at other markets such as the UK.

And to answer your question, yeah, Stripe works in Nigeria. :slight_smile:

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Thats great to know that you have all these items considered. Please take a look at Tiro mobile app. It’s just not usable. Thats what you don’t want to be. I think they might have gone with a multi-platform development framework, like Xamarin, Ionic, PhoneGap and so on. The iOS app that I tried out of curiosity just would not do anything.

Mobile first, I definitely agree. Am sure once you have the team on the ground you will have a much better idea of the actual need vs the supposed need in the market. And from what I have seen so far in Nigeria, although I have not been in the country for a long while myself, internet connectivity seems to be an on-going issue. So you might want to include an sms number (short code number) or whatever is possible to book from.

Essentially, SMS version of Interactive voice response (IVR). Twilio can do that. Sorry I haven’t researched much about companies that offer the same value prop in Nigeria. You might have to find that.
Like so, Dial 1 for this two to book, and so on. You get the gist.

Make use of services like Twilio (Not sure if they have local Nigerian numbers) but am sure there will be alternatives.

But, I do believe that that should drive usage from other users who wants the service but ain’t always connected. But again for someone to want to book a service online or via an app, they must be quite savvy, so why not just let the market decide and see where it goes.

I want to encourage you and other entrepreneurs looking to start a technology empowered business to actually bring value to Nigeria and the Nigerian technology sector. And in no time all the Wantrepreneurs will fizzle out leaving quality and reliable systems, services and businesses.

If we are claiming that we can drive a change let’s actually put in the hard work.

Also, for Stripe, do they allow local Nigerian cards to be used or it has to be some Specialised cards?

Overall, I have faith in the values Nigerians can bring to Nigeria.

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