Haven’t been on here for over a year and interesting to see how things have gone.Back to the topic in context.
Interesting ,going over this thread the last few minutes , and I have been amazed at the sheer ignorance of the average debater on this thread ; majority of responses I have seen on here scream “I lack knowledge on basic business economics”. Why wont our startups fail anyway?
Going forward ,I am surprised no one mentioned the fact I had mockingly predicted Gomyways failure a year ago,alongside Jekalo I think and I was attacked,called names and Mr. Bankola even had my account suspended. He went ahead to block the thread.(Someone knew the guys stationed atop the Radar roof.lol). Comically, Mr. Bankola recently said Techcabal is now a movement or something ,I can wager on the thought , he hasn’t probably been here all year.
Away from that, I have been away from the scene over twelve months and that makes me probably a bit rusty.However ,from my past knowledge Gomyway failed because they had poor execution ,coupled with their inability to tailor their product to fit what their customers wanted.
Gomyway did not need a sales co-founder probably @alpontif as they had 13,000 users (not too sure) and that makes it an average of 400 new users monthly over the last 28 months or thereabout. They did a whole lot of Instagram,Twitter ads and even shot a few promo videos ,all of these don’t come cheap and a sales co-founder wouldn’t had done any better.
While the above metrics seem to insinuate they had poor conversion vs the amount of resource spent ,the signup rate is still fair enough to me.
However,they were unable to make their users use the service day in/day out.They didn’t fail due to lack of monetization ,but rather the above reason.
Interestingly,Even if they had monetized their service ,how would they had made money? With less than 10 passengers daily as at this time last year? Again,I am rusty and I haven’t been around for a while.However ,they were only headed for Failure. To something a lot of people do not even know.Can anyone try find-out the turnover ratio amongst Gomyway team members(staffs) before their closure? You will understand better if you do.
@saosimeon1 Am back on Radar now, share a smile.
Yep I can remember how they attacked you seriously then, BTW I feel the poster here refers to “sales” in the title as " business oriented " , makes better sense like that, we’re all pointing to the fact that in Nigeria, if you don’t define profitability from the start you would most likely fail
Very true. If you don’t define your profitability model from the start, it would difficult for you to now try and build in same at a later stage.
In application development, you need to factor in all the necessary or required security controls from the onset and before the application design for such an application to come out fine. Same things applies to business in general …design your business model well to factor in how you expect to make money. If you don’t, it becomes difficult doing same at launch.
Oh dear,you are missing the point. You can only plan on how to make money ,if the business scale.Theirs didn’t scale and that was the problem.
Same thing we are saying. You must lay out your plans to scale and be profitable. What were their plans to scale? What did they do right or wrong in trying to ensure they scale?
I am sure you know a Lux won’t be needed if bathing never was an activity, same applies to Close Up.
Even Google that started off as an algorithm to rank information on the web was never a product until it solved a real need for their first customer to find what he is looking for on the web.
So Tech still remains an enabler for a product, however, there can be a technical implementation before a product vice versa
I thought I was the only one thinking this
Cut the guy some slack, he made a very valid point, the tech is a means to an end, not the end itself, most devs treat the tech like it is the end itself and it isn’t. That is why Mark also has a strong biz dev team, alongside coders. So when someone says Facebook is an ads company, believe it or not, it is.
Can we stop all these comparisons?
Every business is different and there are a million and one reasons why it can fail. Also, it is hardly ever solely one department’s fault.
Will your superstar sales team market a shitty product? You will only get a lot of angry users.
Will your superstar coders build a product without a market? No revenue!
Every member of the team is crucial.
WhatsApp would be deserted if half your messages did not reach the recipient.
YouTube will be deserted if it slows to a crawl when a lot of people are watching the same video.
Facebook needs a superstar tech team to serve nearly 2 billion monthly active users
Instagram has to serve tons of pictures to millions of users each second.
If you think that the tech is not that important, think again.
If you think that a product will “sell itself” think again.
Know your business, know which part you should focus on in the beginning. Every part of the team is very necessary.
Businesses are just like humans. They might have unique particular characteristics, but they’re generally the same with every other business.
To quote Animal Farm: every member is crucial, but some are more crucial than others.
Tech varies from not very important to very important depending on the business/sector it’s used in.
If Google or someone else didn’t acquire YouTube, history would have turned out differently - fast video or no fast video.
Things they wouldn’t have if they didn’t build a revenue-earning business.
No tech company succeeds solely on the strength of their tech. The best tech/product does not necessarily win in the market, but the best businesses do.
It’s a common problem for technical people to over-estimate the importance of the technical aspects of a business & under-estimate the importance of other aspects. This is not unique to software developers.
How important are the tailors at Louis Vuitton in the grand scheme of things?
Whatever tech is being deployed is just a distribution/delivery mechanism for the actual product/benefit being sold.
It’s high time technical people learn to see the whole forest, instead of a few trees.
I agree.
The sales team is very important, so it the core tech. Who is more important depends on the business and what stage they are at.
I also agree
I agree with this. The mistake being made on this thread is going to the other extreme and underestimating the importance of tech.
There is a balance that must be reached and putting one aspect over another will only lead to a bad overall system.
Right now, it just seems like instead of seeing the forest, we are leaving the tech tree to focus on the sales tree.