I know this is a bit late, but it wasn’t discussed when the news broke, yet it’s such an important story. For those who don’t know, Mxit was the South African social network that was poised to compete with the big global giants. With 30million users in 2010, the world was at their feet, but they seem to have f’ed it all up. Discuss:
30 million users was pretty decent. Was that just in SA, or did they pivot into any other African countries?
Reading through this piece, it appears to me that their problems were not ‘African’ specific factors as such. Instead simply couldn’t/didn’t ‘execute’ properly. They had all sorts of technical debt piling up all over the place, high turnover of key staff, didn’t even clarify vision of what their company stands for, market communication etc.
It’s just like watching the slow implosion going with Blackberry/RIM - it’s not a ‘Canadian’ problem or Yahoo - it’s not an ‘American’ problem…but yet from first movers advantage positions they’ve slowly eroded market share and hobbling towards ignominious extinction.
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