Supfrica - A Great Business Move

Since they learned about the new changes in WhatsApp policies, which, apparently, threaten the privacy of users' personal data, a massive migration of the user base to other platforms and messaging services has been unleashed.

Much has been said about this policy change. Accusations of all kinds have created an opinion matrix based on speculation. The truth is that this move was very expensive for WhatsApp, since it lost many customers.

One of the companies that experienced an escalation of massive subscriptions caused by migration from WhatsApp is Telegram:

“During the first week of January, Telegram exceeded 500 million active monthly users. After this, it continued to grow: 25 million new users came to Telegram in the last 72 hours" _Source

According to statements by its founder, the Russian Pavel Dúrov.

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These figures should make companies think about the handling of sensitive information from their customers.
It is very common that in order to register in any exchange and be able to enjoy all the services, we always have to face a KYC process.
For many people, this can cause a rejection of these platforms, since they prefer to keep their data and personal information, private and not share it with anyone.

_Source

As a result of these events, an African company based in Sierraleone (Techfrica), which was founded by the application developer and self-taught website designer: Alhassan Hafiz Bakarr-Kanu, launched an application similar to WhatsApp that focuses on in the needs of users in the continent, called "Supfrica", which was downloaded more than 100,000 times in a period of 3 days, although it was not yet the official launch.

Supfrica APK - Googleplay

This application was developed considering the conditions of the communications technology base available in most countries and cities in Africa, since, for the most part, the digital telephone network does not exceed 2G, this prevents the good performance of applications like WhatsApp, which has been discontinued for many models of Smartphones with old operating systems.

Despite the exponential growth of African cities, the continent's population remains largely rural. More than 59% of Africans still live in the countryside. In these areas it is not uncommon to see a latest-generation smartphone, however, due to the limited digital telephone network, it is often impossible to receive messages, send photos and videos, as well as calls and video-calls, through such widely used messaging applications.

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Summary

I recently read our friend @ramsesuchiha's post about the book "Blue Ocean Strategy".

Quoting a phrase from that post we find:

Contrary to this blue ocean, there is a red ocean full of blood and war between companies that compete in saturated markets, with few customers and little room for growth.

This refers to those economic wars that occur in markets that are already saturated with supply. What causes competitions that are often unfair.

Having the ability to innovate in other areas where there is not yet great competition, is what makes companies successful.
In other cases there is also the factor of creativity and of being able to offer a "substantial improvement" to an existing product.

In the case of Supfrica, its creator thought about the needs of a vast base of potential users on the African continent and created a product that until now has no competition, so its future in the short term looks totally successful.