Forty tickets to two hundred thousand
A Kigali founder tells Kwame how she grew a bus ticketing company from a borrowed motorbike to a national network, through three bank rejections and a co-founder walking out.
Soil tests and the cocoa price
0:00 / 0:48
Sample the first 60 seconds free. Sign up free or log in to hear the whole episode.
Show notes
Selling data to farmers who never bought data
Kwame visits a Kumasi agritech company that tests soil for cocoa smallholders. Its founder explains how he priced a service nobody had asked for, and how the cocoa price sets his whole year.
- Why the first 200 customers paid in cocoa beans, not cash
- Training field agents who are also farmers
- What happens to renewals when the world price drops
- The cooperative deal that doubled the customer base in one month
- Raising a small round from Accra angels instead of waiting for Silicon Valley
Recorded at the company's warehouse outside Kumasi, with the generator running in the background.
Transcript
Welcome back to Lagos to Nairobi by Pitch Deck. I am Kwame Asante-Boateng, and today I am a few hours from home, in Kumasi, standing in a warehouse that smells of fermented cocoa. The man who runs it has built a company that tests soil for smallholder farmers, people who have grown cocoa for three generations and have never once paid for a piece of data. His first two hundred customers did not pay in cash. They paid in beans. We talk about how you price something nobody asked for, how you train field agents who are farmers themselves, and what happens to your renewals when the world cocoa price falls thirty percent in a season. There is also a cooperative deal that doubled his customer base in a single month. Grab a coffee, or better, a hot chocolate. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
Open as text