Posts Tagged ‘Afrigator’

Posted on February 18, 2010 - by Justin Hartman

My presentation at the Addynamo Blogging Workshop

If you missed it, here’s my presentation from the Addynamo Blogging Workshop that I did yesterday. There are some interesting Adgator insights which haven’t been seen before.

 

Posted on September 22, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

Our experience of sending bulk emails to users

Let me start by saying that Mailchimp is an amazing company and their bulk email service is worth every penny. They deliver a punchy service and their UI is awesome however we no longer use them as our account has now been deleted.

I certainly can see the value in newsletters but from experience our newsletters were more often than not perceived as spam and I think, ultimately, this has hurt our brand. Added to the fact that many of our @afrigator.com email addresses now end up in people’s spam/junk folder and I think you’ll see why we’ve ultimately decided to drop our newsletter service all together.

Maybe our execution was poor, maybe we’re just not experts at doing this but I can tell you in future I’ll be hesitant to send out any emails to users. It’s a tough one for a small online business as email is, fundamentally, your only communication tool with your clients and this tool needs to be used very wisely…….. or else.

I can in all honesty tell you that we’ve learned more than we’d have liked to (mostly painful stuff) and if I had to do it all again I would have never started email newsletters in the first place. We had all these grandiose ideas about how we could leverage off email to our users but in the end I think we failed.

 

Posted on July 29, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

My presentation at the MIH Media Lab Entrepreneurship Workshop

This morning I delivered the following presentation to the students of Stellenbosch University’s Media Lab. My topic was on the start-up lifecycle and I think it went alright. Students are sometimes hard to gauge but I hope that this provided some insight into life running a startup. There’s also some interesting insight into the Afrigator business which has never been released.

Special thanks to Darren Gorton for unknowingly allowing me to use his lighter side of startups presentation in mine! I simply love it! He’s also got a great post on funding for startups in South Africa which any entrepreneur must read.

 

Posted on May 11, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

Afrigator tried to buy Twitter, we launched Gatorpeeps instead

The news is finally out that Afrigator has officially launched Gatorpeeps. Gatorpeeps is our very own micro-blogging platform that we hope will connect our vastly growing community of users.

One of the biggest problems we’ve had is that we sit with more than 12,000 users but we’ve had no way to connect these users together. We’ve had numerous requests to allow peeps to connect with other like-minded African users and for a long time we’ve been trying to figure out the right way to do it.

When we sat down to work the model out Stii had this ingenious idea to buy Twitter so, we made them an offer. Unfortunately our offer of R250,000 was rejected and the result is that we decided to build our own platform instead.

At first glance Gatorpeeps may appear to be competing with Twitter but let me assure you we’re certainly not trying to compete or steal Twitter users but rather leverage off the technology to enhance our existing product.

In truth we modeled a lot of Gatorpeeps off the best that both Twitter and Jaiku had to offer. Twitter has certainly brought micro-blogging to the mainstream and Jaiku revolutionised community interaction and we wanted to bring the simplicity of both into our offering.

So the question then is if we have such amazing micro-blogging platforms already why would we need another? Well, in a review of ten micro-blogging platforms ReadWriteWeb had this to say in their conclusion:

Micro-blogging isn’t a short-term trend – it is here to stay. The evolution of blogging has spawned this new mini version of blogging and many are latching on. The simplicity and ability to post frequently are what attract most to the concept. We expect much faster adoption and mainstream penetration than blogging in general.

I believe this is even more true in Africa as we simply don’t have the penetration that other developed countries have. Also take into consideration that the mobile phone remains the African version of the PC and as such micro-blogging addresses both penetration and accessibility problems. If you take Gatorpeeps into this context, couple it with the fact that less than 5% of Afrigator users have Twitter accounts then you’ll see why launching a micro-blogging platform to our audience is in fact a wise move.

 

Posted on April 30, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

My thoughts on BarCamp Nigeria

On Saturday I was fortunate enough to attend BarCamp Nigeria 2009 in Lagos. Despite various concerns about going to Nigeria (more on that in another blog post) I must say I had a fantastic time and met some amazing people along the way.

Loy Okezie from Startups Nigeria has a really nice summary of the events that transpired over here and there’s another in depth look by Possicon over here as well so I won’t rehash what’s already been said.

What I will say is that this room, filled with about 80 Nigerians, was a true eye-opener for me. They all have university qualifications, all have an online startup (mostly ecommerce focused) and are all extremely well educated and experienced in the online space.

The big question in my mind has been that if a country like Nigeria is filled with such talented individuals in the largest Internet penetrated country in Africa (currently more than 10 million users) then why hasn’t Nigeria produced any world-class Internet startups yet?

This seemed to be a general question and a reason why the event took place in the first place and while there were a lot of theories flying around such as poor connectivity, electricity problems, Government support and regulations, etc., I was left with a strong sense of what’s been lacking – a community.

Up until BarCamp Nigeria most of these 80 people had never met in real-life before. Some have interacted online but for the most part each one has been left to his own devices and they’re all trying to grow their businesses with very little help along the way.

This is the core difference to say South Africa where we do have a pretty strong online community and while it’s often incestuous, contrived and filled with so-called rockstars this community does help drive products online. I can testify to this with my experiences with Afrigator – without the community we’d be nowhere.

South Africa’s online community, or early-adopters, may well be small in the greater scheme of world markets but it all has to start somewhere and in Nigeria’s case this hasn’t really begun yet. I could see that after BarCamp the guys were hungry for more and so they should be. The more they meet, interact, share ideas and create partnerships along the way the more we’ll see online innovation thriving out of Nigeria.

In addition to my observation I also had to do a presentation and to be honest I didn’t really feel qualified to do so. I am the first to admit I don’t know much about Nigeria so I decided to share my experiences of running an online startup in South Africa, shared some of our most detailed social media trends and finally launched our latest baby Gator – Gatorpeeps.

Have a look at the presentation below and let me know what your thoughts are!

 

Posted on April 20, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

Bolton Deventer lives on

When I was formulating my presentation for the 24.com Blogging Workshop on Saturday I was struggling to find a good example of how to promote your blog and market yourself online. So, I decided it was time to revive Bolton Deventer.

I figured that Bolton had a massive impact on the South African blogging community so what better way to illustrate this than by using him as a case study. I must say that I had massive amounts of fun putting this presentation together as it reminded me of the shenanigans that went on during that brief twelve day period. If you haven’t heard of Bolton then best you view the presentation below and get some tips on how to grow traffic to your blog!

 

Posted on April 3, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

Afrigator turns two today… somehow it feels like more!

Honestly I can’t believe it’s that time of year again. Today the team at Afrigator are celebrating our second birthday but strangely it feels like our baby is much older than it actually is.

This time last year I wrote a birthday post and after reading it again I can clearly remember how the first year went by so quickly. Year two is a very different story and while it did go by as quickly as year one I certainly feel like Afrigator, myself and our team have matured in a very big way.

By Web 2.0 standards Afrigator is now actually a very old product. Strange to think that something so new can be classified as old but the reality is that if you haven’t had any traction by this stage your product is dead. For us the reality is that Afrigator has only really started to show traction from when we were partly acquired in September and the growth on all fronts has been phenomenal.

See, for a long time Afrigator had a great brand outside the borders of South Africa and it was largely due to this that we were even able to negotiate a deal with MIH Print Africa. That said, I do remember crapping myself at the idea of how we were going to meet the objectives and projections detailed in the business plan and contracts yet despite this here we are, six months later and I’m blown away by the progress thus far.

While Afrigator has been somewhat of a success story I am humbled by the fact that had we not done the deal with MIH we might not even be here today. Prior to the deal with MIH I was seriously considering the viability of continuing Afrigator in its current form. Mike, Mark, Stii and myself were funding the project by ourselves and it was taking up serious amounts of our time and cutting away at family and personal life and while this great personal sacrifice was manageable in the beginning after 18 months it started to take its toll.

All I can say is thank God the deal came through in the end and thank God I decided to stick it out. I’ve honestly never been this happy with my professional life and this is largely due to the fact that I’m working full time on something that I feel 100% passionate about.

Afrigator has a long way to go to truly be successful and I have a long learning curve ahead of me but as it stands right now I wouldn’t change it for the world. My life has changed so much in the last six months, I’m interacting with some of the most influential business minds in South Africa, I have a great team at my disposal, I am working on innovative ideas and I’m being tested on all levels every day of my life.

Does it get any better?

The great part about where I am right now is that I have a clear understanding of where our company needs to be this time next year and I know exactly what I want to achieve over the next 12 months. So while I’m excited that Afrigator celebrates our second birthday with you guys I’m also humbled by the idea that we have a lot of work ahead of us to achieve the goals we’ve set for ourselves.

 

Posted on April 2, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

My presentation at Nomadic Marketing

On Tuesday I was invited by Dave Duarte to give a presentation at the UCT Graduate School of Business (GSB) for their Nomadic Marketing course. A very daunting task to say the least but I lapped up the opportunity to engage with some of SA’s brilliant minds.

My presentation was on Tools & Technologies, Filtering and Collaborating and while the start is mostly around education the end of the presentation got very interesting. I figured that while it was important to explain the different tools and technologies out there I also wanted to show delegates how to use the tools effectively.

Having been privy to the delegate list beforehand I knew that there were a number of Old Mutual people in the audience so I figured their company would be as good as any to do a small case study on. The results across the various social websites was interesting and I hope that it highlighted how companies are being spoken about online but also how the conversation is generally a one-way street. In my mind it’s an opportunity to engage users and customers in a very unique way.

 

Posted on March 30, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

The Digital Edge – Reprobates and bloggers

I’ve long been a fan of the new Digital Edge podcast series produced by Jarred Cinman and Saul Kropman. When it launched some 12 episodes ago Cambrient received a bit of flack for the promotion of their company but I think over time the content of The Digital Edge has won the battle over the perceived, professional marketing carried within.

What I really like about the podcast series is that it’s short (generally around 15-20 minutes), the content is relevant to the industry and the production quality is superb. In a time when information overload is a major concern this podcast series gives you bite-sized bits of information on the go.

To my embarrassment I’ve been meaning to blog about The Digital Edge for some time but as you can see from the lack of posts on my blog lately time has simply not been on my side. Today however I do have a reason as I’m featured in the latest podcast titled Reprobates and bloggers.

The latest installment looks at the state of the South African blogosphere to see what was really happening. It features top SA bloggers as well as Fred Roed and Afrigator’s other brother, Mike Stopforth. This episode is quite long but I really won’t mind if you skip to the end to listen to me!

 

Posted on February 25, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

The Afrigator / 24.com Integration – what it means

So the big news today is the announcement we made via our blog about the integration between 24.com Blogs and Afrigator.

For a few months we’ve been working with Alistair Fairweather and his dev team at 24.com to try and make this work and I think that as a phase one we’ve done pretty well.

I really believe that this is a significant step in the social media space in Africa. For the first time one of the largest media companies in Africa have opened up their doors to work with an independent and at the same time we’re gaining further credibility within the industry.

From an Afrigator perspective this step moves us closer to becoming the authoritative figure within the space as we are now able to easily aggregate blogs from a portal that was once closed off to the outside world. The 24.com platform is by far the largest of its kind in Africa and it now opens the doors for us to apply a similar model to other blogging platforms.

In the blogging space in South Africa we’ve noticed two very different schools. One is the early-adopter space that are generally all members of Afrigator already while the other is the niche, closed communities that are often much larger than the early-adopter one. These closed communities, while much larger, are not really aware of what’s happening outside their space and I think it’s safe to say that 24.com Blogs is one of them.

By integrating with Afrigator, 24.com bloggers are now exposed to a very different audience than before. In addition these bloggers are now able to get detailed stats about their blog which is something that was not possible prior to this move.

I am of the belief that early-adopters need to be exposed to the closed communities in just the same way. There are some extremely valuable and influential bloggers within the 24.com network and we hope that this integration helps shift perceptions and encourage bloggers to interact outside of their normal environments.

I guess time will tell what happens but for now I’m really pleased to be involved in helping to change the landscape.