EXCLUSIVE Q&A: Deepankar Rustagi, Founder VConnect

VConnect Founder Deepankar Rustagi explains why Africa is the place to be and why African SMEs are the future of the continent’s prosperity.

VConnect

Welcome to Mob76 Outlook, Deepankar. Tell us about VConnect.

We are based in Lagos, Nigeria and we want to be the leading player in Anglophone countries with high internet penetration in Africa. The market is there. According to NBS, the market for online demand-in service-businesses will be $3.6 billion by 2020.

We are playing a critical role in the growth of African SMEs and transforming the way service sector businesses engage with their customers.

To many people, Africa is the so-called Dark Continent, but what’s really happening there right now?

The economic challenges faced by Africa (its dependence on oil, and the non-existence of the middle class) are not hidden from anyone. Providing growth to SMEs in the service sector will append a more dependable stream of revenue.

What is your company doing to help?

We want to transform local SMEs into emerging brands in Africa. More than 75% of SMEs in Africa do not survive the second year of operations. Access to market is one of the major challenges faced by these SMEs.

VConnect is a platform for finding local service professionals and allows users to search for and connect with service businesses to access reliable and affordable services.

We enable businesses to acquire and, more importantly, retain customers by making them more accessible online. Businesses need to take just three easy steps: register on VConnect, respond to enquiries from potential customers and engage to transact.

Our platform is unique as it is easy enough for the SMEs in Africa to promote themselves online using their mobile phones. We help them create their business profile and generate and manage leads for their products and services.

Why did you set up the company?

I grew up in Lagos and have spent more than 18 years here. After engineering work brought me back to Lagos, I noticed the difficulty people faced in finding businesses and how difficult it was for businesses to market themselves and reach their customers. That’s when we decided to start VConnect.

How much traction does VConnect have?

* 1.5 Million monthly users

* 2,000 SMEs actively engage with customers every day

* 15,000 connections made every day(no. of times users get in touch with businesses)

* 75% are mobile users (both businesses and users)

Who are your major competitors?

They are Connect Nigeria, Finelib, Businesslist.ng, Jiji.ng and Olx

Why are you better and different from these other players?

We are an SME tech company, changing the way businesses in Sub-Saharan Africa acquire and engage with customers. We enable businesses to not just generate leads and acquire new customers but also, to retain them, whereas our competitors only enable the business to be listed on their platforms.

As for users, unlike our competitors, we don’t just provide contact information of service professionals but understand users’ requirement and connect them with multiple reliable service professionals for them to get maximum value for their money.

How much funding have you received to this point?

$US5.5 million

Tell us about your founders and team

We are a single founder company and our team consists of 57 people. I founded the company in March, 2011 and have since worked with my team as the CEO, overseeing product development, management, and engagement. During this course, I’ve also completed a Venture Capital program from Haas School of Business, Berkeley and an entrepreneurship course from Stanford SEED, West Africa.

Our core team encompasses of product management, business development, sales, operations, finance, digital marketing and brand/category management all run from our base office in Lagos.

Our CTO is a seasoned programmer with 14 years of experience and has been a part of VConnect since its inception. Our product and marketing heads both have more than eight years of experience in defining the growth path for startups in Asian countries.

Very interesting, Deepaankar, thanks for sharing your story with our audience.

My pleasure, thanks for inviting, me.

EXCLUSIVE Q&A: David Lockie, CEO Pragmatic

WordPress powers 27% of the internet and is a billion dollar market. Pragmatic Founder and CEO David Lockie explains why it will be one of the biggest tech growth areas of 2017.

pragmaticSo, tell our readers more about WordPress

WordPress is on the frontline of the war for privacy and ownership of our content and data. There’s no other platform out there that contributes anywhere near the amount of the self-owned content to the web.

News Corp just migrated all of its sites to WordPress and the platform is starting to win more business in the enterprise CMS space.

Sounds interesting, but what does that actually mean?

WordPress is the common language of the CMS world. It has grown through grassroots popularity and over the past five years has waged a guerilla war on the enterprise software space as people familiar with it migrate into larger organisations.

You’re based in Brighton, right?

Yes, there’s a lot of talent down here and the lifestyle is much better than London, as more people are beginning to realise.

Apart from recent and temporary events with the Southern Rail network to London, living and working in Brighton makes a lot of sense, not only to our employees, but also to us as a business.

Why do you think Brighton is a great place to found a tech business?

Brighton’s an awesome place to have a tech business. Even with the cursed Southern Rail franchise, there are two other operators that run the route and we can be door to door in the same time as many commuters within London.

Most key though is the tech community. Local businesses such as Brandwatch, iCrossing, Unity, SiteVisibility, PropellerNet and Brilliant Noise mean that there’s no shortage of expertise, partnership opportunities and peer support available.

Wired Sussex plays a key role in supporting and growing the industry and taking our voice to government. But key to a small business like us, we can create a stable and brilliant team, less fearful than London agencies that Google or other aggressive recruiters will poach our best talent.

So why is Pragmatic different from its competitors?

We bring proven processes, tools and systems to the table and have the results to show for it. WordPress + Pragmatic = enterprise-ready WordPress. We are one of the few WordPress agencies in the world that have the experience, capacity and capability to execute projects at that level.

Opex spends on licence fees offer a crap product with no portability and a locked-down and opaque road map. Capex, however, builds out the IP that creates a system of differentiation that’s an asset for their business going forward.

What are your plans for 2017?

2017 looks like an exciting year. Last year we grew 300% so this year we’re looking forward to a year of consolidation, structure, efficiency and effectiveness. We’ll grow, but more in profitability than headcount.

We’ve just started a very exciting programme of work that will put WordPress on steroids for our clients, bringing tools to the CMS that will give their journalists and editors a tangible competitive advantage when it comes to writing rich, engaging and on-point news/editorial.

We think our combination of vision and experience with WordPress as part of five-ten year corporate digital stacks along with value-creating delivery will give us opportunities to grow our roster of six- and seven- figure client programmes through the year.

Who are your major competitors?

In three words… Human Made, 10up and Web Dev Studios.

You are currently targeting enterprise clients, but who else do you work with?

We are bound by confidentiality clauses in some cases, but I’ll try to be specific where we can. Our largest programme of work last year was with one of the world’s largest drinks conglomerates.

We also delivered an incredible project for ITV, The National Lottery and the British Olympic Association to support the Rio Olympics. We also have key clients in financial, publishing and ecommerce sectors.

How did you get started in the WordPress business?

It started out with me freelancing, building websites from scratch for friends and family and looking for a better way to do it. I’ve made a video here about ‘becoming a successful WordPress freelancer, that kind of sums it up for me.

I actually began life as a zoologist, so it’s been a pretty whack journey from there to Pragmatic.

Give us some websites you built when you weren’t so, er, experienced

I ate beans on toast trying to build web marketplaces such as:
http://www.fuelcellmarkets.com/fuel_cell_markets/1,1,1.html
http://www.lowcarboneconomy.com/home

(Oh God, just looked at these again – wow!)