Target customer
Any business requires a target market research and understanding the needs, perspectives of the customers you intend in targeting. For Innocent it is the women who spend most of their time doing groceries to carter for their families.
A research was conducted for three months to more than 100 women with the aim of knowing how grocery shopping affects them and their work life. Innocent as an uber driver used that opportunity to ask the women he had as passengers. Lots of responses showed that corporate women have lesser time to do grocery shopping and it was tiresome having to balance office hours and finding time to go the market.
Innocent wanted to provide a solution that is going to be convenient for these women. When the business was up and running the first people to call was the women he interviewed. Innocent says 50% of his customers in the first month were the women he interviewed. He knew what they wanted was a variety of quality products and he delivered.
This is what Innocent asked himself when he began his research “If I am looking at a woman what services am I bring to fit her needs?”
When it comes to the reach of his customers, Innocent uses social platforms such as Instagram, Whats App to advertise their products as well as communicate with their customers.
“Here is the most interesting part, the reason why I do uber is to network, if I am driving you to anywhere you are going I have about 10 to 15 minutes of your time to speak about the product I am providing and your undivided attention”
Innocent says the aim is to get about 5 customers in a week from Uber drives and the rest from other online platforms.
Innocent Mayawa, the founder of Mabibo Sokoni on the importance of impacting lives with what you do.
Accomplishments and challenges so far
Only six months into existence MabiboSokoni has managed to reach 100 users not just registered customers regardless the fact that they had no enough capital for advertisement yet it is marked as one greatest achievement.
The response from the customers has been nothing but encouraging, as a startup company we are looking to advancing and therefore we seek open opinion from each and every one of our customers.
Mwanaidi Juma had this say, “I am a house wife and I need to make sure that my children are catered for when it comes to their meals. I get all my products such as soaps, oil and food fromMabiboSokoni. They have actually made my life a lot easier, saved my time and the price is affordable. I get to enjoy the 5000/= discount coupon every time I make an order of things worth 50,000/=.
Fadhili Mustafa said, “I enjoy MabiboSokoni services and it saves my time, I used to go to the market right after office hours and it was challenging. I now get to buy meat, vegetables, tomatoes and other things for affordable prices and they are delivered on my door step.”
I would not necessarily call them regrets because it is not something that I dwell about up to now. I think back and say, maybe we could have started with an app from the very beginning but again I look at the brighter side and see the fact that we started with a website helped us get so many insights of different features that we wanted to add in our upcoming application. This whole experience gave us a learning curve.
Innocent had this to say to the youth entrepreneurs in Tanzania
“To any young adult thinking of being an entrepreneur, know who you are targeting, do a market research and a bit of pilot testing before executing your plan and rolling up your product. Stat with the little that you have and the resources that you have.”
Impact.techtz@mediaconvergency.co.tz , Th e full interview of Mabibo Sokoni can be found at our you tube channel through this link https://youtu.be/otJ2lDlY9Ow
To read more about our reports featuring Startups in Tanzania https://bit.ly/ImpactTechTZ2021-Report