One of the most popular African startups, the closed store, can be found in Notify Logistics. Why? You’re right; they ran out of money.
The company, whose business model closely resembles Adam Neumann, works in a lease of workplace space to small-sized businesses in Kenya. It was established in the year 2018 to assist in the financing of retail shops for smaller businesses. The cost of retail stores could be as high as sh40,000 ($330) for conventional renters; notify supplied it for sh20,000 ($165) with the retailer’s manager as an added benefit. In the Nairobi shopping mall, the owner was charged 800,000 shish ($6,600) each month for three floors which he used, but the rental companies he used were not sustainable.
The company was founded in August 2021. Notify was able to raise Sh45 million ($370,000), but it was not enough for the startup in its fight. In the end, it was shut down due to the high cost of operations.
This is just the latest in a long line of startups that fail because of high working costs. Consider, for example, Kune Meals, the online food service startup which shut down in June of this twelve months after just 18 months of existence. Kune launched in the month of December 2020 with the intention to provide clients with reasonably priced, ready-to-eat food items for $3 in a marketplace that is dominated by supply giants like Uber, Glovo, and Jumia offering similar products for just $10 and local distributors. of meals that advertise food items. At a lower cost. The month ended in March, and the business delivered 600 meals per day, with the gross margin being 48 percent. Although that might appear healthy, it was not. Kune was able to spend $1.56 to arrange every dish, and he returned the total cost of $1.44.
It is important to note that on June 20, 2021, Kune received $ 1 million in Enterprise Capital (VC) money. In the year prior, she served 5,500 meals. This equates to $165,000. In the event that the business finally went under in the year 2000, its French co-founder and CEO, Robin Recht, mentioned that the promotion at $3 per meal was
It is clear that Kune should have provided additional and possibly increased the value of his meals instead of relying on VC money. According to the Jumia Kenya Meals Index 2020 report, Julia customers in Kenya were able to spend 22,000 shillings ($16) on a typical meal. Each meal.
Prior to Kune’s demise in life, as per his own accounts, Reecht approached lots of customers but could not extract any money from the buyers. In addition to the rising cost of food which has impacted our profits and our margins, we were unable to keep going.” If Kune was already in a state of uncertainty situation increased his expenses, he could be in a position to withstand the increase in the cost of food.
The month before, Kenyan e-commerce firm Sky. Backyard announced that, after five years of operating, it would be shutting down after a failure in its financing round. Agritech company WeFarm was able to raise $11 million in July 2021 and decided to close WeFarm Store, your application that helped farmers buy farm products online. The app, which was introduced nine months ago prior to that, was shut down, according to the company’s director for Progress, Sofie Mala, because of “present conditions in the market which made it difficult for the company to grow.”
These failures raise concerns about technological innovation in the African continent. Startups can set out to as much as a goal to streamline the brick-and-mortar courses of their competitors or even disrupt them and, in the process, end up leaving the business. They aren’t able to replicate the level of efficiency and efficiency that established companies are known for, and so they help themselves, regardless of increasing thousands and even thousands of dollars in capital investment.
There are a variety of reasons for this failure. For instance, conducting business in Africa is difficult. Businesses must deal with clients with low purchasing energy, a volatile political environment as well as a lack of infrastructure.
Another reason for this series of failures is the depletion of corporate capital funds as the global tech recession persists.
Startups are created to grow quickly, but within the process of scaling, they have to rent additional arms and acquire more assets than they can afford to keep. Instead, they rely heavily on their customers who aren’t there, forcing them to cut their coats down to size. For example, Kune, nonetheless, was unable to raise costs or reduce prices, even as increases in food and other working costs pushed its gross margin to 5%. In the end, it was decided to increase money, and it did not succeed. It’s clear now that in Africa’s volatile markets, businesses that have fashions that aren’t able to stand the rigors of socio-economic change are prone to collapse and eventual closure.
In the world of startups, rapid scaling is normal because many startups are trying to solve major issues within a short period of time and also create an environmentally sustainable product and earn profit. But rapid scaling can have its downsides. In order to scale quickly, startups hire and rent at a rapid speed but fail to adjust their terms in line with their current level of growth. What worked in the beginning when you only had ten employees might not be applicable with 50 employees.
The speed of scaling up can lead to more revenue, but it also means rapid growth in the number of customers as well as more inside procedures and ranges of administration and more fires to put out. The rapid changes require careful attention to ensure your product’s good quality to keep your staff happy and make sure you don’t run out of money. In fact, it’s advised that new businesses take a break every now and then so that they can grow faster and more safely.
In this way, frugality is the idea that startups develop products with strong value propositions and implement effective business models. Without these, they’ll be unable to survive.
Last month, when TechCabal went into the accounts of Neobank Kuda and found that the company had incurred a deficit that was 6,092,554,866 ($14,214,681) (primarily through risky loans) in the year 2021. The protection offered said that such losses are not uncommon for startup companies. In the month prior, the news was that Kuda had dismissed 23 employees, or five percent of its employees of 450 employees. But the question is, what, as an African startup, do you need to expand to a loss-making strategy during the world’s recession?
The record-breaking $5 billion in funding that African startups raised in the past year aren’t enough to alter the playing field for entrepreneurs on the continent. For the sake of context, electric car company Rivian alone was able to raise $5 billion in the last 12 months.
Silicon Valley’s “fail quickly, usually fail” business model, which promotes failure as a way towards success, wouldn’t be applicable to Africa because failure is costly in Africa’s growing tech ecosystem. This mindset was most effective in 2018 when the Nigerian technology industry was just beginning to develop, and the startups were in such a state of failure that they were encouraged to just remain. Since buyers are increasingly looking towards Africa as a potential source of enormous returns, continued failures may cause investors to reconsider investing and, inevitably, harm the ecosystem since it heavily relies on funding from outside the continent.
All startups are susceptible to failure, especially when an economic downturn hits the tech industry, but business conditions that are shaky across Africa demand certain kinds of clever that could in the longevity of African startups.