Expanding my Tech Business into Africa... The Early Days

In my last post, I wrote about the rise of AppsTech. A meteoric rise it was. With no funding, a young African woman had succeeded in building a global tech business.

We were profitable, had happy customers across the globe, and we had year-on-year growth of 200%. As we demonstrated innovation in the delivery of services, we also placed a great emphasis on innovation in products.

In 2001, AppsTech acquired a startup that had designed a mobile applications development platform. Their CEO was a Kunle M., a brilliant Nigerian entrepreneur who would become a key player at AppsTech. His startup became Mobile AppsTech. Kunle led the initiative and also joined our Executive Committee as Chief Strategy Officer. Mobile AppsTech won several awards, including from the State of Pennsylvania that gave us a spot in their incubator in Philadelphia. We wanted to scale this business fast as we were feeling pressure from giants like Oracle, who were starting to incorporate mobile development tools into their middleware.

As our CSO, Kunle was also working on AppsTech Africa, our vision to become the largest provider of enterprise software solutions on the African continent. We had sensed already in 2001 that Mobile and Africa were going to be big. We needed to figure out how to marry the two.

Kunle starts to court MTN, a South African telco that was expanding fast across the continent. They were our role model for expansion into Africa. More importantly, they had a mobile apps subsidiary that they wanted to get out of. We jumped at the opportunity.

The Thought Board in Kunle's Office

So while Kunle was busy negotiating with MTN, we were opening an office in my native Cameroon. Kunle thought it was a bad idea. Actually, he thought it was a horrible idea. For him, the country presented too many risks and not sufficient rewards. “The numbers don’t add up Rebecca.” Kunle agreed we should have a small office there but he didn’t think Cameroon should be the gateway into our expansion into Africa. But I was the group CEO and I won. I said this before but Kunle was smart. And I really should have listened to him. You’ll soon understand why.

We had already started subletting a small office in Cameroon to support our sales activity and had a staff of three. It made sense that Cameroon should be our regional hub. The country was bilingual French and English so it could support our expansion into both Anglophone and Francophone Africa. I also had strong ties there and I was sure that I could leverage my relationships with my childhood friends who were now decision makers as well as access my father’s extensive network.

Because of our “global from day one” vision, and because we wanted to scale geographically very fast, we had developed our own step-by step methodology for entering a new market. We had tested it in Canada, France and England and later in Ghana. So how hard could my own native country possibly be?

With the support of the rest of our executive team and a reluctant Kunle, I started to execute the plan. I registered the company, hired a country manager, rented office space and started the build-out. Some Columbia University MBA students followed me around for a few months, including to Cameroon and wrote their thesis on this experience which is available here. Pretty soon, we had pumped half a million dollars into this operation. Video of some of the construction is here

Fortunately, MTN’s local subsidiary in Cameroon launched an international RFP for an ERP system just a short time later. This was perfect. Most of our large customers worldwide were telcos. We were in the very first batch of Oracle certified e-Business Suite partners anywhere in the world and we had a local office in Cameroon. We were hugely qualified for the RFP. On the other side, MTN was the dream customer. They were growing fast on the continent, they were privately owned so we wouldn’t need to worry about corrupt government officials and we had already had an existing relationship with their parent company in South Africa. Even Kunle was excited.

What had propelled AppsTech to success was our unique delivery model. The project itself didn’t quite fit into this. One of our products was called FastApps for Oracle Financials which was a fixed price, fixed scope, fixed time turnkey solution. It worked for small business but MTN Cameroon was too large and too complex for this. So we ended up proposing a hybrid. A “FastApps” that was longer in time and more extensive in scope, but also had a fixed price with a formula on additional fees if the deadlines weren’t met.

We worked furiously on the proposal, responding to hundreds of technical questions and asking quite a few ourselves in order to better scope the project. We had huge competitors, all the big software companies had bid, including Oracle Africa itself. Our hard work paid off and we made it through to the next round (kicking Oracle’s a**).

Jean-Michel, our EVP for Tech Solutions and 6 other people including myself, flew to Cameroon to present the proposal and do a product demo. Internet was very unreliable so we had even traveled with our own server. Our offices were still under construction so we had set up in a suite in a local hotel and literally worked 24/7. Sleeping was not allowed.

The presentation went very well. We made it to the final round.

For the following two months, an MTN team embarked on a four country due diligence tour, flying to France, the US and Canada to meet with our staff, our customers and even our bankers.

This meant that each time, I, or another executive had to fly to meet them too. This proposal project was becoming a major distraction. In order to respond to the extensive technical questions, we had pulled several of our best resources to work full time on the proposal. We also had to build a prototype for the demo including a custom interface into a point-of-sale system called Lexys, the only online/offline French/English system we could find.

But the proposal project wasn’t just distracting my time, it had distracted my focus. Kunle started complaining but he wasn’t alone. The finance team started raising concerns about the cost of the proposal to our business, especially when added to the new Cameroon office and its construction budget overruns. Some of the non-Africans on the team started to question the whole Africa vision.

We had never had to devote so much time, so much effort, and so much money to any customer during the proposal process. I argued that this was a loss-leader, and if we won this project and succeeded in the delivery, MTN assured us that we would implement the solution in their other subsidiaries. This client was essential in our African growth strategy.

I wasn’t worried about executing the project. We mastered the technology. But what if we didn’t win? My real question should have been “What if we won?”

Next time, I will answer that.

7 Lessons from an African Woman Entrepreneur on Building a Global Tech Business

Note: This is the first of a series on some experiences on entrepreneurship I have had over the years.

On Twitter, I am best known as a curator of African tech news and in general as someone promoting tech entrepreneurship in Africa. In fact, many think I am a blogger or a journalist. What many don’t realize is that I am also a successful tech entrepreneur.

In 1999, I set up AppsTech to provide enterprise software solutions, primarily around Oracle technologies. I started with literally no money and despite my best efforts, never raised any funding. I was a woman tech founder. I was a Black woman tech founder. I was a Black African woman tech founder.

Although those might have been external factors, my race, gender, or national origin were never a part of my equation. I lived in a self-created bubble in which those elements didn’t matter and I went about my business as any white male would have, oblivious to the reality that surrounded me and the challenges before me. It honestly never occurred to me that it might be any harder for me than any of my fellow startup entrepreneurs.

Lesson One: Your reality is the one that you create in your mind, not the one that others create for you.

Because I was not conscious of how difficult this was, I could be bold. And bold I was. With very little savings and no financial backing, I set out to build a global multi-million dollar business.

I spent the first two weeks doing nothing but writing my business plan. Because I was writing it for me, and not for bankers or investors, I could be completely honest. I was able to lay out my weaknesses, market risks in a very bare, truthful way. Then I could think of strategies to counter these. As I did this, my business model changed significantly from what I first intended. Over the years of course, it changed some more.

Lesson Two: Having a personal business plan is very effective. When we pitch to investors or customers, we want them to drink our Kool-Aid. It’s important though, to realize that it is Kool-Aid and not to drink it ourselves.

So I realized by developing my plan that the type of customers that most purchased my offerings were multinational. That meant that I also needed to be a multinational. How a one woman company becomes a global business can be resumed by one word. The internet.

I built the company’s web site and it was available in both English and French. I spent days studying the web sites of companies like Arthur Andersen, PwC and CapGemini and mimicked the look and feel. The site wasn’t very nice but in those days, neither were my competitors’. I couldn’t yet afford an office but I did get a virtual business address I could use on the web site and on a business card. I didn’t include a title on the card. I wanted the flexibility of being the CEO when I wanted or just one of the engineers if the situation warranted. I might have been a one person business but I presented myself as a global corporation.

Armed with by new business cards, my new web site, I spent a couple thousand dollars going to an industry conference. During that conference, I landed my first customer. A multinational. Of course, they had no idea that I was a one-woman machine. And they didn’t need to. They needed some technical advice that I knew I could provide.

Lesson Three: Fake it ‘till you make it but never sell more than you can’t deliver.

I used all of the revenue generated from that client and invested it in my business. I rented an actual office, hired a part time assistant. I never used any of those funds to pay myself. In fact, I was homeless and couch-surfed for two years before I finally got my own place. In the 17 years I have been in business, I have always paid myself last and have never had the highest salary in the company.

But couch-surfing wasn’t just about saving money; because I didn’t have a home, I could focus entirely on my business. I wouldn’t leave the office until at least 2:00 AM. There were absolutely no distractions; there was absolutely no comfort.

Lesson Four: Comfort is your enemy. Be prepared to make huge sacrifices.

As I mentioned before, even though I was a tiny business, I was global from day one. Every single tool I purchased to run my business had to work from anywhere. In a world where the word “cloud” still defined something you could look up to in the sky, I only bought software accessible over the internet. We were one of Salesforce.com’s early customers. Also, each individual I hired, from my assistant to my technical and executive team, had to have worked or lived overseas and speak at least two languages. So where my like sized competitors were focusing on the small local customer, I had my eyes on the more lucrative global market. And because everything was designed to be global from the very first day, I didn’t have to pivot years later and develop a global strategy, change systems and staff. Global in one location with four employees is actually the same structure as global in ten locations with hundreds of employees. Global is a way of thinking.

Lesson Five: Design your business structure to address the largest market you can, not your current state.

There were several aspects to our business model which were unusual at the time and helped us sign some very large deals within our first few years in business. One of them was that I personally hated bureaucracy. I still do. I have an intense dislike for paperwork and administrative procedures. What I came to realize was that so did many of my customers. When a bureaucratic multinational company is faced with a bureaucratic multinational supplier, the purchasing process and the delivery of services becomes complex and bogged down.

So I tried to simplify the process. I basically productized services. So rather than sell so many man/hours or man/days with different rates for different people, I created packages that customers could choose from. For instance, support contracts had traditionally been per “seat” or per person on the contract. We proposed three different levels of a support product that never specified who, or how many would provide them. Not only did this greatly simplify the purchasing and delivery process but it also allowed us to scale. Since we weren’t paid by number of consultants, we could build efficiencies to reduce labor costs on customers and spread our resources across multiple contracts. In the US in 2000, this was innovative.

Lesson Six: If the product or service you are providing isn’t innovative, your delivery of it can be.

Of course, I couldn’t have done any of this without a fantastic team. I sought out the very best minds in the industry and sometimes courted them for months before they would come on board. As often as possible, I tried to find the brightest in the African community. Congo, Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, Central African Republic, Sudan, Cameroon, and more were all represented at AppsTech. This in addition to China, Korea, India, France and the UK. Most of them were much smarter than I was. Although some were obviously intelligent, they didn’t necessarily have specific industry experience. One of my very best hires for example, was a political science major with absolutely no Oracle and little IT experience. But I loved the way he carried himself. I hired him on the spot. As a Client Relationship Manager, his ability to navigate difficult personalities was key. Another guy had a degree in veterinary science. He too had no Oracle experience. But he spoke five languages fluently including Russian and Spanish. If he could learn foreign languages so easily, surely “speaking” SQL wouldn’t be a stretch. He went on to get multiple Oracle certifications and was one of the very best members of our technical team.

Lesson Seven: Hire the very best or train the very brightest

Within four years, AppsTech had seven offices across three continents and customers in over 50 countries. We had generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue. By the time our model caught on, we already had established ourselves as the market leader. We had weathered the tech bubble and had seen many of our competitors, even some a hundred times our size, disappear. Profiles in the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Computer World, Fortune Magazine and many others.

The epitome of success. We were unstoppable. Or maybe we weren’t…. But that’s for another post. 

Failure can be inspiring - if you can overcome the psychology

Updated on April 6 2013 to include a reference to a recent article

One of my very favorite documentaries ever is Startup.com. This is the story of Kaleil Isaza Tuzman and his best friend Tom Herman and their start-up experience during the dot com boom to bubble in the late 90's. Kaleil and Tom went from getting a few thousand dollars in startup funds from family members to raising $60 million dollars in venture capital. Their startup grew at a phenomenal rate but eventually crashed. Total failure. The documentary chronicles the rise – and eventual fall – of these entrepreneurs in real time.

I had just launched my own company around the same time as the documentary was filmed and I was so excited about the idea of watching the full story of a startup that when the documentary came out, we rented out an entire small theater in the US and invited all our employees, friends and families to watch it. I keep the documentary on my tablet and I watch it again every time I feel like getting inspired. Yes, inspired. 

Almost every entrepreneur experiences failure. And although there have been countless articles about the benefits of failure the reality is that when your startup fails, you feel like a failure. You have let down people who trusted you, sometimes with their money, you have let down your employees and partners, you have let yourself down and even your dreams. And as many times as you read an article about how failure is good, at that moment you feel like your world has ended. 

The worst part about failure for an entrepreneur is what it does to your self-esteem. After all, it is because you believed in yourself that you got as far as you did. When you start questioning yourself, wondering if you are really worthy of being an entrepreneur, it becomes very hard to start a new venture or to look forward to a new project. 

Advice from friends and family rings hollow: "You will recover from this." "You will build an even bigger startup." While you are asking yourself, how do I recover from what feels like a tsunami? You feel as drained as a wrung-out wet rag.  

The reality is that some people don't recover. I might venture to say that most don't recover. That is, they don't go on to build a bigger, better startup or any startup at all; they don't ever develop any idea that gains any traction, and they disappear into the oblivion of 'employeedom'.

But those who do recover, those who do find the inner strength to believe in themselves once again, those who rise to fight another day, well they are the ones that are able to translate failure into success. Many people will say that failure teaches you all the lessons you need to start afresh. But what they forget to tell you is that you need to move beyond the lesson that you are a screw-up. This is a psychological battle with yourself that is key to rising again. 

I have met many entrepreneurs that never got over the psychological effect of their failure. They knew all the lessons, and if they could do it over they would certainly apply these lessons to the new venture. But they never got a chance to do so because they couldn't find the inner strength, the self-confidence, to take a shot at starting again.

So how can failure be inspiring? When you see someone get over that hump; when you hear that story of psychological victory over oneself. When someone shows you that despite what seems to be an insurmountable loss, their dream is still alive.  Because then you begin to think, if they can overcome, then I can overcome; and your own journey through recovery begins. 

Kaleil I.Tuzman

Back to Startup.com, Kaleil and Tom. You see, their startup was a failure, yes. But Kaleil is a great example of turning your failure into success. He has overcome the psychology and has gone on to launch successful startups. His story continues to be an inspiration. When you watch the documentary, even during the worst of times, you just know he will make it. Tom? …well he did get the lessons down. 

As for me, whenever I feel down and out, I like to experience success, even if it is vicariously through a movie. This helps give me the energy I need to overcome my own psychology and to see failure for what it is: another step towards success.

Update: just two weeks after I published this post, I came across this article about an entrepreneur who didn't recover from failure. It is heartbreaking and food for thought. 

….Despite his many friends and backers, Sherman ultimately bore the burden of Ecomom's success or failure alone.....

….In the past, failure was very contained," another entrepreneur said. "When you failed, you felt bad around your family, the people you raised money from, but it wasn't as public. Failure in an era of social media and social video and global events is a very public thing….

Read the full story: The Story Of A Failed Startup And A Founder Driven To Suicide

Sad example of one entrepreneur who couldn't overcome his psychology...