Making major strides in a challenging landscape is always impressive. It’s even more so when outside-of-the-box thinking leads to real change. For Ayoba, a super-app platform beneath the MTN telco umbrella, the vision to create a more scalable and accessible app was always going to be an uphill struggle. This is due the connectivity and data affordability barriers across Africa. But with the Product and Technology teams built by Esat Belhan, Chief Technology and Product Officer, leading the change, Ayoba has done exactly that and more.
Belhan’s continuous development of his skills eventually led him to Ayoba. He was hired as the Chief Product and Technology Officer in December 2021. The initial team consisted of just 10 employees. Everything else, including all technology and product management, was looked after by a third party. So, with the hiring of Belhan, his first task was to build up a new team to take over from the third party.
“The first year was all about finding people with the right skills we needed, and in the second year, we took over from the vendor,” says Belhan. “It allowed us to grow with our user base, which went from around six million to 40 million. However, it was very challenging, putting together the right team and creating a whole new culture, while being more agile and independent.”
Reimagining the Landscape
Ayoba’s landscape was very different back when Belhan first stepped into his role. The fact that so much vital work was being done by a third party was one thing, but it wasn’t all that had been brushed aside. “I always try to look at things from an analytical perspective,” says Belhan. “So the first thing I did in this new role was check the analytics data. I knew the main goal was to grow the user base, and that requires looking at the data to see where growth comes from. And, also, where it doesn’t come from.
“There were lots of opportunities to fix the basics. That’s what we did in the first period. Fixing the experience, improving the experience, bringing more performance, scalability, and reliability to the technology side. The app itself was, on paper, promising a lot of things, but the experience didn’t fully match up. Working on fixing the basics at least made the app work reliably.”
Facing the Roadblocks
There were plenty of challenges for Belhan to overcome when addressing the problems that needed to be solved. After getting the basics lined up, there were a main problems to address. They were affordability of data, connectivity, and having the right ecosystem. The first issue, data, needed to be tackled quickly. That was so people could connect to Ayoba even if they run out of data.
“The whole idea of Ayoba is to bring more people to digital so they can be more tech-savvy and educated on digital capabilities,” says Belhan. “In order to do that, one thing you could do is give away free data. But that data could be easily wasted on another data-heavy app, like TikTok, in just a couple of hours. So the real solution is that the valuable and insightful content Ayoba provides should be provided for free. Also, that we provide instant messaging and short video content, to keep people using our platform for their communication and entertainment needs.”
The second issue, connectivity, is a challenge across all of Africa, especially in rural areas. The issue of connectivity, combined with data affordability, means it’s common for people across Africa to switch off mobile data when they’re not using it. The downside of this is that it makes it difficult to reach users via app to let them know things. For example, that there’s new and interesting content, or that they have a message from a loved one.
Fortunately, Ayoba has MTN on its side. “With the power of being a telco-funded company, we started leveraging conventional and old-fashioned technology – SMS,” says Belhan. “So when someone has a notification, we send an SMS to let them know they have new information to look at in Ayoba. That means the users can switch their data back on for only notifications they really want to see.”
