Tipsheets and Success Stories from the J-town.
Restack.
There's an emerging trend of companies offering their customers and fans the opportunity to become real owners by allowing them to buy shares and equity in the business.
This practice, known as equity crowdfunding, enables companies to raise capital directly from their communities of supporters and gives those supporters a chance to financially benefit from the company's success.
Read more...
Welcome to Equity Crowdfunding.
In the past weeks, I’ve helped a lot of small businesses and professionals to integrate AI into their daily operations and work life.
And still, get a ton of messages from people who want to know about AI and the new AI language model chatGPT that has been doing two major things firstly helping smart people to augment their work, and secondly, taking away the jobs of less smart people. ( not really)
As an African entrepreneur, you understand the importance of staying ahead of the curve in order to succeed in today's fast-paced business landscape.
One of the most exciting and rapidly evolving areas of technology is the intersection of human intelligence and artificial intelligence (AI).
When human intelligence and AI come together, they can create powerful synergies that can help you to achieve new levels of efficiency, accuracy, and innovation.
For example, by using AI to automate repetitive tasks such as data entry, customer service, and inventory management, you can free up your human employees to focus on more strategic activities.
This can help you to increase productivity and profitability.
As an African entrepreneur, you're always looking for ways to streamline your operations, increase efficiency, and gain a competitive edge.
One powerful tool that can help you achieve these goals is ChatGPT, a cutting-edge language model developed by OpenAI.
ChatGPT is a language generation model that uses deep learning to generate human-like text.
It has been trained on a massive dataset of text from the internet, allowing it to understand and respond to a wide range of natural language inputs.
This makes it an ideal tool for a variety of business applications, from customer service and marketing to content creation and data analysis.
One of the key ways that ChatGPT can be used to augment small business operations for African entrepreneurs is through automated customer service.
By incorporating ChatGPT into your customer service process, you can quickly and efficiently answer customer queries, resolve issues, and provide support.
This can help you to improve customer satisfaction and reduce the workload on your customer service team.
Another way that ChatGPT can be used to augment small business operations is through content creation. ChatGPT can be used to generate high-quality, SEO-compliant content for your website, blog, or social media channels.
This can help you to increase your online visibility, attract more traffic to your website, and boost your search engine rankings.
ChatGPT can also be used for data analysis, by analyzing customer feedback, sales data, and other data sets, ChatGPT can help you identify trends and patterns, and make more informed business decisions.
If you require help or more information on specific use cases that you can integrate today and start harnessing the superpower of AI you can drop a comment and/or send us an email and we will read it and get you all the help you need.
Click www.iworks.sn/?=InternaNigeria to start now.
When you begin to lose customers, someone else is gaining them, first thing you must do is find out why customers are leaving your business and how you can prevent it.
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https://josprenuer.substack.com/p/customer-churn-and-customer-retention?r=1mp7li&s=w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Dear Entrepreneur,
Please leave a feedback about your experience here.
We will respond and try to Improve your experience.
Thank you
Jospreneur
Book keeping isn't just for you to keep record of your business's financial affairs, it's also the most efficient way of tracking customer information that help you know...
1. Which customers buy most often
2. Why do they buy from you
3. Are they happy or unhappy
4. What are their main preferences and buying pattern
5. How do they like you to communicate with them
You need to answer this questions for your business everyday.
Learn 3 pieces of advice from social entrepreneurs on attracting the right talent:
1. Define the "uncompromisable" values for your organization -
"We selected 4 values representing us at that moment, and 2 more aspirational values,” said David Ellis, co-founder and CEO of EthioChicken. “Now, those values have become a part of our everyday work."
2. Seek to minimize bias in your job description to avoid turning away qualified applicants-
Kenya-based social enterprise Kentaste reduced the emphasis on physical strength and instead noted the “flexible work hours” in its job descriptions, and thus increased the percentage of women.
3. Dig deep into your networks and channels-
"Remember those folks that you were at school with, that you interacted with in a workshop... Reach back out. You never know what will come from that," says Amar Inamdar, Managing Director at KawiSafi Ventures.
From Acumen Academy.
Business Owners: Jospreneurs.
5 marketing tips and tactics to reach your target audience and gain new customers.
1. Conduct market research. Understand your target market and its needs before you start spending on major marketing campaigns.
2. Create a customer profile or buyer persona. As you identify your target market, go further and describe the exact type of person you see as your core customer.When you have this buyer persona in mind, you can better determine the best way to reach them.
3. Maintain social media channels. Social media posts can reach customers in a more personal, intimate way that an online banner ad can.
4. Network whenever possible. In order to get the word out about their new business, startup owners have to make themselves visible. This might mean participating in webinars, cross-promoting with other local businesses, or just showing up at events to talk about yourself and your great new company.
5. Promote positive word of mouth. Most customers trust word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family over any other form of marketing. Prioritize great customer experiences to naturally promote the spread of word-of-mouth testimonials.
-Bumpa
Having identified the key secrets on how to make your website seamless and attractive for customers.
📐Creating a website by design layout
When making up a website, pay attention to the grid on which the design layout is based. But you shouldn’t do it by eye. Instead, make it clear with the web designer if you have any doubts when transferring the layout.
📂Website margins
Ensure that the margins before and after semantic blocks are the same height on both desktop, mobile, and tablet versions of the site.
This rule is particularly helpful if the web designer makes only the desktop version of the site, and you have to make up the tablet and mobile versions by yourself.
🦋Animation
Check with the designer what kind of animation and elements you have to make on the site. You can also ask them to leave comments next to the elements in the design layout about the desired animation.
☑️Checking the operation of buttons and links
After you finish the layout of the site, do not forget to check the correct operation of all buttons and links. Links leading to third-party resources are supposed to open in a new tab. And links for the internal pages should remain in the current tab.
📑Technical pages
Don't forget to create technical pages. Make a Privacy Policy page, a 404 Error page, and a Success page. In the privacy policy, write down the terms of use of the site and list the data you collect, including information about the cookies.
The 404 error page is necessary so that the user is not taken away from the site if the link they clicked on is invalid. And the user will get to the Success page after filling out feedback forms on the site.
Remember the development of websites takes a lot of time, patience, and attentiveness. So don’t get upset if something goes wrong. Only by learning from your mistakes, you will achieve perfection!
-Ideafactory.
How bad is the high cost of Internet and mobile data In Africa?
High cost of mobile data is a big problem for Africa!
5 ways to keep your customers engaged and satisfied
As much as we are interested in you getting customers we also want you to keep them because customers are indeed national treasures and they must be protected and retained by all means. Here are 5 ways to keep your customers engaged and satisfied
1. *Stay in touch and encourage their interaction:* If you haven’t heard from particular customers in a while, don’t be afraid to reach out to them. Even if your efforts don’t result in immediate sales, they’ll go a long way toward keeping your brand first in your customers’ minds.
2. Make the most of social media:* Social media offers great opportunities to engage your customers and build trust by showing the personal side of your business.
Get personal:Many customers place as much value on the quality of your service – friendliness, comfort, and familiarity – as they do on the quality of your product.
4. *Solve problem:* When customers have problems, make sure they can speak with a real, sympathetic person, ideally in person or by phone.
5. *Take responsibility:* Your brand is only as good as the reputation behind it. When problems arise, admit to your mistakes and apologize if necessary.
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Think big, START SMALL. (2)
5 things to consider when you want to start small.
Many entrepreneurs sell online and many underestimate the importance of copywriting in business viewing it as a minor thing. But trust me — texts possess such a power that can either make people purchase your product or totally discourage them. How does it work? Let me tell you.
1️⃣ Be helpful. Effective copywriting is always centered around some benefit. Whatever you want from your readers, you should always remember they’re interested to do only those things they personally need. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Therefore, you should build your texts in not a selling, but a caring way. So instead of aggressively pushing your product, just tell the users how it will make their lives better. Treat them in a sympathetic manner like you feel their problems and want to help.
2️⃣Provide facts. A lot of sellers tend to excessively talk up their solution so it even seems annoying and phony. You can describe your product in the most beautiful words but it still makes no sense until the customer tries it themselves.
To be more persuasive, provide statistics, numbers, and real-life cases. Facts are always more sound than words. Consumers are much likelier to believe meaningful brands.
For example, "our vacuum cleaner is super powerful" sounds far less convincing than "our vacuum cleaner can work for 24 hours and remove even coarse particles of dirt."
3️⃣Honesty is the best policy. It’s so simple and yet so many companies lie to their customers, which is eventually disclosed. People appreciate those brands that treat them fairly.
Even though you might be tempted to embellish some features of your product, don’t do that. There’s no worse customer than a disappointed one. Telling the truth shows that you actually care about your audience. So keep your texts truthful and yet considerate.
4️⃣Choose the right tone of voice. It’s very important to personalize the texts and hence you need to know who you’re writing for. Identify your audience and select the respective style.
For example, if you’re addressing aged customers, it may be inappropriate to use slang or jokes. But when it comes to youth, such tricks are likely to catch their attention.
5️⃣Keep it short and sweet. Some copywriters prefer to make very long and sophisticated texts in order to sound more intelligent. However, this is a misconception. The simpler, the better. Your task is to convey a message to the reader, not to make them puzzled.
To sum up, I would recommend that you reread your texts as there’s often something to improve and make them even more captivating.
Hope it helps!
Sincerely,
Vlada (IF)
“How to make your social media page appealing to prospective buyers”
1. Offer Value: As a business owner, your primary duty is posting your products but there are so many ways to spice that up.
For example; if you sell shoes, instead of always posting shoe pictures. Take it a step further by educating people on the kind of shoes that suit certain clothings.
By doing this, you have taught them something and you can then plug your products.
From Bumpa.
If you've enjoyed any content on here, or you want to contribute to the content on here or you want to participate in the Josprenuership!
You should definitely invite all your friends to come and like us.
How entrepreneurs in the fast moving consumer goods industry can get regulated with NAFDAC.
NAFDAC Registration – This is renewable every 5 years and gives your brand a lot of bragging rights, Entrepreneurs run away from this discussion because they assume this is a stringent process, but it’s usually a lack of adequate information that makes the process too cumbersome.
If your manufactured product falls under food or drug then you must get NAFDAC registered, but first, you must have your CAC certificate of incorporation and federal ministry of commerce trademark approval for brand name (optional for micro and small businesses)
The top things to know include that;
- NAFDAC has made it easier to run the process for indigenous entrepreneurs through the self-e-registration portal NAPAMS https://registration.nafdac.gov.ng/
- One NAFDAC number to one product, if you have a variety of different products then you would need to purchase more than one registration form and apply accordingly.
- Food products take not more than 90 days to be registered after acceptance of the application.
The process includes;
Submission of Application and Registration form – Day 1
Verification of Documents – 10 days
Facility Inspection and Sampling – 10 days (for food products)
Laboratory Analysis – 30 days (for food products)
Final Vetting – 10 days (for food products)
Approval Meeting and NAFDAC Number Issuance – 30 days
NAFDAC Number verification
The schedule of fees and tariffs includes;
NAFDAC classifies businesses into 3 major categories for fees and tariffs.
Micro – 1-10 staff
Small – 10-49 staff
And Medium Enterprises – 50 -199
Breakdown;
Application Fee – N2500
Registration fee - N22,000
Inspection fee - N11,000 (micro), N15,000 (small), N30,000 (medium).
Total – N35,500 (micro), N39,500 (small), N54,500 (medium).
Visit the portal to start or you can ask for more information.
https://registration.nafdac.gov.ng/
NAFDAC AUTOMATED PRODUCT ADMINISTRATION AND MONITORING SYSTEM
Josprenuers in the FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) industry faces significant challenges many of which may not be due to changes in the industry but due to the external environment that these businesses operate in.
Jospreneurs in FMCG include people that produce and package products like bakery foods, spices, and condiments, cosmetics, fragrances, beverages like (kunu, zobo, and yogurt), natural products like (processed beans, plantain, meat), clothing, and fashion care accessories.
FMCG entrepreneurs are battling slow sales and rising costs due to low consumer purchasing power and the rising cost of raw materials.
A lot of technologies and solutions have emerged and have made supply chain, sales, logistics, and customer relations management easier for entrepreneurs in this sector.
But regardless of all your deliberate efforts like digital marketing, retail ex*****on, and promotion, you cannot operate effectively or scale without relevant licenses and regulatory registrations.
You want to get licenses and registration to augment your efforts, build trust and put your products in front of a larger audience and give your product the required confidence to find their way into store.
We have covered everything you need to know about NAFDAC registration in the next post..
Dear Jospreneur,
Most entrepreneurs get confused when they hear the words ‘start small’ and it's because these two words should not be used alone.
The more meaningful phrase is ‘think big, start small' so starting small becomes the next thing you do after thinking big.
In the most effective use of words; 'Thinking Big' means considering the full range of the future possibilities of an idea or a project while 'Starting Small' means breaking the idea down into smaller pieces so that you can test it by taking small steps using what you already have.
Every big idea that you have can be started small, so that you can gather real feedback (data) to inform the next steps to take to grow, an entrepreneur must not make any decision solely on intuition or wishful thinking but real information.
The owner of one of Nigeria's foremost automobile companies started his business by offering to help people sell off their used cars and adding a profit, others have established big commerce brands but started out selling products for other people and taking a commission or adding their profit.
If you want to start selling Akara and Koko, you can start using the frying pan in your kitchen to fry and supply customers' demand, the most important part of a business is ex*****on, no matter what you use, make sure you are providing that service no matter how little.
PS. Most people won’t read long posts on social media, this post has been continued in our newsletter the Josprenuer weekly.
Click to read and subscribe for more tipsheets and Success Stories from Josprenuer ❤
https://josprenuer.substack.com/p/think-big-start-small?sd=pf
An angel investor is a high-net-worth individual who provides financial backing for small startups or entrepreneurs, typically in exchange for ownership equity in the company.
This types of investors are involved in the early stage of a startup, and they usually participate in the pre-seed and seed rounds.
The Lagos Angel Network is a company limited by guarantee, a “not for profit” entity set up for the purpose of organizing seed funders (“Business Angels”) to invest in start-up businesses. LAN is an association of committed members that provide early-stage seed funding and mentoring for start-up entrepreneurs.
Individuals who are capable and are committed to invest 5 million over 5 years (100M annually for 10 startups) to be put into startups (this startups may fail or succeed)
The Jos Angel network failed for practical reasons as
a lack of high-net-worth individuals capable of committing, mentoring and ultimately investing over a period of time because you can't try once and stop.
The politics of selection of startups for pitching (as with so many other pitch events)
Disconnectedness of the keyplayers in the ecosystem. (Supposed incubators and accelerators derailed from their business models)
To be continued....
Daniel Balmun
No. 90 Jiyep
Jos
93001
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