Q&a with the owner of Kerawa

Africaincorp had a very insightful conversation with the owner of kerawa.com, a web 2.0 company from Cameroon. The company is taking on the larger Newspaper companies,the community portals and the offline social/tribal networks, that have traditionally controlled the classified ad market.Information on Job,Romance,trade,service opportunities have been often limited to your access to the newspaper[financial/geographical],or a specific social/tribal network.
Say no more,here comes kerawa.

Can you describe Kerawa in a few words ?

The technical term for sites like Kerawa is a free online classified ads site. I would describe Kerawa as a gigantic trade fare where everyone can freely advertise.

How would you describe your Business model ?

The business model is principally based on paid publicity. Hey, but ads on kerawa are free, you might say. True, but we are counting on the fact that the free ads will get so many that some individuals and companies will feel the need to want to make their ads stand out from the crowd.

On Kerawa, we have three principal paid ads options

Extended Ads (Where your ads last much longer than the allocated 45 days for free ads)

Featured Ads( Where your ads kind off stand out from the crowd)

Email Ads (Where your ads will be put after each mail sent from Kerawa).

Google Adsense might be an option when Kerawa becomes far bigger, and when Adsense contains more African ads.

Right now, we are still working on payment methods. Possible channels might include money transfers, from Western Union or MoneyGram, credit transfer through mobile phones, local partners in each and every country supported by Kerawa, and other solutions. Paypal, Visa cards and the other e-transaction gateways are not yet common in Africa, though I predict in the next few years it will not still be the case. Let's see what new solutions like MaatCard will do for us.

What is going to be your marketing strategy, when it seems

that the majority of businesses in Africa go to off/online

newspapers and individuals go to community websites and

forums to post their classified ads ?who do you see as your

direct competition,dating sites,community portals,online

newspaper ?

The marketing strategy will be based on how easy, how effective, how cool and how free it is to post ads on kerawa.com, as compared to traditional media, forums or other community portals. Though traditional media will always have some value, posting ads on Kerawa come as an alternative that is no more reserved for the rich. Though forums can serve as a repository for ads, I don't think they are really tailored for the task. What makes posting ads on Kerawa and other classified sites ads more attractive over forums and other dating sites is that there is no need to register. No need to register when you wish to post an ad, no need to register when you wish to view an ad.

Kerawa has a "Personals" category where one can post dating adverts for free just like how they post other free ads. In your ad you can describe yourself, put up your picture, and describe the date you are looking for. You can even decide to be anonymous. If you see an ad of the date you want, you can exchange emails or numbers and continue dating offline/online. For now we think dating should be as easy as that. If we perceive a need to make it more sophisticated than it is right now, we might as well create a totally separate dating section.

I think the main competition will come from general purpose community portals. These portals have already started adding free publicity as part of their services. We at Kerawa are going to do one thing, and are going to do it very well. Serve free classified ads.

How much do you think the growing usage of the mobile phone

as more than a telephone and more as a medium of emission and

reception of content-information

[music,games,pictures,currency] and a factor of constant

connection[ Mobile Web application,SmS,RSS] can play a part in

the expansion of Kerawa ?

I usually get excited when we start talking about mobile phones and other portable electronic devices, because I think they will only become more and more sophisticated and omnipresent. Just look at the iPhone today.

Without even mentioning other aspects of telephony, let's just look at plain SMS. We haven't even scratched the possibilities of all what we can do with just plain SMS. Just a few months ago, while at school, some of my classmates and I personally developed a prototype where we could literally command a whole computer network just with our cheap phones via SMS. A paper has already been submitted to the some scientific communities on the work we had done.

Telephony will definitely play a big role in the expansion of Kerawa. We are thinking of partnering with sites like Benoue.com to help us do some mass SMS publication to potential advertisers. There are also many features we plan to add to Kerawa that specifically target mobile phone users. Time will tell.

Do you see Kerawa becoming a Kijiji, a craiglist or a oodle

? How do you reconcile the needs[ what are they] of the market

with the convenience or productivity afforded by your web

application ?

When you say become a Kijiji or a craigslist or an oodle, I want to believe you mean in popularity and basic functionality. Of course it will, but mainly for Africa, by Africans.

Effective trade is really important for the growth of Africa. Information too is vital to the development of a society. We wish to provide a medium for the African community where lots of information will be generated to do effective trade or exchange services, just like how we do in real life. When you want to sell your car for example, you usually tell your friends around you and hope they too will tell their friends and so on. With the internet, you will touch a broader potential audience in record time, at virtually no cost.

Do you intend to add more features to the site, RSS feed,

picture or video posting ,dating section of the site ?

There are already RSS feeds on the site for each category and each country, so you can use web based or pc-based rss aggregators to stay informed with the latest ads. Unfortunately for now, all our RSS feeds have the same title. This is a minute problem that will be promptly solved. We can also post pictures on Kerawa even though for now we have preferred to block this feature; due to our slow internet connections and ever annoying spammers. We don't want to add features that our poor bandwidths will not be able to support.

Though for now feature-wise Kerawa is not yet unique, the many features we will add in the future will make it very unique, world wide. The initial objective was to know if there will be a market. Now that we know there is a market especially after the Kerawa Effect, we will orient our new features towards satisfying that market. I am giving you rendez-vous in one year's time, to see if Kerawa will still be just another classified ads site.

How do you intend to monetize the site ?[ Beside

advertisment or subscription fees]

It is generally very hard for a website offering free services to get money apart from publicity or paid subscriptions. We could possibly start our own offline classified ads newspaper with content generated from Kerawa.com.

What type of offline or online partnership do you foresee in

the future that could help propel the business ?

We will definitely be interested to partner with all major offline media and non media African companies to serve as a medium for their classified ads. Imagine if all African job opportunities were posted on Kerawa, be they big or small. Imagine if all local landlords decided to post their ads for free on Kerawa, maybe with maps to their real estates. And so on.

We could also partner with other online companies where they could freely display ads from Kerawa, thereby making ads on Kerawa touch a broader audience. We already provide RSS feeds for our ads, so this should be easy.

What is your perspective on Web 2.0 trends in

Africa-Cameroon and what kind of impact are they going to have

on social/business/cultural paragdim?

Web 2.0 and other social online media are definitely going to affect the African community, big time. We will start relying more and more on the internet to look for things and get things done. I think business will the first to be greatly affected, as more and more will seek online presence. And with initiatives like Kerawa and similar African sites, we may start having companies whose business models are centred on the internet.

The recent trend in most web based businesses is focused on end user generated content and great web experience. The only problem I have with most Web 2.0 trends is their tendency of over bloating. A lot of Ajax/DHTML effects or flash animations are just overkill for our bandwidths here.

Though are fathers never really encountered the internet, the younger generation is getting more versed with what the web can offer them. We are an emerging market. A generation from now, I predict Africa as a whole will be a major internet consumer. It will be unwise to let this opportunity pass away and let the Europeans and Americans come and steal our market from us.