2go, South African Mobile App Bigger than Facebook

2go, mobile social network and one of African continent¹s quietest tech success stories, has come to dominate the Nigerian market, where it has over nine million active users’ ¬ 7million more than Facebook.

The proudly South African mobile social network is a 7-person business that¹s gone from startup to profitability in just four years ­ without ever marketing itself or taking a cent of outside financing.

Peter Lockhart, director of the company said the secret, has been balancing a tight focus on what 2go¹s users really want ­ a cheap, easy way to chat and socialize using their mobile phones ­ with the deep technical expertise needed to deliver that experience across thousands of different devices.
 
“Building mobile technology for an African market is tough. Data and SMS are expensive, and our users are price sensitive and savvy. That means we have to deliver an application that uses the absolute minimum of system resources and bandwidth.  Our response has been to develop proprietary communications protocols and compression algorithms that minimise the app¹s data usage” said Lockhart.
 
The 2go team has also cracked the technical challenge of producing an app that works equally well on all of the myriad feature phones that still dominate the African market.

“It¹s much, much harder to develop for feature phones than for smartphones. Partly because there is such a variety of platforms and operating systems. You need deep technical knowledge. This technical knowledge also extends to our ability to scale the back-end in a very resource efficient manner” Lockhart also said.

The fact that 2go works well on many handsets has been critical to the viral spread of the app, said Lockhart, adding “feature phones aren¹t going away any time soon. Projections from Informa indicate that non-smart phones will still comprise 85% of the African handset market in 2015”
 
2go has resisted the tempation to bloat its app with added features, added Lockhart. “Our users log in and out quickly, several times a day ­ they want things to be quick and simple,² he says. ³We¹ve thought through every menu item; every pixel is there because it serves a purpose”
 
Alongside this technical focus, 2go has also remained extremely alert and sensitive to the needs of its users. ³Our target market is not some kind of generic ŒAfrica” said Lockhart.  “We ask what country are they in, what region, what city?  2go really took off in Nigeria when we noticed that our users wanted to be able to chat within their university communities. So we did the research and created a chat room for each university in the country”
 
2go also actively solicits and follows up on suggestions from its users, added Lockhart.

"People want to be asked for their opinion. Many of our users are starved for entertainment and engagement. 31% of our Nigerian users tell us they don¹t watch television, but 66% of them spend two or more hours on their phones each day. It¹s a very sociable society, and 2go supports that sociability”
 
The insights gained in Nigeria have fed back into the South African market, where 2go has 1,5m active users and counting. The app also provides gateways to other popular social networks such as GTalk, MXIT and Facebook.

2go is a mobile social network targeting users in emerging markets, particularly in Africa. The company has over 21 million registered users with more than 10 million active users in Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya.

User adoption is growing rapidly at approximately 50,000 new registrations a day. 2go users message each other for free, meet new people and share updates and photos with friends and family. 2go¹s mobile currency, GoCredits, enables users to buy content, play games and message each other in in chat rooms.