Prowork, one of two Nigerian startups that participated in the 2013 VentureOut Challenge, has expressed its readiness to expand to other African countries with its task management platform.
HumanIPO reported last week Senegalese online video broadcasting platform Marodi.tv won the African category of the competition, seeing off challenges from two startups in Nigeria, one from Kenya and one from South Africa.
Speaking to HumanIPO, Francis Onwumere, business and product developer at the task management app Prowork, said the decision to focus on expanding to other African countries is based on the good responses so far.
“The response has been emphatic. We are growing very fast and we are working to keep conversion at par,” Onwumere said.
Currently, he said, the number of users exceeds 10,000 while the number of paying companies is growing, most of whom are from emerging markets.
“Our target market is currently Africa, even though we still get subscriptions from all over the world, as can happen with cloud based software as a service (SaaS) platforms,” Onwumere said.
Concerning the Venture Out Challenge, he described it as a great learning experience with the focus not on writing codes, but on the business aspect of the platform.
“[The] Venture Out Challenge consisted of two parts, the internationalisation workshop (three days) and the Pitch sessions (three hours). Each pitch (five minutes) was interesting; unfortunately we didn’t win the prize for Africa,” Onwumere added.
“The workshop was very engaging and with a lot of quality content squeezed in the 3 days, hardly any time for a breather.
“The workshop had a lot of practical take home, and a lot of value from interacting with entrepreneurs from across the world.”
To prepare for the event, Onwumere said he was assigned to three mentors, Mobola Onibonoje, of Alitheia Capital in Lagos, Saadiq Rogers-King, co-founder of HotPotato and Nodejitsu in Silicon Valley, and during the event, Augie Rakow, of Orrick Partners – a law firm that has many years of experience helping startups close investment deals.
“The mentors, amongst many other things, listened to our pitch and helped us refine it.”
