With over 2000+ entrepreneurs in attendance , 40+ events featuring many Nigerian entrepreneurs, The Grand finale of the Lagos Startupweek ended with 6 amazing startups launching several products.
The program was geared towards helping startups successfully launch their innovations and share their stories. It also provided a platform for existing startups to launch new products and inventions.
Giving startups the opportunity to validate ideas, connect to early stage investors, create awareness and drive impact. Amongst those involved were a diverse group of startups from the around the region which included startups in travel, Aviation, fintech, Digital Sports Publishing, consumer & retail and a co-working space.
Startups that made the list include the following: Amebo Sports , Buffer space, Intellicode, Jetseta and Loystar
Amebo Sports
Amebo Sports is a destination app for sports fans to engage with their favourite sports and fans around the world.
Launched during Lagos Startup Week the app allows users to seamlessly chat with other fans by text or 30-second voice messages. The app was debuted on the latest TECNO Phantom 6 Plus, with the fast 2.0 GHz dual-core processor and 4GB of RAM, everything during the demo was snappy and looked sharp on the 6 inch display.
Users read articles from top sport sites they already know. Articles load from the web very fast, to give the user a smooth reading experience.
Users can swap between different competitions and leagues from the side menu, and enter a specific sport related chat room, e.g. Football, Tennis, Rugby, Basketball etc.
Users also earn points for using the app which is visible from the profile page. In a future update the points can be redeemed for items through the app.
Intellicode’s Social Monkey
Intellicode’s Social Monkey is a robust social analytics solution that helps organizations measure and optimize social media performance.
According to the founder , by providing a simple, easy-to-read dashboard, the proprietary product helps managers make better decisions by presenting them on-the-spot insights about their social media performance at a fraction of the cost of similar products on the market. Managers and their teams can create and monitor the performance of hashtags, social media profiles, and engagement levels across multiple devices to aid transparency and timely responses to their online community activities.
Jetseta
V-2 Solutions Ltd, an aviation start-up company launched its mobile app called JETSETA during the Launch Pad at the just concluded Lagos Startup Week. Harold Okwa, co-founder of the company, showcased Jetseta as an app created to provide reliable, accessible, affordable and convenient aviation services without any of the existing limitations such as flight delays, cancellations etc. faced by air travellers in Nigeria.
With emphasis placed on granting users greater control of their flying schedule as well as introducing luxury travel as an affordable way of life, Jetseta is regarded as a virtual airline selling business class seats on a private charter aircraft.
He went further to give a live demonstration of the app and showed various options available to users, especially the innovative “group share / single seat” option which allows users to book single seats to a desired destination, thus creating an avenue to share the costs of the flight.
In Nigeria, over 40% of commercial airlines are known for delays and cancellations, the app has carefully combined a variety of services into a unique marketing mix to gain as much market share as possible and introduce luxury travel as an affordable way of life.
The Jetseta Mobile App is available for download on App Store and Google play.
Each download comes with a $350 fly credit and $100 fly credit each on a maximum of 5 referrals.
BuffrSpace
Buffrspace is building Africa’s largest workspace sharing platform. The startup provides a seamless connection between individuals looking for affordable workspaces and individuals with surplus workspaces, across Africa.
An app that allows you to monetize underutilized resources and facilities — your surplus spaces like desks, cubicles, offices, or floors — bringing in extra funds while simultaneously increasing your bottom line without any extra expenditure on your part
Buffrspace is here to disrupt and solve a viable problem impacting start up teams, entrepreneurs and business owners across Africa – by connecting growing teams and businesses looking for work space, directly with work space owners looking to share their spaces for a fee. Think of Buffrspace as the AirBnB for workspaces.
With a beta launch in August, Buffrspace has on boarded 200+ unique work spaces, from over 90% of Hosts (co-working spaces and serviced offices) within Lagos and Abuja and with solid plans of expanding across Nigeria and Kenya in Q4 2016/Q1 2017, based on the overwhelming demand from Guests.
Loystar
Loystar a Nigerian startup that provide the simplest way for small and medium businesses to keep their customers coming back with loyalty programs.
It focuses on solving a customer retention problem faced by small and medium businesses globally, and in the year 2020, businesses are expected to spend $4b on Loyalty software. Source: MarketsandMarkets.com
Loyalty programs are a great way to engage with customers, but they can get very difficult to manage, especially with cards. Customers forget to carry them, they provide little customer insight and it’s just time consuming to collate the data.
Loystar is a global product and is currently being used in the US, UK, South Africa, Ghana and currently expanding more of its base operation in Nigeria.
According to one of the co-founders , apart from being able to provide a simple way to manage loyalty programs, the app was demonstrated to have some key functionalities which include the ability to functions with limited internet availability, so merchants can save the cost of internet data in their operations. A SMS broadcast tool is available so merchants can reach out to all of their customers at once and in a personalized manner. They also get notified about their customers’ birthday’s and have a birthday message delivered to them, among other benefits.
Compared to other players in the market such as Suregift, Parolz e.t.c. Loystar has been designed to be simple and specifically serves small and medium businesses. It is the only option that allows merchants get started with a loyalty program in less than 5 minutes. He further said Loystar is experiencing growth in transactions of at least 101% MoM, which is more than the 40% industry standard for SaaS businesses.
By Astha Kaul
