How Khoyn CEO Victory Matibiri grew Khoyn to $9.2K revenue and 700 customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest today is victory mata biri he is a product visionary he's passionate about designing products that amplify human potential along with a bachelor in international business masters in marketing he has over six years of experience designing building and shipping products in australia asia and africa he's now on a mission to democratize commerce as ceo of coin victory you ready to take us to the top i sure am i'll tell you what man hell of a name i'd love my first name to be victory i mean with a name like that how do you lose right you can't everyone's always calling you a victory how do you feel like you're losing everyone's like yo victory you're like i just i just lost stop calling me victory yeah all right tell me about the company what are you guys doing by the way if you want to follow along if you're listening on the show it's k-h-o-y-n-com pronounced coins the victory what are you guys working on yeah uh so we're basically working on what we call a social selling platform so we enable anyone to basically uh monetize their network and how this works right back from a company level is a lot of businesses whether it's in retail right now and especially in in commerce they've got a lot of staff and and people going out and networking and meeting uh friends and families who are also potential companies uh clients of that company so our platform basically helps these organization use their workforce to become a sales force interesting so it's like an incentive plans essentially not necessarily so there's that there is an incentive plan definitely since it's part of it um we've sort of been working on how exactly we can increase the value proposition for the actual people selling but starting with the sales people it's it's so straightforward because they earn commission on the leads and and traffic they're bringing in but is this i guess what i'm trying to figure out victory are the is the tool for internal employees at a company to sell more of the company's product in their day-to-day communications with friends on whatsapp and facebook or just for anyone to be an affiliate of any product so it's actually both okay is that okay both yeah so we we so basically we started off with allowing anyone to basically be an affiliate to resell products for a company and as well as the company's internal sales teams or just workforce in general to also do the exact same thing for the company when did you launch the company what year we launched the company early 2018. okay so yeah about a year ago yeah about a year ago uh we ran into some troubles as you'd expect what were those troubles yeah so basically we we started off with chatbots um thinking okay cool like chatbots would work in this part of the world but they didn't because the way people think in this part of the world or africa or developing countries when they're buying products is very personal they don't like this whole automation thing so automating that uh composition didn't work out too well um after actually studying how people interact and how people purchase the purchasing decisions of consumers here um we saw that the personal conversation is the most powerful way to actually uh sell products or services so we transitioned toward that model earlier this year around march and victory help me understand how you're funding yourself right so you launched the company go through a couple pivots have you bootstrapped the company or raised capital yeah we raised capital so we were part of a startup bootcamp which is an accelerator here in africa so how much have you raised today we've raised 50 000 okay and how much money did you spend before you got your first dollar in revenue we spent about 35 000 dollars before we got our first dollar and when was that first dollar in revenue first dollar in revenue was in february this year okay february 2019. and then what was that so what's the pricing model are you just taking commissions or is it a sas model how do you make money so we're doing both uh we we're starting off with the commission model because we just wanted to prove that the model works right so what we did was we got uh basically an audience of people and we got a bunch of sort of brands uh and we said cool like put your products on on our platform and these guys will basically sell their products to their communities to show that the product works and so it's worked really well in terms of and and how we started off was well what do you mean worked really well measured by what how many how many so how many brands first of all how many brands sell through your platform so we've got seven brands of cell phone platform right now which are local brands local local south african brands so you said sorry 700 can people sell uh are selling your brands right now how many brands can they sell through your platform seven seven okay so seven brands 700 users yes okay and how do you make money so do you charge the seven brands anything to be listed on your platform or just the 700 consumers so so right now we weren't charging the brands to be on the platform because obviously we wanted to prove that the model works uh but now we're going to start charging the brands because they want to understand uh the data so they can be able to read data of what's going on with the products on the platform uh which areas their products are receiving the most hits and to basically um optimize their product uh reach so so last month how much total volume went through your platform the total number of dollars sold through the platform uh 20 000 okay and how much how much total to date since you launched the company uh 65 000 okay so again most you know 30 percent of your total volume has come in the past 30 days yeah that's great how are you scaling how are you finding new consumers to download your app and then sell products through it using affiliate links uh so we were using facebook we're using facebook obviously how we started was we actually created a whole bunch of whatsapp groups um so we created a bunch of whatsapp groups for people who are interested in or people who are actually doing this because it's in it's driven by an informal economy where people are you know obviously selling to their communities but that's a big thing here because the retail footprint isn't big so we just got all of them in one whatsapp group how did you find them oh in facebook groups so went into facebook groups and we said hey guys we've got this product wait what hold on what's the name of the facebook group like one of them that you went in oh uh there's one called hold on south africa on entrepreneurs okay so you go into that facebook group let me just get the correct yeah and then posted a link to our whatsapp group okay and how many people joined the whatsapp group we got we filled two whatsapp groups in five days so how many people is that what's up that's about uh 535 people 500 so about 200 on each face 250 in each what's that group yeah exactly okay just over 20 and then one man yeah so then basically the purpose of the groups were to get them having to have conversations amongst amongst each other uh discussing the problems they face in terms of how they get how they're getting products and so on and so forth and within those conversations obviously we got to understand what problems they face so he said guys we can get you access to brands who need you guys to reach your communities so they said cool we'll sign up so that's how we basically got our first batch of users and we got them you know uh selling products pretty much right away that's great now on the twenty thousand dollars in volume that went through you last month how much money did you make as a company we made a thousand dollars of that okay so you have about you so you have about 700 people selling goods through your platform you're essentially making something like a dollar and 10 cents per customer per month yeah okay um and how do you price is it a percentage of sales through your platform so you're taking a thousand on 20 which means you're taking what is that five percent yeah is that five percent or uh that's over or or one percent so basic five percent we how we actually worked on pricing how we worked out the pricing is we did uh 15 we do 15 of the profit margin that the reseller can make that's what we charge okay that means 15 of the profit margin that the affiliate makes exactly okay so if the affiliate sells something of uh makeup for 20 and the brand it costs them 15 so there's five dollars there of spread the affiliate will essentially keep four dollars or or something like that and you will keep about a dollar about 15 percent yeah exactly interesting okay very good uh what about churn so when a customer when a new seller downloads your app to again sell through it you have 700 today um how many in the past 12 months have sold at least one thing oh sorry 12 sorry 30 30 days i meant 30 days so in the last 30 days about 34 34 have made a sale have okay so how do you reactivate the 600 and you know 40 that didn't sell anything so right so basically how we're working with it is we are working to get more product um variety for them because what basically happens is you have a lot of people who have niches so they'll only sell electronics so they'll only sell certain niches and they don't want to sort of dabble because right now we've mostly got fashion brands and um a few makeup brands so it's about increasing the breadth of our product portfolio so the more products we have on the platform how many skus do you...