[dmos62]

I enjoyed the write up.

700 on-the-ground interviews is a lot. On-the-ground implies person to person, right? I think we'd all love to know what were some of your take aways.

I would guess that the idea for this app came from those interviews. It sounds like a good low-hanging fruit, as in good impact and low-cost. Do you have some other ideas lined-up?

[benjaminf]

That’s right! The idea for NALA was totally shaped by these conversations. I wrote a short post about how NALA was born that provides a bit of insight into some of these interviews (https://medium.com/nala-money/how-we-built-nala-e40a0e3e9ac3).

The most obvious take-away was that sending money via USSD really isn’t user friendly at all (takes a long time, have to memorize unique and sometimes complex payment codes, etc.).

Another take-away was that users have multiple sim cards (each 'bank' account may be tied with a different sim card). So having one interface to actually make and manage payments could prove extremely valuable.

[prawn]

I was curious whether the interviews were conducted directly for NALA, or as part of other research that proved useful as they started to hone in on creating NALA.

[benjaminf]

great question, they were actually out of curiosity to learn to build something in fintech.

Interviews themselves are really hard, I struggled to not ask 'leading questions' when I wanted the interviewee to say what I wanted to hear vs what was going to be an even more valuable insight to us.