[benjamaan]

This reminded me of the early days of launching SnapScan. Firstly, it was about the 4th time we had rebuilt and relaunched a payments app. Then, we launched it for online payments which got absolutely zero traction.

Eventually we went and sat at weekend markets and coffee shops and spoke to customers and merchants one-by-one to explain to them everything about it: why we built it, who we were, how the security worked, where they could find us if we lost their money, how to download a mobile app, how to link a bank card to an app. We manually did this with probably over 1000 customers.

And then we gave them R50 to use it, and for the first year gave merchants the product for free.

This set us up for success. We deeply knew how customers perceived our app and using their phone to pay. We had also deeply educated a small army of people. And we had personal relationships with them, they had literally saved my number on their phone and could call me.

This article was a great reminder of the mental strain that took.