There are more than 13 savings and investment apps in Nigeria. These apps make it easy to save and invest money with higher interests than banks. In a recent article, Techpoint published a roundup of  leading savings apps in Nigeria . After reading that article I decided to automate my savings. But, before making my final selection, I checked out the platform and studied their growth strategy.  After my analysis, I started using three of the apps. In this article, my goal is to share with you eight growth strategies used by some of the apps and how you can adapt those growth strategies to your business. Design Your Product To Solve Major Issues Facing Your Users. Before you launch, your first goal is to find out the core problem users want you to solve with the product.  In the case of these apps, the problem is helping people develop savings habit. As a result, the main product feature created helped users to automate monthly savings and discourage imp...

Tech firm, Eyowo Integrated Payment Limited , has launched an initiative to ease retailers and business owners’ mode of operations in Nigeria. The series is reportedly aimed at creating an avenue where retailers and business owners can learn how to improve business performance using modern tools and strategies. The initiative, which is tagged the Boost Your Business with Eyowo retail/business workshop series, is themed “Driving Business growth with data.” According to the Chief Executive Officer of Eyowo, Tomi Amao, the workshop series was launched in line with the company’s vision of solving financial inclusion problems and making daily transactions seamless for businesses in Nigeria. “The boost your business retail seminar is one of many steps we are taking to achieve our vision, which is to promote and drive financial inclusion throughout Africa. We believe this is very possible,” he said. The workshop had Chief Customer Enterprise Architect of Oracle Ecemea [CTO], Ol...

When was the last time you paid cash for something? Personally, it’s rare for me to even carry it these days. And with the rise of new mobile and digital payment options like Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, PayPal and Google Wallet, cash payments are only going to become less common. In fact, according to Worldpay’s 2018 Global Payment Report, the global use of mobile payments is forecasted to increase to 28 percent in 2022, surpassing credit cards and cash. Given this trend, it could be time to consider eliminating cash payments from your business altogether. It might seem crazy to stop accepting cold, hard dollars, but there are actually a number of benefits. Check out these three reasons your small business should consider going cashless. 1. It Boosts Checkout Efficiency.  Consumers today are busy and don’t want to spend time waiting in line to check out. That’s why companies like Starbucks have been promoting mobile order-and-pay apps that allow customers to pay ahead of time....

Improve your time management and productivity with these tips. Unless you’re Jim Halpert and enjoy spending most of your time pranking Dwight, most of us want to become more efficient at work. Not only is this beneficial for your career, but it can also help maintain a healthy work-life balance. But how can you become more adept at work? Well, here are 25 time-management strategies that you should implement. 1. Stop Letting To-Do Lists Ruin Your Life. To-do lists aren’t just useful. They’re essential to our success, since the brain can only focus on three or four things at a time. So, we need lists for any work-related tasks that we have to get to later. But, creating too many lists can stress us out. Lists don’t take into account how long it takes to complete a task, and they don’t help us separate the important from the urgent. Don’t scrap your to-do-lists. Instead, rethink your approach to your lists. A straightforward approach would be to use 5x3 inch index cards fo...

If I told you that you could launch an e-commerce business this week, would you think I was crazy?  Well, it’s true -- you can. Thanks to the internet, there is essentially nothing stopping you from creating and launching a product in less than a week. I’m not just talking the talk -- I’ve walked the walk. My teeth-whitening brand was brainstormed while on vacation in Hawaii and I launched it within a week of returning home.  If you want to do the same, follow these eight steps and you can have an online brand up and operational in a week. (1) Identify A High-Potential Product. There are several things you need to consider when deciding what your product offering will be. You will want to find something that has a large global demand, high margins and can be easily warehoused and fulfilled.  Google Trends, eBay Top Products and Amazon Best Sellers are all great resources to help you identify hot products. For example, fidget spinners are current...

Moving goods over long distances can be tricky. Moving large goods over long distances can be trickier. You constantly worry about how they are handled while in transit. You think about what could go wrong during those long hours as the goods are moved to their intended location. What if the goods don’t get there on time? What if they don’t even get to the intended locations? What if they get delivered…somewhere else?! And the clearing of these goods…how will you handle it? All these worries, and you haven’t even started discussing how they will be moved out of the port to where you need them to be delivered. The word ‘Freight’ comes to mind when you think of how large cargo is moved from one country to another, especially when the goods have to be moved overseas. In Nigeria, we have many importers who ship in many goods using massive containers. For many of them, the best part of the process is when the goods are finally delivered. For us, the best part SHOULD be the ent...

Preparing to start a business typically occurs over a period of time, unless you are thrust into emergency mode by losing a job, or arriving as an immigrant in a country without a financial source of livelihood. Also, entrepreneurship is rarely a first occupation since people normally gain business experience and skills by working for others. Individuals usually pass through various stages of development in making a decision to open their own business. The venture development stages outlined below are presented in a logical sequence; however, the steps frequently overlap and do not always occur in the order presented. 1) Discomfort :  There is discomfort in one’s life due to a variety of causes such having a lousy job or no job at all, wanting to make a change in one’s occupation, desiring to live in a distant location, seeking more personal and political freedom, and/or migrating to another country. 2) Ideation : One begins dreaming and developing ideas for a better futur...