Kenfield Griffith

Amidst the smoke of the sizzling burgers on the grill and the bubbling oil breathing taste into a handful of French fries, Ayda is wiping down the counter before she unlocks the door to her little burger joint “OSmash” in a crowded side-street in Nairobi. One of her two employees is chopping lettuce and tomatoes in the kitchen, while the other is making sure the three-table seating area is clean and tidy. Customers start trickling in – students, business folks, commuters, families – on the lookout for a quick meal that will satisfy their taste buds and help them get on with the day.

New and old faces appear. One customer presents his 10% discount code, another asks for the daily special, and a third is scouring the menu to find an item that he would enjoy on his first visit to OSmash. Ayda is thankful for the diversity in customers who made the trip to her restaurant today, remembering days when she was struggling to get even one customer through the door.

The game-changer in her story was none other than Tappi. When business was not going well, despite the high-quality food she served and the excellent location she had obtained, Ayda was on the lookout for something that would help her attract new customers, retain old ones so that her business could support her family, as well as her two employees. She had tried offering a home delivery option but found that about 30% of her revenues went to the delivery partner she contracted, which was not sustainable. She offered promo codes and discounts, but no one really discovered and used them. She created a loyalty program, but no one signed up.

As Ayda sought advice from different people on how to grow her business, the answer was usually the same: You need to have an online presence to acquire new customers and make sure the ones you have always come back. But the internet is complex, and managing OSmash’s online presence would require hiring a dedicated person, which was not on the cards for her at this point.

When one of her advisors pointed her to Tappi, Ayda’s story changed. She downloaded the app, created a free website in minutes, started publishing simplified Meta ads, paid for those through her mobile airtime credit, built her business reputation by capturing multi-channel reviews from customers that had come into her shop, and compiled a proper, data-centric customer database and a unified payment system. In a matter of a few days, the reality of Ayda, and OSmash, had shifted.

Through the online reviews, new customers were incentivized to visit her shop and try her delicious burgers. Through sending bulk SMS notifications to her existing customers with a 10% discount voucher, existing customers were motivated to visit her again. And through keeping track of her customers’ data and payment transactions, she was able to predict and forecast the needs of her business and come up with a growth strategy that suited her current situation.

Before Tappi, Ayda had 200 customers in her database. Today, she has 2,000.

OSmash is just one of the millions of MSMEs constituting 90% of all businesses in Africa, accounting for 60% of employment across the continent. “The main challenges these MSMEs are facing are finding and retaining customers, and growing their business,” says Kenfield Griffith, CEO and cofounder of Tappi. “Proper, organized data and simplified online presence management can empower these businesses and help them grow at a scale that they can manage.”

So, what does Tappi do exactly? It is a platform that digitizes SMEs in Africa through software solutions for lead generation and marketing. By providing personalized landing pages for businesses, it empowers businesses to discover customers online, handle and manage lead generation, enhance marketing campaigns, and simulate sales growth. Additionally, it allows businesses to accept digital payments from customers by facilitating transactions through various channels such as mobile money, and enables business owners to pay for the digital marketing campaigns through mobile airtime credit.

Kenfield, who has a PhD in Design and Computation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), cofounded Tappi with Louis Majanja, a former software developer at UC Berkeley, in January 2023. The duo had exited their first company Ajua, a customer experience platform allowing businesses to enhance customer satisfaction through data-driven insights, in December 2022, feeling like they had more to offer the continent.

“Through our first startup, we realized that we were solving the problems of large companies, like banks and mobile operators. We soon came to realize that a lot of small businesses across the continent need the same services at an affordable price to be able to grow, and that is what we are trying to achieve with Tappi,” Kenfield explains.

Today, Tappi’s 23-employee-strong team has gotten over 10,000 SMEs to register on the platform through their on-the-ground strategy and their partnerships with mobile operators such as MTN in Nigeria. “We know that there is a direct correlation between the growth of SMEs and the growth of the economy as a whole – and that is the needle we are trying to push in Africa,” Kenfield concludes.

“We’re delighted to invest in Tappi and to join Kenfield and Louis on this amazing mission to empower small and medium business owners across Africa and to provide them with an easy to use all-in-one platform to digitize and scale their business” says Aly El Shalakany, Managing Partner of Acasia Ventures.