The mobile application is approaching 300,000 downloads, having found its audience in Benin and Senegal, and is expanding more widely in French-speaking Africa.
At the end of April, the CoinAfrique mobile classifieds application released its latest version. This is the sixtieth update of this all-mobile player, the service not being accessible on a computer but only via smartphones and tablets.
On the continent, competition is fierce for this market, between local players such as the Ivorian eezydeel.ci, whose site is no longer accessible, and international giants such as the American Letgo and its South African branch. , or even Facebook Marketplace. Despite everything, the newcomer led by a Franco-Senegalese trio of entrepreneurs and IT developers has managed to find a place for himself.
The app, available on Android and Apple Store, has 270,000 downloads and 40,000 monthly users. There are many smartphones for resale, computers, cameras, cars, clothing, furniture …
In total, an average volume of 25,000 advertisements are offered by individuals in some twenty countries in French-speaking, West and Central Africa. The ambition is to bring traffic – the eldorado of e-merchants – to one million active users within three years.
African capitals tour
It is Matthias Papet, a former e-commerce company at Air France, who passed the head of the travel industry at Google, who took the initiative after a meeting with Alexandre Collinet, deputy general manager at Leboncoin.fr . In May 2014, he injected 50,000 euros of personal money and toured several African capitals: Libreville, Douala, Abidjan, Dakar …
In the Senegalese capital, contacts are good. Tidjane Deme, then head of Google in French-speaking Africa and now head of a pan-African tool within Partech, a venture capital fund established in San Francisco, Paris and Berlin, puts him in touch with Jimmy Kumako. The latter is another Google alumnus and the founder of Dev Engine, an IT development company specializing in mobile apps and sites, which happens to be behind Seneweb or Marodi.tv.
“They [Jimmy Kumako and Martial Konvi, both associated with DevEngineLabs] delivered an application with more functions than what I initially envisioned,” says Matthias Papet about the first version available in the Google application store in May 2015. It was then tested by online marketing campaigns in 17 countries using Google AdWords and Facebook.
Take off in Benin
Good pick in Benin. “Because there were fewer competitors in the classifieds, the product took off,” says Matthias Papet. A network of personal contacts, for the most part active within the giants of the net – the “GAFA”, for Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon – support the development of CoinAfrique from one level or another. They help him organize a larger advertising campaign, and the audience is climbing.
An eloquent indicator, “the cost of acquiring a user on the Internet is 3 to 10 euros in France, we are well below in Africa,” explains Matthias Papet. Today, the company has around ten employees in Benin and is expanding in Senegal.
These two countries represent 50% of the advertisements. After a first fundraising from individuals, of 150,000 dollars in mid-2016, the company is looking for new investors.
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