LittleFish

Unleashing the potential of an MSME through e-commerce on everyday tools

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Inspiration

Growing up in small businesses and then moving into financial services for approx. a decade, our CEO realised that not much had changed for his family on how they trade, access clients and grow their business.

So, with the primary goal to help those like his family LittleFish was born out of a need to enable MSMEs with limited capital to experience and enjoy benefits of the growing digital economy.

But, with the Covid-19 pandemic we soon realized first hand SMEs have taken a huge hit as they have no online prescence and no ability to serve their clients other than an instore visit, so we've used the Ayoba hackathon to protype and develop our e-commerce channel for small business owners during these trying times.

What it does

LittleFish is an open-ecosystem to enable MSMEs to trade smart, access affordable finance and to getting better deals from suppliers by leveraging collective buying power, e-commerce, on demand insights and enhancing their business skills.

Our submission will allow an MSME to use LittleFish Merchant to create a store profile, add products, recieve order and go online in a few simple steps and our companion micro-app namely LittleFish market is for the MSMEs customers to view their store, place orders, make payments and more,

How we built it

We started with a micro-erp system to provide MSME with all the tools they need to run their business from a mobile device, tablet or desktop, this is a freemium that we use to convert an MSME to a live data point and apply our behavioural scoring pattern.

Now, we are building the e-commerce channel through Ayoba, namely LittleFish Local Market that will enable MSMEs to put their business /store online by completing a few simple steps, no website designer and full control of their online storefront.

This is built using a combination of frameworks, being angular for the micro-app to manage your store in Ayoba, then flutter for the marketplace along with a flutter experimental port into a micro-app for purchases.

Within this platform will enable cashless trading for MSMEs, receive orders, buy goods, communicate with their clients and access on demand finance when needed.

Challenges we ran into

  1. Getting MSMEs to use the platform - We are solving this challenge by ensuring clarity of the value to MSMEs (ie more revenue and convenience. We are partnering with FCMGs companies to access their client base.
  2. Signing Financial Service Provider Partners - initially this was a challenge, however once we unpacked the CAC vs CLV it was clear we brought value and enabled a new form of MSME banking / MSME financial services
  3. Hands On Learning - A product does not count, if you haven't lived and breathed the problem, so we saved up and travelled to emerging markets and worked in informal and formal stores, interviewed many MSMEs and unpacked what we believed would be a new digital outlook for MSMEs in Africa.
  4. Technology Skills are Scarce - A major barrier to platforms is the technological literacy, so a website builder is not an option and so we create a pre-determined set of interfaces and themes leaving the SME with a few simple interactions to embrace technology

Accomplishments that we are proud of

  1. We became a member of AlphaCode in 2019
  2. We got support from FSDT (Financial Services Deepening Trust - part of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) in Tanzania to support their drive to support MSMEs growth.
  3. We signed an agreed pilot partnership with the largest bank in Tanzania. This enables us to access their MSMEs client base to use the platform.
  4. We have a key pilot agreement with one of the major FCMGs wholesaler /distributor in South Africa to enable their digital channels for the benefit of the MSMEs
  5. Nedbank payments sandbox invitation

What we learned

We have learnt that MSMEs are neglected and too many solutions out there focus on creating value for other members in the stream (i.e. banks for loans or suppliers for more orders), where we have chosen to make the SME our primary benefactor and change the dynamic by putting pressure on value chain partners to acquire these valueable clients.

What is next for LittleFish

With Covid-19 impacting small businesses, especially those with no online presence our focus shifted directly to enabling online e-commerce and is our focus for the Ayoba hackathon.

We have seen first hand in family business where the drop in revenue is quite severe, so in order our plans are:

  1. LittleFish Market - e-commerce marketplace for MSMEs to sell and buy goods
  2. LittleFish Bots - Ayoba, whatsapp & telegram bots and microapps to service clients, manage store, fulfil orders and receive payment
  3. Social Media Integrations - Facebook Marketing (Insta), snapchat
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