Micro-entrepreneurship? There’s An App For That
Micro-entrepreneurs generally face two main obstacles: getting funding and managing finances. Micro-lending programs like Kiva have done a tremendous job of addressing that first challenge. But what about that second one?
David Del Ser, founder of Frogtek, has it covered. He’s providing the financial tools and skills to micro-entrepreneurs through the power of mobile. Think about being a small business owner in the developing world and having all your sales technology literally at the palm of your hand: touchscreens, accounting software, barcode readers, interactive learning modules. That means more data, smarter decisions, and better service—the start of a growing business.
Check out our interview below.
What are you up to at Frogtek?
We are busy building the first business tool specifically designed to run on the mobile phones of micro-entrepreneurs. To be more concrete, we are focusing on the small mom & pops and their accounting and inventory management needs.
Is the smartphone then basically a substitute for the personal computer?
Exactly. We believe the smartphone will become the main computing tool for the base of the pyramid (BOP), since it doesn’t have to compete with laptops or PCs as in the richer world.
Almost every adult has a cell phone at the BOP and from the drop in price of technological products, we can infer that in 3-5 years everyone at the BOP will have a smartphone.
Will they also buy a PC computer? Well, it will depend on what they can’t do on their smartphones, which is an interesting inversion to what happened in the US and Europe.
I think of the iPhone and all the app possibilities. Even in the US we’re starting to realize the power of smartphones.
Of course now that the smartphones have powerful interfaces and an internet connection, here too we’re starting to see what novel applications they can foster.
The difference is that those apps still have to compete in most cases with their equivalents in laptops and desktops, as even while on the move you can always wait until you get home to write that long email. In the developing world, there won’t be any laptops necessarily, so you’ll write that email on your phone for sure!
So you’re giving people the technology tools, but I imagine there’s also a sizable gap in knowledge and skills. How are you educating your customers about running a business?
We will have to educate them at two levels. First, they’ll need to learn how to use our tool. But to extract all its potential, they will also have to learn the business skills required to run efficiently a retail operation.
How will we do that? Even if we’ll use teachers and workshops in the early stages, our goal is to have a self-teaching tool. Using the multimedia capabilities of the phones, we plan on creating short how-to videos, interactive animations, audio testimonials and even simple games that modularize the knowledge and make it simple to digest.
The benefit of using the phone is double. On one hand, once you’ve built the content, its replication is free. On the other, the shopkeepers will take advantage of the idle time they have in their shops, instead of having to close them to go to a classroom and forgoing some income.
Did business school prepare you for the challenges of social entrepreneurship?
I’ve heard before that you can’t teach entrepreneurship, let alone its social sister. By that I take that the drive and desire to build a new organization can’t be taught and that’s one of the most important ingredients for a successful venture.
In my case, the two years at Columbia business school gave me the tools to analyze an opportunity, to understand the rudiments of how to capture it, and to devise ways to ensure its lasting social impact.
Furthermore, it provided an excellent testing ground to sharpen skills, which I took advantage of by launching Microlumbia, a student-run fund focused on investments and consulting for microfinance institutions. Going through that process while getting advice from professors and experts, as well as access to Columbia’s network of professionals, was an extremely valuable teaching experience.
And it made me want to continue down a similar path after graduation.
