Meet The Boss: Asoreba; the Adjudged Best Startup in Africa

A combination a mobile and Web App, Asoriba seeks to solve all the administration needs of an average church on one platform- from collection, storage and analysis of the data of church members, keeping track of church revenue as well as facilitating members' tithing, offertory and pledge payments.

Starting a business can be a very difficult endeavour, especially tech startups in Ghana.

This is due to their inability to streamline solutions to the challenges of their target customers.

So often, you find techprenuers( tech entrepreneurs) building fanciful apps that appear to do so many mind- boggling enhancements, but do not bring the exact convenience that the average Ghanaian needs. Something attributable to a failure on the part of these techpreneurs to localize their technological solutions to the needs of the average Ghanaian.

This is why what Asoriba has been able to do perfectly, which is why they earn a slot in this Edition of Meet The Boss.

The Story of Asorba

Asoriba is a management tool for church administration. A combination of a mobile and Web App, Asoriba seeks to solve all the administration needs of an average church on one platform. Ranging from collection, storage and analysis of the data of church members, keeping track of church revenue as well as facilitating members' tithing, offertory and pledge payments. They can do all that through embedded electronic payment platforms on Asoriba.

The days when your church administrator is unable to tell whether you attended Sunday church service or not is over. Asoriba gives him an easy, real- time analysis of church attendance patterns. He or she is also able to tell the margins of decrease or increase in church population just by the click of a button.

Solution meets problem

Again what makes Asoriba standout, is how well they have specifically tailored their tech innovation to the basic problems and needs of churches.

The team attributes such valuable achievement to their strong religious background. It so happens that three of the five co- founders of Asoriba were born to parents who are pastors and church leaders.

Nana Opoku W. O. Agyeman-Prempeh, Chief Executive Officer of Asoriba reveals what they did to achieve such value:

" For the four of us who started the company, church has been a part of the life. Myself, Saviour and Patrick have been in church leadership almost all our lives, and our fathers are pastors. And when we started off, we built around pastors. For example, from conception to the time we went we had wonderful pastors like Pastor Eddy Addy who is the pastor of Light House, Airport Branch. With that you are able to build solutions that meet real problems".

For Chief Product Officer for Asoriba Web, Saviour Kwaku Dzage other web solutions on the market do not present the holistic solution that Asoriba provides. And this, he says is testament to Asoriba's commitment to a tight feedback system. " We practically built the app for our customers. And they were in the process every step of the way."

Has Asoriba been Successful?

Asoriba's quick meteoric rise to fame is strongly tied to the reception they have received from customers.

" We have been out selling a lot, and I tell you this... the reaction we get most of the time after demonstrating the product to churches and church members is WOW!!!" , Obed Asamoah Boateng (VP - Sales & Marketing) says.

" iIt has really made my job as a sales and marketing much easier, because the product really sells itself" he adds

Asoriba wins 3 awards out of 3 competitions

For many, Asoriba was, by far, the Ghanaian startup of the year 2015. Their real test would come when they entered the Seedstars Ghana competition in October 2015, which was held in Casablanca, Morocco. This was barely a few months after the product had hit the market in June.

" Seedstars is actually a competition that goes round African countries selecting the best Startups. So it was previlege for us to win in 2015. But it says a lot about the amount of hardwork that was put in, but of course it was by the Grace of God. This was at a time when we had just finished building a product, an MVP, and then gone to the market only to be adjudged best startup in Ghana."

As their prize, they won $150,000 in cloud services.

Asoriba would go on to be adjudged Best Startup in Africa 2015, and that was before they had won the Innovate Africa Challenge, a business pitching competition for startups in Africa, from which they won a cool GHC10,000.

For them the sky is a stepping stone. And if only other tech companies can emulate Asoriba's example of building apps according to local nuances and to the needs of the customers, success will be almost a surity.

Source: www.vanguardngr.com