Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders
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Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders
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Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders
#2> Zoho started allowing African companies to pay for its software in local currencies. This decision has been a major reason for Zoho’s success in Africa as it allowed customers and potential clients to avoid regulatory hurdles around dollar spending
> Zoho has also been aggressive with its pricing in Africa. Zoho One, a bundle of more than 45 products
This is a major reason why Western products aren't landing as well abroad anymore.
This isn't the 1990s-early 2000s where your only options for software and hardware were Western (in reality only American and maybe a couple niche European vendors).
American companies need to actually localize and build the "cultural competency" muscle, which I feel a lot of Western companies lost by being overly dependent on China as a singular market.
This isn't 1989 anymore - Levi's jeans and Coca Cola don't cut it. Just about every major country is capitalist now.
American brands, technology, and R&D still have a lot of staying power and brand cachet (there's a reason Asian tourists love taking a selfie while touching John Harvard's foot), but there needs to be recognition that the delta between the US and other countries in R&D has drastically shrunk now that countries all over the world are much richer and have adopted American style innovation systems.
Localization and greater openness to foreign innovation will help boost our own products, economy, and soft power.
If we become too insular, then we doom our larger economy to the same mistakes France, Germany, UK, and Japan made.
Sticking to principles like Data Security, Privacy, and concierge Customer Support are legitimate differentiators that can by justified by customers to pay a premium.
Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders
#3> Zoho started allowing African companies to pay for its software in local currencies. This decision has been a major reason for Zoho’s success in Africa as it allowed customers and potential clients to avoid regulatory hurdles around dollar spending > Zoho has also been aggressive with its pricing in Africa. Zoho One, a bundle of more than 45 products This is a major reason why Western products aren't landing as wel…
I'm completely OK with American brands making Americans their primary target again.
Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders
#4> Zoho started allowing African companies to pay for its software in local currencies. This decision has been a major reason for Zoho’s success in Africa as it allowed customers and potential clients to avoid regulatory hurdles around dollar spending > Zoho has also been aggressive with its pricing in Africa. Zoho One, a bundle of more than 45 products This is a major reason why Western products aren't landing as wel…
Not only currency, but Albo outdated payment methods like credit card or PayPal only? What?? Srsly?
What about other robust methods like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blik
Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders
#5> Zoho started allowing African companies to pay for its software in local currencies. This decision has been a major reason for Zoho’s success in Africa as it allowed customers and potential clients to avoid regulatory hurdles around dollar spending > Zoho has also been aggressive with its pricing in Africa. Zoho One, a bundle of more than 45 products This is a major reason why Western products aren't landing as wel…
I'm completely OK with American brands making Americans their primary target again.
By becoming completely insular, you lose the ability to innovate, as you cater to a subset of consumers and as such aren't being pushed to test the limits of the existing status quo.
For example, look at what happened to Sony - they were a darling of the Consumer Technology space and the Apple of the 1990s-early 2000s, but because they concentrating on the Japanese market at the expense of the global market, they fell drastically behind in innovation.
A similar story happened with Nokia, RIM, GM, etc as well.
Competition from players like BYD, DJI, and Huawei has helped incentivize innovation in the Li-on Battery space (eg. Panasonic, Tesla), the low budget drone space (eg. Andruil, Skydio), and 5-6G sector (eg. Cradlepoint, Qualcomm)
An insular America is an uncompetitive America. An uncompetitive America is a weaker America. A weaker America opens political vacuums from the Red Sea to Central Africa to Myanmar.
Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm completely OK with American brands making Americans their primary target again.
By becoming completely insular, you lose the ability to innovate, as you cater to a subset of consumers and as such aren't being pushed to test the limits of the existing status quo. For example, look at what happened to Sony - they were a darling of the Consumer Technology space and the Apple of the 1990s-early 2000s, but because they concentrating on the Japanese market at the expense of the global market, they fel…
I think the key word there was 'primary'. I think it's okay to have a main audience in mind that isn't the entire world.
Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
By becoming completely insular, you lose the ability to innovate, as you cater to a subset of consumers and as such aren't being pushed to test the limits of the existing status quo. For example, look at what happened to Sony - they were a darling of the Consumer Technology space and the Apple of the 1990s-early 2000s, but because they concentrating on the Japanese market at the expense of the global market, they fel…
I think the key word there was 'primary'. I think it's okay to have a main audience in mind that isn't the entire world.
Primary implies the lack of localization, and localization is a critical piece of innovation, as it forces you to consider additional user experience enhancements.
From a typography standpoint, think about how you would represent Hudum versus Latin fonts on a mobile app or PWA now that Mongolia is deprecating Cyrillic script.
On the Cloud side, a lot of major K8s orchestration and edge computing innovations were sparked by Chinese telcos and tech vendors trying to work around GFW related latency issues.
Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders
#8Zoho is a major player in the industry being direct competitor to small business. They are also bootstrapped.
Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders
#9What may really blow their mind is that there are open source tools that cost even less. Zoho is a good choice though, their CRM was not the best but got the job done. Has a good API. Haven’t tried their other tools like docs or mail.
Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders
#10> Zoho started allowing African companies to pay for its software in local currencies. This decision has been a major reason for Zoho’s success in Africa as it allowed customers and potential clients to avoid regulatory hurdles around dollar spending > Zoho has also been aggressive with its pricing in Africa. Zoho One, a bundle of more than 45 products This is a major reason why Western products aren't landing as wel…
I'm completely OK with American brands making Americans their primary target again.
56% of Apple's revenue is from outside the US. 38% of Boeing's revenue is from outside the US. 58% of Caterpillar's revenue is from outside the US. (Those are the first three companies I checked.)
If American companies took the attitude "America #1, we don't need foreign customers," I don't think you would like the impact the resulting revenue loss would have on the American economy.