How I'd Grow Bumpa
How I'd Grow Bumpa
Empowering Small Businesses in Nigeria's E-Commerce Landscape (B2B)
[some corrections were made to the original email. My sincere apologies]
Welcome to the 7 people who have joined us since the last deep dive! Join other smart, curious folks by subscribing here.
Hi Friends,👋🏾
I hope you’re all having a great week so far!
In the last deep dive, we looked at How I’d Grow Money Africa Kids — an EdTech platform that teaches kids about financial literacy. We looked at how they use video content to keep kids (hopefully) more entertained than Cocomelon.
Today, we shift our focus to the platform designed for sellers: Bumpa.
Bumpa is like Shopify for small businesses in Nigeria, equipping them with the tools needed to establish and thrive online. They have been active since 2021 and have raised more than $ 4 million in the process to support more than 50,000 small businesses on its platform.
In this, we’ll learn about:
A brief overview of e-commerce businesses.
How discoverable Bumpa is?
Why acquisition isn’t all there is to growth.
What drives merchants’ activity on Bumpa
How to retain merchants on Bumpa
Setting the strategy to grow Bumpa.
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UNDERSTANDING BUMPA THROUGH ITS CUSTOMER JOURNEY
Before we dive in, let's take a moment to look at this from the POV of a merchant. Picture yourself as a merchant in search of a solution to streamline your online sales process. You might search Google, seek recommendations on social media, or stumble upon Bumpa through ads. Regardless of how you discover them, the key is whether Bumpa can convince you that it's your perfect solution.
Let’s find out.
AWARENESS
In terms of awareness, how discoverable are they?
Well, before we get to that, let’s set some context. E-commerce is the way people do commerce online. You see a fine dress online; you purchase it, and it gets delivered to you. However, as a business, it could be divided into 3:
E-commerce brands: Think of companies like Nike or Adidas, which sell directly to consumers through their platforms.
E-commerce marketplaces: Platforms like Jumia, where multiple sellers list their products for consumers to browse.
E-commerce platforms: This is where Bumpa comes in, focusing on empowering sellers with the tools they need to succeed online.
Bumpa describes itself as “the best business management app for SMEs. They help them create a business website, issue invoices, record sales, receive financial reports and manage all business operations on their app”.
It’s immediately unclear what separates Bumpa from existing solutions. Let’s break it down.
When I think of “business website”, I think of WordPress or Shopify.
When I think of “invoices and recording sales”, I think of Kippa.
When I think of “financial reports”, I think of a business banking app like Brass or an app like Prospa. Prospa even wants you to think it’s more than a bank (ngmi🙃).
In all, Bumpa should refine its messaging to highlight its unique value proposition. And who better to help them than their customers?
Most of these reviews focus on either handling offline and online sales, as an alternative to Shopify, or the fast online store setup.
So, a good header and subtext could be:
Before Bumpa considers this, I think there’s a low-effort alternative that they already have.
Yet, does the lack of positioning impact how much traffic is coming to Bumpa?
Nope and here’s why:
Bumpa outperforms its peers in terms of overall traffic. It has higher traffic than its peers – Oze, Kippa, and Prospa that it is typically associated with.
Bumpa has been increasing in traffic growth rate. Bumpa has been growing traffic MoM at 5% for the last 3 months. 47% of their traffic is from direct channels meaning that those people going straight to getbumpa.com know about it. People not familiar with them (46.55% Organic search) are finding them on search engines like Google or Bing.
Bumpa has the strongest in terms of domain authority – which tells us how strong and authoritative a search engine like Google ranks it.
It has high view rates on Instagram. Bumpa's Instagram strategy has proven effective, with a significant portion of its audience actively engaging with the platform's content. It also has a high reel view rate—28.6%. For every 100 followers they have, 28 of them watch their reels. That is more than double the industry average for its size. Massive.
Despite not being positioned well, Bumpa is strong when it comes to making people aware of it.
P.S.: This is where Marketing would tell Product “I told you so. Fix your product.😂”
There’s an almost 50-50 split between the Direct and Organic traffic channels which suggests that not enough people who see Bumpa on Google remember them enough to come to them directly.
Why, what’s going on? Let’s check out the next step in our growth diagnosis.
CONSIDERATION.
Since we can see that Bumpa is very discoverable, how easy does it help the customer answer “Ok, I’ll go ahead and use this.”
For prospective merchants, the platform must effectively communicate its value proposition and ease of use.
Bumpa’s focus is on any business that sells stuff. It doesn’t have a preferred persona or industry that it targets, something that I’d have preferred but I digress😓.
While I love that Bumpa excels in providing social proof through testimonials, there's room for improvement in providing additional resources to increase consideration. Case studies and targeted email marketing campaigns could further convince potential users of Bumpa's value.
Here’s what I would do:
Case studies especially with video. This helps to show how different businesses use Bumpa to set up a store and get sales. These would be things like “How DCG Girlies made 10x sales in 6 months” and then optimise the pages for SEO.
Email marketing. The goal of good content marketing is to get people who are unaware of your product and make them aware to use it. A blog is a good way to convince them, but Bumpa’s blog is a mash-up of unrelated content. There are “How to detect fake alerts”, “Small business software”, “How to file CAC”, and so on.
Community. I’d create a telegram group like what Rise did. This will show visiting merchants that real people are sharing their success stories and tactics in text videos or photos.
ACTIVATION.
“How long does it take a user to see the value of the product?”
I have worked and played around with a fair bit of apps and never have I seen a SaaS app that asks me to pay a subscription to use their web app.
Never.
Not Microsoft. Not Slack. Not Zoom. Heck, not even Google.
But someone at Bumpa decided to “Oh well, we’ll just need to gate-keep our web app”.
Instead, this is giving (in Gen-Z speak) … “Give me money🤑!!!”
Bumpa has a 4-step activation process from sign-up to setting up a website:
Create an account.
Create a website.
Add products.
Share the store link.
The flow required that I already had a business name, Instagram handle, business location etc. So, I’d be eager to know if Bumpa was intentional about wanting the flow to be for existing businesses rather than new entrepreneurs starting their online journeys.
Bumpa's streamlined sign-up process is good, but there may be opportunities to make the onboarding experience better for new entrepreneurs:
Create a business name with a business name generator.
Create a logo with a log generator.
Still, defining the activation metric for Bumpa is tricky.
Is a business activated when they’ve created their website? Added a product? Or even made their first sale? It’s often better to consider activation as the point where the user sees value and the business can also extract some of that value.
With this context, my activation metric for Bumpa would be Time to the first sale.
If we’re looking at how fast it helps existing merchants sell a product, then more to-dos should include:
Sharing my product link,
Importing contacts or customer lists,
Messaging my customer list that products have been added or the business now has a web presence etc.
All of these are meant to get the first sale. And when it happens it should be meaningful.
LOYALTY/RETENTION.
Let’s say, I’ve been able to make my first sale within 1 hour (Massive 🏆), how does Bumpa keep helping merchants achieve more over time?
Bumpa can continue to deliver ongoing value and engagement to drive sustainable growth by:
Congratulating the customer for making their first sale or hitting some milestone. I “made” mine and just saw this as a record of 1. C’mon, help them make a big deal out of it!
Providing a weekly summary of sales and products.
Providing a summary of abandoned carts and what to do.
Providing a summary of new reviews etc.
Upselling users to paid plans after analysing their success with Bumpa. For instance, customers that do X are likely to subscribe to a paid plan.
As we discussed Money Africa Kids, a company is ready for growth when it has hit Product Market Fit (PMF), can acquire users sustainably and can extract revenue from users in the process.
Bumpa would love to earn transaction fees from free users and upsell them to their higher-value Subscription plans. To achieve this, let’s look at the strategy.
SETTING THE STRATEGY
As you may have noticed, Bumpa is a conflicting product. Good at one and not so good at another. And it seems like its bad parts are weighing it down from achieving its potential.
The image above may look intimidating but breaking it down, you’ll see that it all adds up.
There are a few ways that Bumpa adds value to its merchants:
Create product.
Create website.
Share receipt.
Create collection.
Make a sale.
Create an order.
Add collection.
Create campaign.
Based on these, there are a few growth loops that can help Bumpa acquire and retain users sustainably.
UGC+SEO: This loop exists when a user creates content, and that content can be indexed on search engines. For Bumpa, that can be captured when a user creates a website. As merchants create websites, these websites are indexed on Google from which Bumpa makes it easy for visitors to create accounts again.
Side virality: This loop exists when a user unintentionally promotes a product while using it. When you receive this newsletter, there’s some Substack branding around it, which could lead you to learn more and start your newsletter. By adding Bumpa branding to sharing receipts, they can get another acquisition channel that can be leveraged.
Paid acquisition: Paid acquisition can come in different forms. Whether you’re paying to promote on X (formerly Twitter), Google, or Facebook, getting an Influencer, or sponsoring me (I’m open👀), it’s all a means of paying to promote the product to an audience. By exploring paid, Bumpa can reinvest part revenue earned from merchants subscribing to paid plans.
CGC + Viral: This exists where the company generates content and is distributed by users. Now, this is where I think Bumpa could get a bit better. They can create tools like a business name or logo generator which they can use to collect email addresses. Sign-ups could turn to subscribers which allows them to reinvest in more tools.
Based on everything we’ve discussed, here’s what Bumpa should do.
Look at the growth loops and leverage their strengths to add UGC+SEO loops, CGC+SEO loops, Side virality and Paid acquisition.
Bumpa doesn’t seem to have an acquisition/awareness problem but a conversion one. This means more focus should be on case studies, and testimonials and making it easier for merchants to be activated. Remove the damn restriction on requiring a subscription to access the web app and consider placing a demo.
Strengthen the value prop with better positioning. I had already said that Bumpa didn’t have an awareness problem but they could focus on letting people know that they made the right choice coming to them.
Partnerships. Even though partnerships are tough to pull off, when done well, they’re a compounding growth channel. I would recommend that Bumpa finds businesses like those creating WordPress websites for other businesses and gets into partnerships with them for some affiliate payment. This would make it easier for these businesses to design more websites at scale and earn additional revenue on each website created.
Optimise content to be directed to what people want to achieve with Bumpa.
In conclusion, Bumpa holds immense promise in empowering small businesses to thrive in the digital age. Leveraging growth loops, such as user-generated content, optimizing conversion funnels, strengthening its value proposition, and forging impactful partnerships to propel growth, Bumpa can fuel sustainable growth.
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If you learned something or enjoyed this piece, please like and share it with your friends or colleagues who could benefit🙏🏾.
Also, if you want me to cover any other product, please let me in in the comments. If you’d love to chat, you can send me an email or send a DM.
Thanks for reading.
Kamso.