Rebecca Jones, Co-Founder and CEO, Clutch Wallet
Only 3.9% of the population actually owns cryptocurrencies and tokens. Starting to look at that pain point was where my co-founders and I really wanted to address the problem with a wallet. And look, a wallet isn't something that's a new product. But unfortunately, we identified that the current user experience isn't the best, especially for those first-time users coming in. And so we really wanted to improve upon that with a better experience in terms of your UI and UX of how the product looked and felt and integrating educational content, video content guides, modules that helped with layers of social content and social experiences into the wallet to expand upon that user experience.
Chika Uwazie, Co-Founder, Afropolitan
We are building the first digital country for the African diaspora. I was a technical recruiter and then I started an HR-software company. My first interaction with Web3 was actually in Nigeria. When I moved back to Nigeria to start my business, that was just around when crypto crashed. I remember being super interested but also felt like it seemed a little too crazy for me at that time. I just started finding out about crypto because people in Nigeria were using it to save because they felt like our currency, Naira, was too volatile.
Chika Uwazie, Co-Founder, Afropolitan
It has to be a multi-pronged approach, especially if you're targeting community members who are not in Web3 and that's kind of our main challenge is that we are going in between people who are crypto native and then people who are not. Luckily for us, Afropolitan we are known in the event space and so we have a lot of people that come to our events and that's been a great awareness and also we've actually done quite well with media. When you are building something that's unique and specific, I think you can use it to your advantage. I would also say that about partnerships. We are doing our first major partnership in Ghana during Afrochella, which is one of the biggest festivals in Africa, about 25,000 people attend. We're also doing a community roadshow and we've already done some town halls.
Rebecca Jones, Co-Founder and CEO, Clutch Wallet
We've always run a bit of a multi-prong approach. The first place that we saw traction was on TikTok and that was honestly I think part of how we were able to raise our pre-seed pre-product was just talking about our product idea on TikTok and garnering a level of interest through that platform. There's obviously so much opportunity with organic growth there and the fact that if you have viral content, you get exposure to a really big audience of people that are active and are interested and are willing to take action.
The other kind of approach that we've had is to really build networks and partnerships with different communities. BFF is one of the wonderful ones that is doing incredible work and onboarding large groups of different people that are coming into the space. And so trying to be as supportive to different networks and communities as possible.
Rebecca Jones, Co-Founder and CEO, Clutch Wallet
What we’re focused on has shifted in a big way and this is the challenging part of building in an industry that is still very new. When we have market downturns, there are a lot of people that leave and that changes the numbers, that changes the excitement and it changes the traction numbers. Starting a product like this in the middle of or the tail end of this hype cycle, meant that when we talked about onboarding first time users and people that were yet to come into the space, that was a very viable option. I would say now it's a bit more challenging and so for us we've had to look at our customer base and who we want to build for. There's always been a focus on the first time user but we really think the product that we're going live with next week has a lot of use cases for existing crypto natives as well.
For more tips and insights, listen to the full conversation with Bec and Chica here
This is not financial advice. If you don't want to spend money investing in crypto or Web3 — you don’t have to. The intent of this article is to help others educate themselves and learn.
