It is that time of the year again, where we close for the year and write our new year resolutions that we might never follow through. Considering what we’ve already seen in industry trends and patterns for 2020, here’s a compilation of what some of us expect to happen in Africa’s product scene come 2021:
Silas Adedoyin(Mono)
Basically, I think they’ll be a lot of new startups than we’ve seen before, and a lot more investments from Silicon Valley and the likes.
We'll be having more fintech infrastructure startups like mono, more infrastructure means more startups can leverage their APIs, and the entry barrier for fintech will become very low.
Soliudeen Ogunsola(Product Cycle)
We're truly at the unbundling phase of the internet. Big firms are getting bigger and bigger that they won't be able to solve all the problems and also often care less about some tiny parts of their company that usually results in shutting them down.
If you want to build stuff and lack ideas, now is the best time to check your favorite company to see what people are complaining about and also what they're requesting. Then, study them and build for them as fast as possible!
2021 is going to be another year of unbundling. Another opportunity to build great stuff if you like creating stuff.
There will be other changes including:
- Open banking.
- More crypto powered products for cross border payments.
- More products on access to credits by SMEs/Individuals.
- The rise of Food tech.
- Products to make the lives of creatives easier.
Olaseni Otusanya (Upspell Studio)
Products will become blockchain-based, a lot of excellent products would be in the industry of evolving demand(products that spot problems that are a result of the evolution of demand). Product managers will be logically mistaken for indigent which would be a total disregard for the fact that this generation of product managers are products of access to a wealth of information
Ijaola David (Helium Health)
There will be more demand for UX specialists, more crypto-based solutions and I believe edtech will become more mainstream.
Ishola Adebayo (OnlineHubNG)
What do you call it when a founder succeeds in building a startup in a certain sector, returns with another one in the same sector and they're already killing it.
In 2017, Rob Paddock and his brother Sam sold their edtech company, GetSmarter for $103 million. The SA-based company provided short-term online certification courses to distance-learning students in partnership with some of the world's leading universities.
At the time it was acquired by 2U, a publicly-traded, US-based, online education company, GetSmarter claimed it had 50,000 students globally. It also said it saw approximately $17 million in revenue in 2016.
The year is 2020 and Rob Paddock has returned with another startup called Valenture Institute. It describes itself as "a global private online high school offering a curriculum recognized by the world's leading universities".
What's more? Valenture just raised $7 million from GSV Ventures. GSV Ventures is an investor in online education giant, Coursera.
I call this The Reincarnation because Paddock is returning with a new (albeit different) version of his previously successful edtech venture. Valenture plans to open three campuses in South Africa in 2021. Afterward, it could launch in London, Boston, and New York. So, the outlook for edtech startups in 2021 isn't looking bad.
South Africa is home turf for edtech startups in Africa; what might be trickier is launching in locations such as the US, Canada, and the UK. I know of a Senior-colleague that got $5k grants from Facebook this covid year for just incorporating his edtech start-up in the US market.
But in Nigeria, uLesson boss is already moving it's 80+ staff from the city of Jos to Abuja owing to a lot of government inconsistent policies, we all know he's not a newbie when it comes to creating a high-value, tech-enabled education company.
Hoping we can have more tech and non-tech collaborators/partners/founders for edtech products in Nigeria particularly from here The edtech space is big and bright. Let's look inward, folks.
David Atanda(Product Cycle)
African startups will begin to create global products. 2021 will be Africa to the world for tech startups, a replication of the music scene.