One thing that is super scary is bank of Khartoum. Yeah, we all know bank of Khartoum is scary, however i don’t mean their current app, well that bit has it owns deficit and honestly we don’t even need to compete with. (Of course, we do want to compete, however, for our setup and late launch stages, it should be safe to just ignore it). Bok can do an extremely badass move now by integrating with ebs. In retrospect, the only missing piece they still lack is ebs convenience and that ebs cards don’t map to an actual account so hence the more permissive their kyc is). However bok now is more concerned about foreign currency and remittance so that should give us a good edge.

Check this dedicated article for more info about BOK

Ideally, I would love us to have these products:

  • the pos app. I will give name to our products now to make it more convenient to reference them in other notes / docs. This will go by Tuti POS. And it will be our flagship product and the main company product. Its main goal is to bring in cash to our customers, so the whole agency setup as well as the affiliated network of billers and merchants.
  • consumer app, we gonna refer to it by JUST tutipay. It will be our main marketing product, it is what we gonna use to pitch our portfolio, its what we gonna use in our websites and our main selling points to any VC or so. But guys I want to make the argument that the mobile app is our most precious asset we have! The reason being the versatility of it, its wide range of services and hassless way of setting it up, will get us customers. But that is of course not enough in its own. I can do the math for you but trust me on this: no one can make revenue from transaction fees. And everyone has failed in payment in Sudan because they were only thinking about the fees: Sahla (used to be the biggest payment provider in Sudan era 2018), now its owners are fighting amongst themselves and they have been trying to fix their software since 2018. Syber has a joined venture with UCB and while that will give them liquidity (they were struggling amid the corona and general situation in Sudan), and one thing I learned the hardware is that joint venturers in Sudan hardly works, and they usually get into your way when you are trying to sell the company or accept any new investors. Huge due diligence issues and Hamdi I’m sure knows about that than I do. But back to the story again: fees is what get us to this whole issue. Let’s ignore the fees and never ever mention them. They don’t exist and if they do, they are a liability against us and something if we get rid of, will help us in our marketing offering. Imagine w tell our partnered bank and our merchant that:
  • the merchant will get 1 sdg fixed per any transaction. We will tell them that will work on certain conditions eg you get 2 sdg when you process amounts less than 100 sdg! Guys you see the figures now and how they are turning: I want our merchants to learn to accept to use Tuti Pos even when their customers are buying something with 10 sdg amount. We have to make this paradigm shift and push our users to use their cards regularly and always AND push our merchants to accept cards regularly and be incentivized to make that. The merchant will get 2% of the amount whenever they process a transaction! Guys sometimes that might be even more than what the merchant themselves earn per the product! 2% is really a huge thing.
  • the other party we want to lure in are the banks. Currently the banks, whether they were the issuer bank or the settlement bank, both gets nothing. (OK, let me rant in the next article about how credit cards companies make money, but that for a later notes). We can giveaway the 1 remaining sdg to the bank IN EXCHANGE FOR THEM ALLOWING US TO DEVELOP AND INTWGRATE CERTAIN MODULES SUCH AS THE INSTANT SETTLEMENT OF THE TRANSACTIONS. Everyone is happy, we are happy as well, buuuut we don’t make revenue. So let’s get down to making revenue part and welp making Sam as rich asf so he can do whatever Hamdi won’t allow rn.

So, no fees, and we want to make revenue. I will walk you through previous examples we did and why they failed:

  • we are a payment processor aight? We can avail it to others right? Well yeeees technically we are, but the market for ecommerce is laughably small. It is trivial to the extent that ebs had almost forgotten about it
  • we can do business 2 business. OK, this is a classical example of chicken and egg: yes, we can arguably make a great impact and also good revenue by extending our network to include large employees, but guys to sell that proposal: WE HAVE TO HAVE AN EXTENDED AND VERY WIDE AGENCY NETWORK SUCH THAT you can pretty much find our agent in your next turn. I don’t say that won’t work, in fact the opposite: the agency network has been something I was pushing since the very first release of noebs and first article. What I want us to do is to have more vertical businesses, and not just a one and this is the main objective of this document.

One of the ideas I keep thinking is the modular system design. A system that is functional with the minimal components, yet so powerful and very extensible. A system, not just in software but even as a business concept, that starts as just a Tuti POS and grows in layers and complexities to include various components, sometimes even various competing ideas, however in retrospect they complete each others. A functional organisation where a team can grow and shrink in complexity without breaking down the whole organisation. Individuals whom are very self motivated and initiatives takers that keep spawning us with new ideas and new proposals. A research team that they very most goal is to help us understand what the market will be like in 10 yrs time frame. A sales team that is so vibrant and so active they can literally reach any store and supermarket in Khartoum. Their main selling point would be we will pickup the phone on your second ring and be there for immediate. A creative marketing team that actually use our products their products that they understand wholeheartedly its value that they love our customers and make it their job to fix any issues or any raised complains. A tech team that won’t fear from rewriting a major system component, while they also understand that certain compromises are always there and our goal is to be smart about it. That from the CTO to everyone they always feel they are attached to their systems and what they are building. They can always be paged even thu its 3am, in a vacation day. And try to be smart about communicating the issues from the support team to the devops one.

All of that can grown and shrink autonomously. Because we are startup but not just that: we gonna be a holding startup company that will keep on spawning newer startups

Let me get back again to a few thoughts that I would expand on them later, this is how I imagine our offerings:

  • tuti pos
  • tutipay
  • tuti invoices: companies can invoice each others
  • tuti dukan: a small convenient store erp system that offers tracking for items, easy upserting new items.
  • tuti commerce: a shopify like platform where you can with a wizard you can set up your online store AND accept payments (guess who’s processing the payments? Well I heard it is the T company)
  • nfc integrations so that our tutipay app can use their app to pay in. Our. Merchants. And. With. Tuti POS.

BUT, not just that. Guys, do you remember we are like in Sudan? I mean come on!

  • Tuti Cloud: Web hosting, mail server, form builder, and you bet tuti plugin!

  • tuti smart cards: or this is our way to penetrate markets where no Internet coverage whatsoever is available

  • tuti incubators. Yes we ought to incubate other startups and work with them. Hamdi used to say in Sudan everyone’s problem is your problem.

  • Tuti SaaS (well, i couldn’t get a better name for that). Essentially what this is and how it relates to our offering is like this:

  • we want to empower developers

  • by giving them a simple platform that they can use to deploy their apps, hence the name Software as a Service

  • and by offering a seamless way for our developers (whom are mostly flutter developers) to deploy their apps and utilize our infrastructure, we can leverage that by offering them even more services. But, the most important thing here: this is totally a new line of business for us and like the others too, it will require us to breakdown our organization into yet smaller pieces. But, more on that on later documents.

  • tuti checkout. A checkout / charging page, where a merchant can generate a link and send it via:

  • email

  • via sms with a link

  • via TutiPay Whereby customers will go to the link and proceed with the payment. What we are going to do however with this is to encourage our users to use TutiPay instead of others channel (by offering them discounts which we will collect in terms of payment fees from the merchants).

That kinda of organization when you think about it, is no longer dependent on its founders. Because the mere reason of founders is to build the base and establish the process so others can follow. Failures are part of the process. In order to build something, you gotta get some ideas. But not just hypothetical theory ones, we also gonna build an environment where everyone are free and encouraged to execute on those ideas, learn from them and document their process. We don’t need idle members.