Hey Vipi, Happy to meet you. Glad you asked the question. Who or what is lisa, why is lisa necessary and so on. Today, I will give you the whole story. So grab a cup of coffee and let us get started.
Back in 2017, we wanted to build an app to help small businesses easily connect with their customers through AI powered marketing or as our customers like to call it, data-driven marketing.
We started, but along the way we discovered that there was even a bigger problem. Businesses, were not growing despite all the different business solutions available. We asked why.
We decided to study the issue and understand why is it that a business makes almost the same amount of money every month. We wanted to understand what is it that is not being done. If you have noticed, most of our local stores, never change or grow to a recognized brand.
Remember that our motive has always been to help businesses grow beyond limits and borders.
Why can’t one start a small hardware and scale it across Africa. We wanted to know, so tukaingia kwa ground.
We found out a few things
- most people are just comfortable running a small business. This means, they don’t have a growth mindset.
- others want to grow but do not know exactly what to do, and are afraid of taking bigger risks.
- many businesses lack a specific direction, for example, you will find out that most businesses across Africa are general stores, offering a wide variety of services and products, this means resources are spread out and returns are never equally reciprocated. Others flood one market, for example, clothing business.
- the other major problem was financial planning and management skills.
- the last, is that most businesses lack a customer pain that thy are addressing. To know this, we asked people why they started a business. Who their customers are and whether or not they care about customer feedback.
Our conclusion was: That people needed access to tools to learn how to build a business and grow it. With our background and expertise in business, data and AI technology, we knew exactly what to do.
Yes, of course we thought of an app. An app that assists a business owner to learn, manage, build and scale their business while optimizing resources, and saving time. We thought it’d be easy since we had the skills, but I kid you not, it has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
Our initial thought was that this app was going to be called the intelLigent Store Assistant (LiSA). This name has stuck since then.
We knew that if packaged properly with all the technology, LiSA would be able to steer a business step by step towards growth and sustainability.
To achieve this, first step was to ensure that as many businesses are digitized and at least manage their business data electronically.
So we built the very first version of lisa meant to help #MSMEs centralize business data management.
So, let’s jump into it,
Here is how lisa is going to do it for you.
Lisa will aggregate your business data into one place. There are two ways that you can do this, either by using lisa to run your business or by connecting lisa to your business apps. Lisa organizes all your business data, ranging from customer feedback to consumption patterns.
Remember that lisa is intelligent, meaning, lisa can learn. Once you start using the app, it will slowly start learning about your business, your market, and your customers.
Before you know it, lisa is an expert at what you do and will start giving you tips, recommendations, and actual business strategies geared towards growing business. Magic, right?
That’s not all, lisa is smart enough to know exactly what people from your location are consuming, possible quantities and why they’d prefer buying or not buying from you. It goes a step ahead to predict sales and demand for individual products so that you can plan.
All this information will be relayed to you in a simple, straightforward language and interface. Besides these tips, the app will recommend actions for you to take to continue growing your business.
For example, the app might recommend that you focus on a specific product for a specific customer profile because lisa has figured that most of the customers are in that customer profile and consume that product more than they do other products.
In conclusion, we believe that at the core of every business, there is data. And wherever there is data smoke, there’s business fire.
We believe that lisa will go a long way in enabling businesses to access technology, and grow into sustainable ventures across the globe.
Give it a try!
