Remember the “setback, setback, setback” interviewee? He just sold his company.
I did an interview last year with a founder who had one of the most painful strings of failures I’d ever heard here on Mixergy.
Herman Heunis, founder of MXit, was convinced that mobile would take off, but every attempt he made to build a mobile business flopped.
He launched a text-based game, but that didn’t work, because texting was too expensive at the time. (Kind of still is, isn’t it?)
Then he tried a mobile search engine, but the technology he needed wasn’t advanced enough yet.
Then he tried mobile classifieds, but that was too complicated to work.
See what I mean? Setback, setback, setback.
He was on the verge of insolvency.
But he couldn’t stop.
“Now come on,” he said to his employees one day. “There MUST be a way.”
Then a woman in his office said, “Maybe we make it too complex for the user-base.”
That changed everything.
They decided to stop over-thinking and create something simple. So they launched a simple mobile chat system. The problem that killed his earlier idea — texting was too expensive — became their opportunity when their chat program became more accessible alternative.
MXit is so big in Africa now that the US embassy uses it to broadcast its message. It says it has around 40-million registered users “posting 700-million messages a day.”
Memeburn says MXit sold for about US$60 million. Herman will step down. On Twitter, he says, “Really looking forward to a rest ……traveling, kitesurfing, mountainbiking, photography…. Hell it was a tough ride the past 6 years.”
It’s a touching interview. You should listen to it.