Communiqué 29: The Money Africa playbook
How Money Africa is building a successful subscription business and financial community with content
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The Money Africa playbook
One of the biggest missed opportunities in the 21st Century is that banks and financial institutions are not the champions of financial literacy content.
For so long, something with such a significant upside received negligible investment from the companies it could benefit the most. They’ve missed out on its potential to strengthen their brands and deeply connect with young audiences. They’ve missed out on building vibrant communities around the critical topic of money. They’ve failed to capitalise on a steady, low-cost customer acquisition channel.
In their defence, some of them have attempted to play the game. For example, one of the media companies I worked for a few years ago partnered with a Nigerian bank to create a financial literacy series. It was mildly successful.
Still, despite these attempts, millions of people are starved of relatable financial literacy content that fits their media consumption and engagement habits. They don’t want any of that highly-technical, boring stuff. Just jargon-free, easy-to-understand content that they can relate with.
The gap is immense, and the most prominent attempts to close it are from individuals or small companies. Websites like Investopedia and authors like Robert Kiyosaki and Morgan Housel (to name a few) have built their brands on this. But one of the most compelling examples is Money Africa, a subscription-based financial education platform built on the back of relatable content and community.
In today’s newsletter, we’ll see precisely how Money Africa has become one of Nigeria's most popular sources of financial literacy content. We’ll look at the logic behind its subscription business. We’ll also look at how it uses relatable content as a foundation for building communities and products.
1. Show me the Money Africa
It will be disingenuous to call Money Africa a media company or try to shoehorn it into any remotely similar description. It’s an education technology and financial service company -- plain and simple. But what it does is it exhibits many of the features we explored in ‘Paystack’s media threat’ — taking everyday money problems and building a content strategy that solves them.
What sets it apart is that, like Multichoice, it proves Nigerians are willing to pay for content. However, when thinking about what they can or can’t pay for, the utility derived is what matters most for many people. They think, “if I’m paying for content, it has to be more than that I’m paying for. There must be other benefits.”
I wrote about this in ‘The subscription playbook’:
“In a market like ours that is low-income and heavily utilitarian, content is not enough… As long as income levels remain where they are, most people will be unmotivated to pay for content except in extraordinary circumstances. However, if there are additional offerings that make paying a fee worth it, then we will see the tides rising. So, it is less about content value and more about subscription benefits.”
Money Africa’s promise is simple — give us a portion of your money, and we’ll provide you with access to content and community that help you handle the rest of that money better while giving you the tools you need to make even more in the future.
Content, check. Utility, check. Paying subscribers, check. Equation complete.
Oluwatosin Olaseinde, the company’s founder, is a former reporter and analyst with CNBC Africa and Bloomberg TV Africa. So, she understands just how powerful content can be in business.
In its initial form, Money Africa published 60-second Instagram videos. As the videos gained traction, the company segued into physical classes, each costing the participants ₦20,000 ($33.33).
However, physical classes can be limiting. There’s a finite amount of people you can reach in a year. However, take everything online, and the potential for scale becomes infinite. That’s what Money Africa did.
It built a website and put all its content behind a paywall. Previously, only 20-25 people could pay for each class. Now, thousands more can consume the content at their own pace and as often as they want.
The platform has grown to over 200,000 paid and unpaid community members in nearly four years.
2. Take something abstract, then make it relatable
Two social media posts stand out when I think about how Money Africa has demystified financial literacy.
The first post uses Cristiano Ronaldo’s infamous actions at a press conference in June 2021 to explain how individual actions may or may not impact the stock market. The second uses Lionel Messi’s shocking exit from Barcelona to explain debt and cash flow.
These are just two examples, but there are many more instances where Money Africa takes advantage of subjects everyone is talking about and can relate to to explain concepts that might be abstract.
In a noisy world where everyone is constantly talking, it matters how you contribute to conversations.
3. Why teach people to fish when you can own the ocean?
In 2020, after two years of building a community of over 200,000 people hungry for relatable financial literacy content, Olaseinde launched Ladda, a savings and investment platform.
Money Africa has served as a great lead generator, and Ladda is the investment platform. Because of the former’s popularity, the latter’s user acquisition costs are significantly lower. Imagine having already built a community with thousands of people. Layering additional products that you know they need is a brilliant next step. It’s like Amazon realising several years ahead that building a cloud computing platform is a smart bet if you truly believe in the Internet’s potential.
Today, Amazon Web Services contributes $62 billion to its parent company’s $469.82 billion revenue, with companies like Coca-Cola, Netflix, Goldman Sachs, and even the US Census Bureau as customers.
Why teach people to fish when you can own the ocean?
For many other companies, their content and media strategy are loss-leading line items. An unprofitable means to a profitable end.
But this is not the case if you’re Money Africa and Ladda. Building a fintech product on top of a vibrant content-driven community hungry for financial education is a profitable business strategy. You never have to worry about user acquisition again. If only a bank could have thought of that.