Saya Mobile has carried the African IT startup industry to a new high when they presented at TechCrunch Disrupt 2012 in San Francisco, one of the biggest pitching event worldwide.

Built as an easy mobile web chat applications, the startup has seen a tremendous growth in the feature phone sector and plans to make a move in the smartphone market.

ITWeb Africa caught up with the co-founder and CEO of Saya Mobile Robert Lamptey to talk more of their business and the future of mobile in Africa.

VINCENT MATINDE: What is Saya Mobile?

ROBERT LAMPTEY: Saya is a mobile communication platform that we built to solve the problem of expensive SMS and non intuitive SMS for those people who didn’t have smartphones. Feature phones had one advantage to it. They could access the internet. We wanted to build an app around that and see if people would be interested in it. But currently we are pushing the application on smartphones.

VINCENT MATINDE: When did the business begin?

ROBERT LAMPTEY: We started the business in August 2011. We basically finished school and went to the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) and just graduated from that. We pitched it to them and they invested in us. The product was ready in February 2012. That’s when we did our BETA launch. We wanted to test it with 2000 people. The next thing we knew we were in 35 countries and we had gotten about 86,000 people using the app in Beta phase.

VINCENT MATINDE: How did MEST help your business grow?

ROBERT LAMPTEY: They have a school where they train people in software engineering and the business behind starting a software company. After that you are required to form a team then you come up with a business idea. Then you pitch the idea to investors. Then the investors make a decision whether to invest in you or not.

VINCENT MATINDE: What is your view on the investor climate in Africa?

ROBERT LAMPTEY: In my view we don’t have really an investment industry in terms of software. When software companies pitch ideas and even those who succeed to get funding, they do not get enough money to enable them realize things they want to achieve. Investors are interested in ideas, but they will not give you much funding until you get to a certain level. That level requires money.

For us an ideal range of investment for a series A funding would be US$1 million to US$ 5 million. If you have something like that you can really focus on the product and built it faster. It won’t take you a year or a year and a half to do more.

In Silicon Valley, there is enough money for startups even those who do not have a good idea. But with the money startups are able to pivot their idea to adapt to what is suitable. If there is no enough money, startups would not be able to pivot or change their ideas.

Another thing that is lacking is networking. Basically investors in Africa just think of the money. What we are looking for is someone who has the network. Let’s say that I want to do a deal with a telco. I need an investor who knows people, who can just make a phone call and in a couple of days I will be seating with the CEO of the telco and we strike a deal.

VINCENT MATINDE: How did you come up with the idea of the mobile application?

ROBERT LAMPTEY: Firstly we wanted to build an app that is tailored to feature phones. The first huddle for us was that feature phones do not have memory or storage space for apps. So we had to figure out how they would get a hold of the application. We also had to think of how the users would get updates for the software.

We experimented with a couple of things. We did not want users to use a complicated sign in with passwords. So I thought, why don’t we use the phonebook? The first thing we had to do was to prove if you can actually use someone’s phone number and phone book. Once we were passed that, we used the phone number as a unique ID to connect people together.

We tested it in a couple of universities and students liked it. The interesting thing was that, once people started using the service, others also upgraded their phones to be able to use the service. In the end they were cutting the costs of messaging. Users are able to cut down the cost of messaging to a thousand times.

VINCENT MATINDE: What is the difference with your application and WhatsApp and Viber?

ROBERT LAMPTEY: That is a question we get a lot. Basically we are not so much different from any other chat apps, the main differentially factors is that, we are starting from the ground up. Whereas all of the international chat apps started from the smartphone and some build for some high end feature phones. We are feature phone based.

Based on our data and analytics we have seen from our system, it makes sense for us to build for smartphones too. If you are solving a communication problem, you have to solve it holistically.

The other differentiating factor is street chats. The concept of street chats is actually African. In Africa you know your neighbours. We are community focused. So we decided to give people that opportunity to have that feeling in an app. So street chat is actually grouping people on the same street or a certain location in a single chat room and giving them the freedom to discuss anything at all.

But we decided to make it anonymous. That gives people the freedom to say anything at all and not be stigmatized. We have piloted it and it is one of the most used part of our application.

VINCENT MATINDE: What was the experience at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco?

ROBERT LAMPTEY: This is the mother of all PR events for startups. It opened a huge investment door to us from Russia to Brazil. People were sending us emails from all over asking us to pitch and asking how much money we are trying to raise.

In my pitch I did not know it was “illegal” to announce that you are looking for funding. At the end of my pitch I announced that we are raising funds. So people started to contact us about it. I can’t count on the top of my head but anybody who is a somebody in Silicon Valley, I have spoken to. We have been invited to visit Facebook, Twitter, Skype and AVG. They wanted to learn about the technology.

These are events that startups need to go to like TechCrunch Disrupt and Demo Africa. The PR in these events is huge.

VINCENT MATINDE: What are some of the huddles you have faced in setting up the business?

ROBERT LAMPTEY: One of the major problems we have is recruiting people. Fortunately or unfortunately we found ourselves and the forefront of technology in Africa and we weren’t prepared for that. So here you are trying to scale the business to millions of users and you are trying to find talent that has done this before, or know how to go about it, but you do not really get that. You also get a lot of people who are just talk and nothing more.

You have to do it as a trial and error thing but eventually you get the right people. I would advise to use referrals.

Another way to tackle that is to train people. We currently have people we are training from college who are good in their field. We then absorb them.

VINCENT MATINDE: How many employees do you have in total?

ROBERT LAMPTEY: We have 6 employees including myself. One in Kenya, one in Nigeria and four of us in Ghana. I also have 3 students in training.

VINCENT MATINDE: What is the future for Saya Mobile?

ROBERT LAMPTEY: We do not want to only be in messaging. In the future we are looking to give out API to developers for our system. There are various components of our system not only chat but messaging that they could use to create something else. We are also trying to get into the enterprise market. And it is something that is in Alpha phase right now. We want something that will make a fit for Africa.