Cape Town-based mobile message service, 2go, is fast making its presence felt across Africa. It recently reached the 20 million user mark and continues to grow at a furious rate with 50,000 new users a day joining up.

Founded by friends Ashley Peter and Alan Wolff, 2go began simply as a way for the two to track their way around their lectures at Wits University back in 2006.

“Initially I wanted a way to track which lectures I had to go to next and so we began building this small mobile app. Alan came up with this idea that we should be able to chat between those using and eventually it translated to asking why are we even limiting ourselves to university?,” explains Peter.

They very quickly came to the conclusion that there were two key factors in turning the idea into a viable proposition, namely the high cost of SMS messages and the relatively cheap cost of using GPRS.

Peter explains, “If you can combine those two things into a good application you can get to a place similar to where 2go is today. It’s a mobile app that you can install on your phone and you can chat via text for free with your friends using the app.”

What started as a project carried out over the university holidays soon snowballed at a rate that the erstwhile students could not have predicted. Within the first day they had signed up over 100 users and by the end of the week they were at a 1,000.

Two weeks later they noticed their little project had migrated to the Western Cape and showed no signs of stopping.

“Alan and I slowly completed university and we began to focus on 2go more and more as it generated more money and as we noticed more and more users. You feel a real responsibility to the product you have put out there and so we kind of organically kept growing it,” continues Peter.

Keeping with the strongest traditions of startups, the partners refused to take funding from outside investors and paid themselves the bare minimum while focusing on building the company and developing the next version of the product. Once Wolff completed his degree they sourced some office space from his father and hired their first employee and programmer, a former Wits classmate who was soon followed by business development manager, Peter Lockhart.

“We realised that we were quite talented technically but we were lacking in a business sense and Peter had just completed his MBA. He is a very quick, strategic thinker and we thought there would be a really good mesh there for getting him involved in the business,” says Ashley Peter.

Operating out of the pint-sized offices and on a shoestring budget, Lockhart started to do some minor advertising around Google adwords. 2go took hold with one or two bloggers in Kenya and soon they noticed real growth in Kenya, which they encouraged by cultivating the country’s chat rooms. The growth tapered off when the East African country changed its SMS pricing model to make them much cheaper.

While Kenya may have fallen off, it was not long before other countries across the continent and further afield started to embrace 2go.

“We were always focused on countries that had those great conditions for an app like ours: high SMS costs, cheap and good GPRS coverage as well as big population because the more social you can be the more people you can have connected,” says Peter.

Focusing and targeting countries like Nigeria, India and Brazil, the 2go team cultivated the chat rooms and very quickly adoption in Nigeria took off.

2go has over nine million users in Nigeria alone.

“While we strongly believe there is huge potential for 2go in other emerging market countries, because its primarily focused on feature phones, right now we are just trying to grow the company to sustain the growth in Nigeria which is around 40,000 people a day,” says Peter.

Peter admits that he and Wolff had always envisioned a business model emerging from the idea and saw the potential for making money.

“Mxit was doing something similar. You have this virtual currency and so you would send a SMS to a premium rated number which would debit your account with say three rand and we would give you a specific amount of virtual credits,” says Peter.

In the 2go model, a user can purchase 330 go credits for three South African Rand and each time the user sends a message in one of the 2go chat rooms then one of the credits is deducted. Private messages exchanged on a one to one basis remain free.

Although the two products are similar 2go does not consider the Stellenbosch-based Mxit to be direct competition with their focus on different markets as well very different user experiences.

“They are actually very different products. That’s one way we differentiate. We offer a pretty unique user experience on feature phones another one we really concentrate on is chat rooms,” says Peter.

It’s these chat rooms that have proven to be so popular in Nigeria and so Lockhart explains that it was the feedback from users that allowed them to create such a successful product.

“We found uptake was initially around the universities and the users were interested in using chat rooms to talk to one another, socialise and know who was where. That was a big part of it.”

2go is committed to being an African technology company focused on developing solutions for the unique challenges of the continent. It’s that vision that sees them seeking to grow organically while at the same keeping their current users happy and connected to a consistently solid network.

“The company mission is actually to build intuitive software which enriches people’s lives and we do and are really serious about helping to enrich people’s lives,” concludes Peter.