Sasai announces Talent Show as Cassava continues aggressive user acquisition efforts

Late last week, Cassava Smartech circulated a press release announcing that they were hosting a African and Talented competition and they had over US$15 000 in cash prizes that were going to be won.

Beyond doing an article outlining that this is what’s happening, I was more fascinated by the why? Why is Cassava doing this and what do they stand to gain by hosting such a competition. It was pretty clear to me early on that this is part of their user acquisition strategy and as someone who has been covering Sasai a lot recently, it wasn’t hard to reach that conclusion.

“All aboard!”

Sasai has been trying to proactively get more users onto the platform. They announced partnerships with a number of influencers such as comedian Ray Vines. Ray Vines is posting some of his content exclusively via Sasai and the hopes behind such an arrangement is that more of his fans will start uisng Sasai to consume this exclusive content.

Beyond influencers, Strive Masiyiwa announced that Sasai is making a content creation platform for African content creators and one of the goals of this platform is ensuring that African content creators get paid for their efforts.

The Sasai Content Platform is meant to create a Market Place, where hopefully millions of people will come to see the content from Africa. They will be able to pay using Sasai Pay.

Strive Masiyiwa

All this is meant to provide value to content creators and users (vice versa). Users come on board because there is content to consume and content creators come for the users. The only problem so far is that Sasai hasn’t been able to solve the chicken and egg problem of what comes first, users or content creators.

Where does “African and Talented” fit into all this?

A virtual talent show fits into the user acquisition story pretty well…

The competition is very referral in its nature. Content creators are being asked to publish their content on Sasai Moments. After which they need to get at least 100 likes to qualify for the competition. Naturally creators interested in winning will upload their content and then ask their friends, family and fans to like their content. Many of these will be people that have never used Sasai before and therefore the user count grows.

Will it work?

Whilst this is a pretty decent strategy in terms of growing total user count, there are some gaps. For one it’s not really clear what winners will get on a weekly basis and it also isn’t clear what the grand prize is.

If content creators aren’t exactly sure what it is they are competing for, that disincentivises them from competing. No one wants to read the Ts & Cs before entering or worse being told their winnings aren’t as they expected after getting their 100 likes…

My assumption is that Sasai is banking on features like Podcasts, Watch and Moments to ensure you and I continue using Sasai long after the competition. My only concern there is that most of these features are rough around the edges and will need work before they are attractive enough for me to open Sasai every day and make it the Super App Cassava envisions…