Over the last week we have heard incredible data that has shocked the world around the growth potential of mobile in Africa exceeding expectations. The future looks bright indeed for Africa, and mobile will play a big part…

The lowest common denominator in mobile technology is SMS. This is in wide spread use on all phones and all networks (unlike other sexier technologies like 3G, 4G/LTE, mobile money). As such it is critical and a powerful distribution channel. For western readers out there- SMS is like e-mail is to you and is more important in Africa than you realize. SMS also has the aspect of being a notification channel, whilst e-mail can sit in a folder or spam inbox, SMS pops up and notifies you- as a result the open and response rate tends to me much higher and this has opened up interesting mobile marketing opportunities. Of course, SMS carries a cost, so it’s nowhere near as cost effective for broad reach as e-mail and traditional mobile ads on the mobile web.

You want examples of interesting innovations- plenty abound. Let’s start with Bongolive in Tanzania which is trying to be self-serve platform for small businesses to promote their offers and deals.
I have pointed at the use of SMS and mobile money as a channel for building an supply chain system to coordinate and replenish malaria drugs with SMS4Life in Tanzania. Or even one startup this year’s pivot25 finals is trying to build a full scale premium content publishing platform so that anyone can publish content on SMS. And a recent favorite is inSight, an SMS powered reporting tool that allows a microventure firm inventure to get updates on a businesses in remote areas.

Despite this, I would argue that in Africa, SMS is not being used to its full potential by startups- mainly due to the mobile network operators and 3rd parties who keep the barrier to access this infrastructure high as Erik Hersman has just posted about. One argument is that they should have high barriers, after all, we don’t want anybody being able to broadcast messages to everyone right? Or have easy access large lists of numbers? Yes and No. One one hand, the very personal nature of mobile and the fear against spam and privacy are real, on the other hand more SMS driven applications could unleash amazing innovations to reach almost every African for the startups that exploit it, not to mention it could continue to extend incremental revenue for carriers for voice and text during the rise of data services as a source of revenue. The biggest brands and companies can pay to acquire shortcodes and do very innovative sms marketing campaigns by working with 3rd party SMS providers or the carriers themselves, why can’t small startups? Is there a fear of disruption? How about in Tanzania, where the CCM political party in power has actively used SMS as a way to crowdsource fundraise for their presidential campaign last year- innovation from a political party! Yes, because in Tanzania, it is possible for you to subscribe via SMS and take advantage of in carrier billing to offer a service. I believe in the political fundraising campaign it was a get a “Nyerere quote” delivered to your phone every day. The service provider only has to provide a reminder to stop once every 30 days. The story didn’t end so well as the system got hacked and was abused and the messaging got out of hand for political gain. Like any technology it has potential to do both good and bad. After all, Nigerian spam e-mails are big business…

Many startups in the west rely on huge distribution channels that inc. facebook, twitter, e-mail and Google SEO and adwords. I believe in Africa a different approach to distribution is required, one that puts SMS at the cornerstone of a startup’s marketing and distribution strategy, especially as SMS costs continue to go down. But there is mobile web , you all say.. Fine I agree. That’s why its even more important. Why not combine both and get “richness and reach”? One of my favorite startups in Silicon Valley is Twilio. Its a platform that allows developers to easily build web integrated cloud telephone apps with low barriers to entry and pay as you SMS pricing. They started in the US and are now expanding into Europe… There are so many SMS powered apps in US now inc. startups like Groupme that is a group messaging app that works on smartphones and feature phone by bridging the two with SMS and was bought by Skype to Airbnb that has a feature to notify landlords renting out their property of pending guests arriving.

I have a few friends who work at Twilio and you would be silly to think I wasn’t trying to convince them to come to Africa one day…. It’s only a matter of time. You could either wait or someone in Africa can build this… Or you might put faith in the mobile operators to make it easy, which could take forever.
Existing 3rd party SMS providers could get into this game, but this would be disruptive to them. A company like Twilio is wired very differently organizationally to just a bulk sms 3rd party provider- you need a good team of platform evangelists to communicate to developers rather than sales and account teams talking to chief marketing officers at big brands.