Guy Kamgaing, a Los Angeles-based Cameroonian entrepreneur, is the Founder and CEO of StarNews Mobile and a 20-year veteran of the African mobile space. Kamgaing started his career by supplying network equipment to mobile operators and ISPs in Africa and other developing markets. He later entered the Value Added Services space by founding Mobile-XL, a mobile SaaS company, and creating the XL Browser, the first mobile browser using SMS as a content bearer, before data and smartphones became mainstream. He then decided in 2015 to work on the creation of a platform to deliver African content at an affordable price to consumers.
He launched StarNews in 2017, and after only 9 months of pilot deployment in Côte d’Ivoire in partnership with the operators MTN and Moov, StarNews Mobile reached over one million subscribers. Guy holds an MBA from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management and a mechanical engineering degree from France.
What is StarNews Mobile all about?
Our vision is to unlock the massive potential of Africa’s mobile video market. I launched StarNews Mobile in 2017 to connect brands and celebrities with tens of millions of young, eager fans across the continent. In nine short months after launch, we were able to reach over one million subscribers. Today, we are reaching an audience of 10 million subscribers and counting.
The StarNews platform gives content providers a sustainable income source which allows them to benefit from their talent and influence. Our focus is three-fold: great content, monetization, and marketing. We source the best and most relevant content from popular talent and brands, then distribute it directly to fans through their mobile devices. We partner with pan-African mobile operators such as MTN and Orange to do so. The content we deliver is short, addictive videos that users pay for. We bill subscribers seamlessly through micro-payments and share this steady revenue stream with creators at a higher share than other platforms. StarNews is also constantly trying to reach a wider audience. We use live notifications to boost messages from signed artists and brands, promote events, link to exclusive content, run giveaways and competitions, etc.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
I was born in Cameroon, raised in France, and I have been living in LA for over 20 years. I have worked in the telecom industry for 20 years, starting on the infrastructure side building networks. For the past 10 years, I’ve been in content and monetization, helping the carriers with value-added services or services that help bring value to the network. Through this experience, I learned how to monetize content on mobile networks in Africa and in other similar emerging markets through direct carrier billing, which is a way to help people pay for content and services in markets where there are no credit cards, no banking. Here I saw the perfect opportunity to start a company.
I started StarNews Mobile because I saw how local content creators were struggling, even though they’re very talented. So I figured if we can create a platform through which you can monetize their content, they could earn a decent living. At the same time, I wanted to provide a platform for local users to consume local content, because, in many places in the world, people consume local content. In Africa, people were consuming only foreign content because there was no local content. Through StarNews, we were able to establish a local content ecosystem that provides local content to local populations and puts money in the hands of creators.
What were the top three mistakes you made starting your business, and what did you learn from them?
- The first mistake I made was hiring the wrong people. I learned quickly that it is important to not believe people for what they say, but what they do. Sometimes you hire the wrong people and know they’re wrong for the job in the long run, but they’re good enough for now. I’ve also hired the wrong people and didn’t fire them quickly enough. It’s important to hire slow – take the time to get to know the candidate and see if they are truly the right fit for the job. If they aren’t, fire quick and find someone else who can help keep your company moving forward.
- The second mistake I made is something I think most entrepreneurs do, which was making bad equity deals in the beginning. I gave somebody 2% of the company who didn’t deserve it, and I’ve gotten played many times. Without going into details, all of this slowed me down and created delays in the company’s trajectory. But you kind of have to make these mistakes in order to learn from them.
- The third mistake I made was relying too easily on others. People tend to overpromise and underdeliver. So I learned I needed to rely only on myself and my company, which is why we decided to have our own carrier and connect directly with our users. Moving forward, I don’t ever want to connect through a third party because I’ve been burned in the past. I’d rather have a direct relationship with the teleco partners and content creators.
How do you separate yourself from your competitors?
First of all, we’re unique because we are two companies in one. We have a content piece and we have a billing piece. Most of our competitors are just content creators and they let somebody else manage the billing or vice versa. So if you look at companies like YouTube or Netflix or international partners, you’ll find most of the local content video creators do not even understand how to monetize. Most platforms are totally detached from monetization. They just push out content. That’s because in the western part of the world, the traditional model for monetization is through ads. So if you have nice content, you’re going to plug it into an advertising model and then that’s your business. That’s what YouTube does.
Since we have two businesses (content and billing), we have two sets of competitors. On the content side, we set ourselves apart because we have the billing element. Plus we have local content. Most people do not go to the effort of building a local content portfolio, so the local content doesn’t exist. So we are creating it or aggregating it. There’s content left and right. We’re putting it together on the same platform for distribution at the local level. Nobody else really doing that. And then nobody really knows how to monetize it.
On the monetization side, our advantage is that we own our content. We’re more connected to the end-user because the content is ultimately what the end-user cares about. So from a billing standpoint, we integrate vertically with the content whereas most billing companies just do billing and that’s it.
We are also unique in that our technology caters to a mass audience in a mobile-only market. Most of the other platforms don’t care about this audience, or, if they do, they only target the top 1% who have a lot of many and can afford high-end devices. In the west, it’s very difficult for them to pivot to a mass-market audience in Africa. It’s pretty much impossible. Our solution is really built from the ground of a mass-market audience, so we can easily cater to all.
Tell us a little bit about your marketing process, what has been the most successful form of marketing for you?
For marketing, we mostly use SMS campaigns and push campaigns that are generated by the operators, which is part of our partnership agreement with them. That’s the most effective form of marketing we have thus far in terms of acquisition and it is the most cost-effective. In Africa, it is also the kind of marketing that people are used to and what most businesses use to reach people and influence them to make purchasing decisions
Moving forward, we really want to leverage our creators since most of the content creators we have on our platforms have millions of followers. We’d like them to use their established recognition with their audiences to become the brand ambassador for their channel on the StarNews platform. Through promotion on their social media channels, our objective is to gain at least 10% of their followers.
We’re also partnering with other forms of marketing, like S Kimmy, One Pin, and Stream, which are other platforms that are based in Africa that also would increase acquisition rate.
When it comes to other, more traditional ways of marketing, we plan to invest in more in-person events once things reopen, focus on direct-to-consumer marketing, and the more traditional billboard, TV, etc. We want to have a 360-marketing angle and cover all aspects of marketing.
What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?
The biggest challenge we’ve had is in building a team. Finding the best people for a quickly growing company has been difficult. I knew the market and I knew I had a winner. I just couldn’t do it alone. So it was, it is hard to find people who can execute on the vision when it’s so new, unique, unusual. I’m trying to find people who can understand the market, the technology, and how to be successful and make things work in these markets.
Finding people who understand the technology is a challenge in itself. The platform may look easy from a distance, but it’s actually very, very complicated and requires a specific skill set. So I needed to put together a team that can do this at scale. It’s very expensive and difficult to find these people.
Then there is the challenge of content. We’re introducing a model that’s new and needs to be explained over and over again to content creators simply because they’re unfamiliar with the platform. Working with the telco is extremely challenging as well because they’re giant companies and are inherently difficult to work with. They’re slow on execution and need a lot of assistance, so putting together processes and a system to work with them is not easy.
What helps you stay driven and motivated to keep going in your business?
I like the challenge. It is a challenge to do something nobody’s ever done before. A lot of people want to do better than the people who came before them; to some extent, I want to do and be better than my own dad. I want to do something that is crazy and look back and say, “Oh my, God. I did this!”
The other thing that keeps me motivated is what drove me to start StarNews Mobile in the first place – the content creators. Someone had to help them monetize their content, so why not me?
What is your definition of success?
I define success in a few different ways. From a financial standpoint, I would say success is reaching my target number of – I don’t know – 20 million. I guess that’s a decent number, but I’d like to do better than that.
But success is also just being happy. I’m happy when I’m doing something that’s hard and I’m accomplishing what I set out to do. There’s something to be said about being able to start something that is incredibly difficult to do, realizing that it’s even harder than you thought it would be, and then figuring out ways to keep going. And if you’re able to do that, I guess it could be considered successful.
If you started your business again, what things would you do differently?
If I could do anything differently, I would probably be more of an equity hog from the start because I’ve given up too much. I’ve probably lost 10% equity. I also wish I had been able to find a co-founder. If I had a co-founder, things would not have been so hard. But I don’t know anybody that I could have started this business with four years ago who would have believed in my vision and what I said I was going to do. Those who believed in it were all paid employees, and it’s easy to believe in something when you’re getting paid. Finding someone who would have sacrificed like I did was unlikely.
What valuable advice would you give new entrepreneurs starting out?
Be patient.
What would you say are the top 3 skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur, and why?
- Patience – Building a business takes time, usually longer than you may expect.
- Resilience – Building a successful business requires resilience because you will encounter a new challenge every day that you must overcome.
- Humility – You have to be humble. You’re going to experience many setbacks, and if you have a big head starting out, these blows could cause you to lose your confidence.
What are your plans for the future? How do you plan to grow StarNews Mobile?
The main goal is to expand to more countries. We want to repeat this playbook we’ve created in 15 countries in Africa, then five to seven countries in Latin America, and three to five countries in Southeast Asia, ultimately getting acquired for $1 billion.
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