The Legend behind the App with 7.5 million active monthly users that could have been WhatsApp

Herman Heunis a Namibian born tech legend you many not have heard of yet.

A brief History of Herman Heunis.

Herman Heunis (The Late) was born in Namibia and grew up in a rural community where his parents had a sheep farm. Despite his rural upbringing, Herman was always drawn to technology especially as a young man. After moving to South Africa, He attended the Sellenbosch University from 1977 and 3 years later started his career in computer programming.

In 1990 Heunis launched his first business an ICT consultancy firm and later in 1997 came the launch of Swist Group Technologies, an information and communication technology company which specialized in software development focused primarily on the mobile telecommunications industry, developing software and providing system support to large Telco’s.

How Mxit the App was launched.

Mxit app, tech in Africa, Funding in Africa, tech layoffs

In 2000 Clockspeed Mobile, a research and development division of Swist Group Technologies, developed a Multiplayer Mobile game named Arya. The game was SMS based and was unfortunately not successful due to the high cost of SMS since GPRS was still not widely implemented.

In 2004 the game was reassessed and the MXit concept was conceived by Herman that same year. In April 2004 Clockspeed Mobile became independent and on July 1, 2006, became MXit Lifestyle (Pty) Ltd. In January 2007, media giant Naspers acquired a 30% stake in the company for an undisclosed amount. (Wikipedia)

The rest of the story.

In 2012, Mxit was reported to have over 7.5 million active monthly users and was getting between 35k-50k new registrations per day.

In this same year it acquired Motribe – a platform that allowed anyone, anywhere to build, manage and generate revenue from their own social mobile website.

In another turn of events, in that same year 2012, the founder Heunis, sold Mxit to World of Avatar. In one of his tweets, he stated that he was so burntout in 2011 to take Mxit any further, it had all the ingredients to become a major success story and that the missing catalyst was new energy.

Heunis stayed away from the limelight after selling Mxit and focused on his various other hobbies.

The app’s user numbers were also dropping year on year and by July they were at 1.2 million monthly active users. In 2013 even competitor 2go overtook Mxit in terms of users across Africa.

In October 2015, Mxit announced that it was shutting down its corporate operations but would still leave the app available for download and use, but in 2016 the app went completely offline.

Why did it shut down?

There are always a mix of reasons that lead to a big startup’s shut down and some of Mxit’s are as below:

One is as mentioned by the founder above, burnout.

The other major one was intense competition from the likes of Facebook and WhatsApp which also had major investor backing and were just beginning to gain momentum in Mxit’s backyard/home, South Africa.

With the advent of smartphones, a lot of South Africans began to use these other international apps. Mxit being primarily based on feature phones was not able to compete and gradually lost users.

Take away:

Burnout is real, founders need to have ways to rest and take a break from building.

Smartphones and digitization have killed many companies from Kodak to Mxit. Adapt or die is very real thus allow your startup to be flexible to change and adaptation, quickly. When you are lucky to see it before it happens, change before change changes you (as my deputy headmaster used to say), we can all learn from Nvidia and their bet on AI.

Read more on this here 👉🏽 buildingafrica.co

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