2022 Recap & Year in Review
2022 Recap & Year in Review
What went right and wrong for Afridigest this year, top reads of 2022, a look back to our start-of-year predictions, and a compilation of various #AfricaTech creators.
Afridigest provides ideas & analysis for startup founders, operators, and investors across Africa and beyond.
📌 Welcome back, friends! This is the last time that you’ll hear from Afridigest in 2022, but we look forward to continuing to be your guide to Africa’s startup ecosystem in 2023. ✨ As we all start working on our 'New Year, New Me' resolutions, it’s wise to remember the words of 8X Mr. Olympia, Ronnie Coleman: “Everybody wanna be a bodybuilder, but don’t nobody wanna lift no heavy ass weight.” Here’s to lifting some heavy ass weight in 2023. 🥂
If you’re new, welcome 🙌🏽 — you're among thousands of readers who receive this Week in Review on Mondays, the Fintech Review on Sundays, and (for those who've opted in) the French-language Revue de la Semaine on Wednesdays (which is on a temporary hiatus right now). And from time to time, an original essay/article goes out on Saturdays. For past essays and digests, visit the archive.
Hello friends, we’ve come to the end of the road: Day 365 of Week 52, 2022.
And what a year it was. Below you’ll find a quick look back and a look ahead.
2022 Recap
What we accomplished together this year:
We grew to over 6,000 newsletter subscribers — up 3.6x from last year — thanks to you & readers like you. 🙏🏽
How? I’d point the finger mainly at consistency, but also at recommendations. We covered 51/51 weeks this year, with 90% of the Monday Week in Reviews sent on time. Including the Fintech Reviews & original essays, we sent ~80 emails this year that were viewed/read almost 300,000 times in total. (And Week 52’s coverage will be out next week.)
While we failed to reach our target of 5K LinkedIn page followers, 4,600+ professionals now follow Afridigest on LinkedIn, up 8x from a year ago (with a lot of credit owed to
.)Rounding out our main channels, Afridigest now has over 1,100 Twitter followers. (We weren’t tracking the channel at the start of the year, so I can’t say what the growth was.) It’s still early, but we’re starting to get a bit of a feel for what works for us here.
That makes for a total audience of ~12,000 (not including our website) thanks to you. And you can help by following our social media channels & continuing to spread the good word.
Speaking of the website, we rebooted Afridigest.com in September, and our republished 2020 story on super apps hit #1 on Hacker News again — a testament, we think, to the importance of evergreen content & what
calls “timeless thinking.”Aside from that, we launched Afridigest Français (but couldn’t figure out how to really promote it to the Francophone audience) & Afridigest Fintech.
We also started monetizing — signing up our first newsletter sponsors this year, and offering paying subscriptions for the first time. Many, many thanks to our founding members: Chris, Victor, Khalid, & Mira — your support is greatly appreciated 🙏🏽
We held a couple of successful in-person meetups in Lagos. There’s some really awesome energy here and I appreciate each & everyone that takes the time to come out to these 💖 (Here’s one recent attendee’s review — thanks, John 🙏🏽)
While Afridigest pieces had been featured previously in academic & think tank reports, we received our first major media mention in a Quartz article this year, and we were also mentioned in Semafor, This Week in Fintech, TechCabal, and a few other places.
What didn’t go so right:
We only wrote 7 original essays this year (excluding short actionable insights pieces on Iroko & the hierarchy of venture opportunities). And there was a four-month spell where we published no essays at all. 😔
An unlike past years, no articles went viral viral. We need more shots on goal in 2023.
We recorded some insightful video conversations with leaders from across the ecosystem but never published them. But they’re coming shortly, by hook or by crook.
Afridigest Français took an unannounced hiatus. It’s not completely dead though, something new will happen here.
We identified but failed to kick off a number of other initiatives — some are still brewing. Mea culpa. 🥺
We killed GIFs in the newsletters (see the unlocked Week 23 Week in Review for a GIF example) and a surprising amount of folks weren’t happy. But, for now at least, there are no plans to bring them back. Sorry.
What’s to come:
2023 will be an interesting year and, without giving too much away, we’re focused on:
Continuing to be a sensemaking guide to #AfricaTech for more readers across Africa & the world via consistent, differentiated, and high-quality content & experiences.
Boosting Afridigest.com as a media destination beyond the Substack newsletter.
Making a more intentional push to launch a variety of experiments (e.g., tinkering with the ‘voice,’ exploring new content formats, & more)
Actively seeking to amplify expert voices (e.g., the Thought Circle pieces)
Increasing overall engagement & exploring a ‘multiplayer’ experience for readers
Prioritizing brand development & monetization efforts for sustainability.
All that said, if you’re a reader that wants to support the humble Afridigest media experiment, consider a paid subscription. And if you’re a student, startup executive in Africa, or otherwise need a discount, ping me.
If you’re a writer or creator that wants to explore ideas, now’s a good time to reach out.
And if you represent an organization that’s interested in sponsorships or exploring potential collaborations, kindly inbox me.
What Afridigest is about at a high level remains unchanged:
But, with your help, we can execute this more effectively. 🙏🏽
Afridigest is a reader-supported guide to Africa’s startup ecosystem. Both free and paid subscriptions are available. If you’re reading this and want to support us, the best way is by taking out a paid subscription:
Top Reads of 2022
Here are the top five essays/articles Afridigest published this year:
10 lessons I learned while building Africa's super app — This is the most personal piece I’ve written for Afridigest to date & thankfully it was very well received. Fun fact: I stole the idea of using African proverbs for emphasis from this earlier piece I wrote.
The top smartphone apps in Africa — An examination of the top Google Play apps across multiple African markets that helps uncover hidden insights & aid market understanding.
The rise of earned wage access across developed & emerging markets — EWA, a new frontier of fintech at the intersection of payroll and the on-demand economy, is spreading across the West and emerging markets in Asia & Africa. Here's a primer.
To scale in African markets today, startups need to run hybrid strategies — Despite all the attention Africa’s digital revolution receives, the reality is that this digitization is driven in large part by the analog world of atoms and bits.
The rise of earned wage access across Africa, explained by leading founders — A Thought Circle piece with leading EWA practitioners from across the continent
And here are the twelve most clicked links from the Monday Week in Reviews throughout the year:
The future of traditional retail in Africa — a BCG report
Investing in Africa's digital transformation — A February op-ed from Google’s Sundar Pichai
Coatue May 2022 investor presentation (PDF) — The full Coatue presentation that went pretty viral on social media around June & July
Companies build capabilities before they build moats — Good piece from Equal Ventures on capabilities that lead to ‘moat trajectories
Questions VCs ask founders — What experienced investors ask during a pitch
Lessons from Cash App — Why turning commerce into culture is the best go-to-market strategy
Be less scared of overconfidence — Wave’s CTO Ben Kuhn on the perils of leaning on simple heuristics to make decisions when more detailed context is available
11 laws driving success in tech (PDF) — Good compilation from CB Insights
The elephant in the room: The myth of exponential hypergrowth — Solid read on growth, marketing, and the elephant curve.
Iyinoluwa Aboyeji’s Flutterwave video pitch from six years ago — As of February 2022, Flutterwave was Africa’s most valuable startup, with a $3B valuation
Operating well: what I learned at Stripe — Operational insights from former Stripe product lead Sam Gerstenzang
The universe of fintech infrastructure — On the current fintech infrastructure landscape and the key categories at play today
Bonus: Remember this SPAC-y headline from January 2022? It seems like eons ago today…
Scoring predictions for 2022
Around this time last year, I joined the annual new year’s prognostication fray, writing, “Key trends & themes to look for across Africa in 2022: What's old is new again.”
In that piece, I called out the following five themes to look for:
Increased “MENASSA” and out-of-Africa expansion
Increased strategic bolt-on & tuck-in acquisitions
Diversification/verticalization of fintech
The rise of other/overlooked sectors & geographies
The rise of local investors
I wouldn’t say it was 100% spot on, but I stand by the list generally.
With the benefit of hindsight, however, I’d say that if the key theme of 2021 was “the rise of mega-rounds & African unicorns,” then the key theme of 2022 was accountability & a media spotlight on bad behavior. (I alluded to this previously in the preamble to a few Week in Reviews & wrote a guest column for Semafor Africa on the topic.)
Support other #AfricaTech creators
I updated my compilation of Africa Tech newsletters & podcasts (and I’d love to collaborate with many of the creators on this list). A number of these platforms are now dormant (or perhaps defunct), but there’s some quality stuff here.
(And if I’m missing some folks, ping me to add them. Thanks.)
AUTHOR’S NOTE
And that’s a wrap, folks! As always, thanks for reading Afridigest 🙌🏽 And many thanks to the thousands of new readers who subscribed to Afridigest in 2022, and special thanks to the OG readers who’ve been with us from the very beginning since the pre-Substack days — I appreciate you!
If you want to support us, consider a paid subscription, follow our social media channels, and share Afridigest with friends, colleagues, and Africa Tech enthusiasts in your network. 🙏🏽
And feel free to contact me on Whatsapp, Twitter, LinkedIn, or via email. Let’s lift some heavy ass weights together in 2023!