Mxit how does it work

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From our Obsession. By Leo Mirani Reporter. India Published January 29, This article is more than 2 years old. Sign me up. Update your browser for the best experience. That may not sound like much, but remember South Africa only has 50 million people. The day before I spoke with Heunis, MXit added some 24, new users.

Mention it to adults, and many tell you they hate it. MXit is like MySpace in the mids—with many of the good and the bad connotations that label implies. That the non-techy mass market would not know how to download a Web app on a basic phone, especially back in And the first iteration—a subscription version—indeed failed.

But when it came to the free version the company retooled five months later? Yeah, those so-called experts were flat wrong. And like any messaging platform, the network effect is huge in this business, especially when you are sending group messages. Mxit was the pioneer globally in mobile messaging, that much is certain. But its initial success was based on usage of feature phones at a time when this was the norm in South Africa and elsewhere on the continent. It was woefully unprepared, it seems, for the swift uptake in smartphones, which has increased at exactly the same time as usage of Mxit has decreased.

On old Nokia mobile phones, Mxit was the boss. When it came to moving into the smartphone era, frankly, it stank. Though it eventually released Mxit 7, which aimed to bridge the gap between feature phone and smartphone, it was too late, as more recent entrants to the mobile messaging scene such as Facebook, WeChat and WhatsApp had already stolen its thunder.

This point is linked to the previous one, but there is more to it than simply being unable to move with the times sufficiently in a market where technology changes almost by the day. Mxit hit the market well before the major players mentioned above, but moved too slowly, and failed to take advantage of its first mover advantage.

While its user base grew to sizeable proportions in South Africa, it was ponderous in reaching other markets.

Expansion would have obviously increased its user base, but also served as an excellent marketing strategy, increased interoperability between users in different countries, and boosted revenues. As it was, Mxit was far too late in making efforts to scale internationally — in Nigeria and India — and these efforts were in any case low-key and insufficient when it came to winning market share. The result was it squandered its first mover advantage, and ended up losing ground to those that came later.

The confusion is clear based on just a few numbers. Having claimed growth from three million in to 7. By the time Alan Knott-Craig Jr took over, the company was claiming 50 million registered users globally, though founder Herman Heunis had recently claimed 42 million.