“We stopped looking at Safaricom as a threat the day they denied us access to sending out Binary SMSes for our backup system. We learnt to build indepent systems that DO NOT rely on Safaricom’s infrastructure and give more value to our customers that they do,” David Ngugi of Binary Science, the startup behind 6ix Degrees told TechMoran.
Ngugi was refuting claims that the firm was more than dead after Safaricom, Kenya’s mobile telecommunications firm launched a similar service for contacts backup months ago. The backup system for mobile phone contacts in the cloud launched last year after raising a reasonable amount of money from a seed fund in Kenya. Its run by Kenya’s Binary Science.
Speaking to TechMoran, David Ngugi and Shadrack Ogechi of 6ix Degrees said the company is not dead yet.
“Revive means we are dead which have never been. We have learned from our mistakes and plan to grow. Yes, we did so many mistakes, financially..we burned a lot of cash during test phase instead of during deployment but Safaricom’s backup service did not kill us.In fact it increased awareness of the need for contact backup but failed to offer a complete solution in terms of only offering SIM backup while we offer complete back up,” Ngugi told TechMoran.
Though Binary Science seems to have found a niche for itself, it just has over 2,000 users compared to over 20 million users their competitor has. Safaricom’s strength cannot therefore be despised even though they “configured their network to forcefully subscribe everybody” and can only backup SIM contacts unlike those 6ix Degrees which can back up both SIM card and phone contacts.
It seems to be a growing concern that Safaricom is competing with all innovators across the board, building competing solutions and leveraging their muscles and customer base, which begs the question, does a company like 6ix degree’s have a chance in building a solution that can compete with this Giant ? is this a case of David Vs Goliath ?
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