Nigerian Aba-based e-commerce startup Chooya has secured US$100,000 cash and a further US$850,000 in programme support from Entrepreneurship World Cup.
Founded in 2019 by Igwe Uguru as a “search engine for African traditional markets” and bootstrapped since inception, Chooya was one of 100 finalists – chosen from 200,000 participants – for the Entrepreneurship World Cup, organised by Misk Global Forum and Global Entrepreneurship Network (GEN).
The startup received a US$100,000 national prize as well as a US$850,000 global prize from the competition, and plans to utilise the resources for product development, marketing and human resources to reach businesses struggling with new customer acquisition and help them digitise word-of-mouth marketing.
Chooya’s word-of-mouth mobile solution, called “addds”, targets 5,000 businesses by the third quarter of next year and wants to help them boost sales by three times.
“I was inspired to digitise word-of-mouth marketing by my experience helping my 72-year-old father at his local business. Without any form of paid commercial or social media ads, I watched the customers grow every single month through word-of-mouth marketing and helped my father train all his five children in the high institution. We are very excited about Chooya’s future and the impact we are set to make considering the impact of the COVID-19 crisis, especially on small businesses,” said Uguru.
