Chooya, an Aba-based e-commerce startup digitizing word-of-mouth marketing for African businesses and consumers Tuesday announced funding of $950,000 in cash and programme support from the Entrepreneurship World Cup.
As one of the top 100 EWC finalists chosen from 200,000 participants spread across 200 countries, Chooya benefited from the over $75 million service support from Misk Global Forum, Global Entrepreneurship Network (GEN), and other world partners.
Chooya will plow the resources into product development, marketing and human resources to reach businesses (local and online) struggling with new customer acquisition to help them digitize word-of-mouth marketing and grow their sales.
By default, for any business to reach new customers and grow their sales they have to engage in marketing. Unfortunately, currently available channels do not provide an easy or budget-friendly way to automate word-of-mouth marketing which by research is the most effective type of marketing.
Chooya’s word-of-mouth mobile solution called “adds” plans to target 5,000 businesses by quarter three of 2022 and help them boost sales by three times.
Speaking the grant, Igwe Uguru, Founder and CEO of Chooya, said, “I was inspired to digitize 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.