Today I look at yet another noteworthy startup and its innovative platform. I am talking about Workzuite and that is what I shall be focusing on here. I recently had a chat with one of the co-founders of Workzuite; here is how our chat went down:
Kindly Tell Us Who You Are Including Your Goals And Objectives
My name is Tirivashe Mundondo. I am a communication, growth and marketing expert with a background in advertising and information science. I am the founder & managing partner of an Integrated Consulting Group known as TBGA (The Brand Guy & Associates).
At heart I am an entrepreneur who has over the past decade started a couple of businesses, some great, some not so great and most could fit the title of embarrassing flops.
This phase in my life created most of the lessons I would use in the future. In 2013 I managed to sell my design studio known then as the Kreative Republic to a bigger agency, Excel Communications and in the years that followed, we managed to bring in WiGroup to Zimbabwe through Kuronda Venture Partners, a vehicle we had created initially to leverage on harnessing technology to create a leap for businesses in Zimbabwe.
https://www.telecompaper.com/news/kuronda-launches-wiplatform-for-mobile-money-in-zimbabwe–1022081
https://www.herald.co.zw/mobile-firms-banks-sign-up-to-new-platform/
In 2019 we created a financial product that we thought was going to take off and disrupt finance as we know it but the road to launch was painstakingly suffocated by regulations. I believe the Round fund will launch at some point very soon. So it is safe to say I start companies, I learn lessons and I improve my modelling.
Tell Us About How You Ended Up With The Workzuite Idea
Workzuite started as an internal system within our agency TBGA. I was really frustrated by the fact that we had to use multiple platforms for our productivity needs. So one will log into Freshbooks for our bookkeeping and accounting needs, then hop to Hubspot for CRM and Belina for payroll. We still needed project management and an integrated cloud service, we used Dropbox then. All this cost money.
Sometime in 2019, we started putting internal hackathon hours in trying to solve our problem. By 2020 we had a functional solution for our business, and from that, I partnered with Victor Janhi who was one of the developers within our agency to start a new business with the ambition of solving productivity needs for businesses and with an emphasis on delivering a seamless integrated solution. That is what morphed into Workzuite.
What Is Your Long Term Vision?
To enable organisations to be more efficient on the system side so that they can dedicate more time to the actual business of satisfying their clients’ needs.
What Can People Expect From Workzuite?
Workzuite offers an all in one productivity app that handles most business processes from one dashboard. From invoicing to payroll, CRM, HRM, Asset Management and Cloud drive. We hope to learn from current usage to continuously improve the product.
Tell Us About Your Team
So the core team is currently me and co-founder Victor Janhi. As a bootstrapped business, we are currently getting support from our team at TBGA but we have also entered a phase where we are now looking at hiring Customer Service Agents and a few more developers. We are looking at a staff compliment of 12 by the end of May. Interested interns can reach us at careers@workzuite.com.
Tirivashe Mundondo
Victor Janhi
How Do You Cater For Your Financial And Material Needs To Produce Your Work?
TBGA has been our rock in offering foundational infrastructure to the business. We have had to self-finance along the way and we hope we will manage to continue perfecting our product during this BETA mode. We hope we will be able to monetise very soon, probably by August.
What Challenges Are You Currently Facing?
Workload – The size of the platform we have built requires an army of engineers, developers and so forth. Just two people handling this has been our worst nightmare. Also on the market side, we realise in hindsight that we have to invest much more in offering effective customer support because some people are generally intimidated by new technology hence a slow adoption trend, even after people have signed up.
What Form Of Assistance Would You Need To Optimize And Grow Your Work?
Self-financing a business of this size is not easy. We obviously would have hoped to get financing of sorts but you know how that is both expensive and difficult in Zimbabwe. We also owe it to ourselves to prove beyond reasonable doubt that this is a functional product that can be monetised. I am happy to say the feedback we have received has done exactly that.
We hope as we start the growth phase, we will be able to access more capital to speed up the process. We are aware that this may not happen and were prepared to go all the way to self-financing.
Which Area Do You Need The Most Assistance?
Right now we are looking to boost our marketing and growth budget, this is where we need help the most.
Anything You Feel The People Should Know?
We believe that when you solve a problem, you can get a market. Our belief is bolstered in the confidence that with Workzuite, we solved an internal problem and we created a product we would be happy to buy.
On the business side, it is not easy to get a product this far without financing and infrastructural support but when everything dies down, our drive rests on the big picture – to enable efficiency in business processes. If we end up failing to achieve the earnings our product deserves, we will be satisfied by the lessons from the process.
The physical address is TBGA, 76 Ridgeway North, Borrowdale, Harare. You can email me at tirivashe@tbga.group or you can also find me on Twitter. Workzuite is on Facebook, you can check out the page here. Our website is also accessible here.
