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Tym2Sell. Air-time “topups” for the text generation. Pre-Paid Airtime Ubiquitous. No credit check necessary Large rural populations with no fixed income make PAYG easily to implement for both consumer and telecoms operator
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Tym2Sell Air-time “topups” for the text generation
Pre-Paid Airtime Ubiquitous • No credit check necessary • Large rural populations with no fixed income make PAYG easily to implement for both consumer and telecoms operator • The population communicates only as much as they can afford from month to month as rural populations monthly income is rarely fixed. • For these reasons 90+% of these vast emerging markets are pay-as-you-go... Throughout Africa and southern Asia the vast majority of cellphone users are pay-as-you-go (PAYG) clients. This is due to:
Pre-Paid Airtime Distribution • Typically a PAYG user only realizes they have zero remaining credit when they suddenly get cut-off • Rural (and even urban) community doesn’t have personal transport and hence needs to walk / cycle or catch bus or taxi to nearest airtime shop in order to “top-up” at considerable inconvenience. • Lack of transport means that airtime distributors need to be physically close to the customers they serve so ideally tens of thousands of distributors are necessary for country-wide coverage. • However the cost of maintaining large-scale distributor network is vast and includes: • Thousands of handheld or other expensive POS devices • Huge Stock holding at many levels in the “channel” • Huge data & infrastructure costs shifting stock around • Vast employee or contractor relationships So there is always a balance between trying to deploy tens of thousands of distributors (so that every consumer is close to one) vs. the huge cost in maintaining such a depth of nation-wide distribution.
Tym2SellThe Concept “To rapidly deploy a distribution network of tens of thousands of airtime hawkers throughout a country at near zero cost to the telco / distributor” This is achieved by: • Allowing hawkers to use their own cellphones (no matter how old) to sell airtime to customers in every far flung village, on every street corner, in every taxi / rickshaw and in every formal and informal market place • Allowing anyone to become a hawker without any physical interaction, contract or credit agreement needing to be established between hawker & the telco/distributor • Promote the rapid viral growth in the hawker population by recruitment royalties whereby a hawker who recommends another potential hawker gets a small portion of that hawker’s profit forever should that hawker apply and be granted hawker status in the system • The hawker’s cellphone is their complete POS solution that can: vend airtime as well as check balances, show sales & profit, recall previous transaction details, recruit other hawkers etc.
Tym2SellHow it works:Becoming a hawker After looking at the profit to be made on Tym2Sell and deciding to join, John completes the simple application on his cellphone and submits it. Peter The system sends John an SMS on Peter’s behalf telling John that he can make extra cash by selling airtime with a link to the system URL where the details and benefits of being an airtime hawker / distributor are explained. Peter (an informal fruit seller and Tym2Sell airtime hawker in Johannesburg) wishes to earn extra cash. He has a friend, John, a taxi driver in Durban, who he wants to recruit as an Airtime hawker so that he may earn a portion of John’s proceeds as profit for himself. Peter logs onto Tym2Sell on his cellphone and recruits John by simply entering John’s cellular number. The recruitment of John by Peter is recorded on the central server. Should John’s application to become a hawker be approved (there is also an auto-approve option) then the support team activate John on the system. John is informed of his acceptance by means of an automatic SMS sent by the system. John’s application is automatically emailed to the support team who evaluate John’s application and may speak with him to verify details etc. John
Tym2SellHow it works:Selling Airtime Patricia could instead have requested that John instruct the system to SMS the airtime voucher direct to Patricia’s daughter’s phone if Patricia wishes to top up her daughter’s airtime account. Patricia will pay an extra charge for this service but still smaller than if she used her own phone to SMS (or phone) the voucher number through to her daughter. Direct top-up could also have been used to top-up Patricia’s daughter’s pre-paid account. The server checks John’s balance & deducts R40 from it (cost price of a R50 voucher). The voucher number is displayed on John’s cellphone screen which he reads to Patricia (if Tym2Sell had been configured with “direct top-up” then Patricia’s airtime account would have been directly credited instead). The server also credits Peter’s account (John’s recruiter) a royalty fee from the transaction. Peter Patricia enters the voucher number shown on John’s phone’s screen onto her phone and her airtime account is credited with R50. She can now continue chatting to her friends. Whilst riding in John’s taxi, Patricia runs out of airtime. She hands over R50 to John for the R50 Vodacom airtime voucher she wishes to purchase. With just 3 clicks on John’s cellphone, John requests a R50 Vodacom voucher from the central server. Patricia’s daughter John Patricia
Tym2SellHow it works: Banking At regular intervals the finance staff operating Tym2Sell download electronic bank statements which Tym2Sell automatically processes, extracting hawker deposit entries (such as John’s). These deposit entries are immediately credited to the relevant hawker’s account. As John continues to sell airtime vouchers to customers, his balance on the system decreases by the voucher cost price of each transaction and his wallet accumulates cash at the larger amount of the voucher selling price of each transaction. John can view his balance as well as profit and transactions at any time on his phone. At some point John runs out of credit on the system and the system refuses to issue more vouchers. At this point his wallet is full of cash from the voucher sales as well as the profit he has made on these sales (difference between the cost of the vouchers to him and their selling price) The system provides John with instructions on depositing the money in any one of a number of banks which the Tym2Sell operator has accounts using a unique deposit reference such that his deposit is rapidly recognized by the system and his vendor account on Tym2Sell credited Within minutes of depositing his cash, John’s balance on Tym2Sell is updated and he may continue selling airtime vouchers. John
Tym2SellViral Adoption • Tym2Sell requires virtually zero marketing costs in order to rapidly recruit a nation-wide network of airtime hawkers. • Each hawker has a powerful incentive to actively recruit more hawkers as they will forever receive a royalty on each sale made by the hawkers they had recruited. • A hawker’s royalties earned from the airtime sales of their recruited hawkers are immediately reflected in their statements and balance on Tym2sell allowing them to use this to sell additional airtime in order to monetize this royalty. • The operators of Tym2Sell can vary the pace of this nationwide viral spread via the adjustment of business rules in the system. These are: • The royalty percentage earned by the recruiting hawker. • The number of recruits any one hawker can gather. • The hawker approval cycle. This can be varied from a totally autonomous automatic approval of any recruited hawker to a process involving background checks etc. • The cost (if any) to a recruiter to recruit another hawker. As can be seen, the business process can be varied to any degree from creating a steadily increasing adoption all the way to a virally spreading network of hawkers creating a nationwide network of hawkers in a matter of weeks.
Tym2SellDistribution Models Tym2Sell typically has a flat single level distribution model whereby each hawker is responsible for managing their account balance and replenishment thereof by depositing cash into one of the available bank accounts. However there may indeed be instances where certain hawkers are too remote from any bank to visit on a regular basis and where they therefore act in a cooperative fashion. This cooperative model may also be forced where village elders insist on appointing “authorized” hawkers in their area and perform banking on their behalf. There may also be practical instances where hawkers may collaborate such as when a number of hawkers are “working” an event such as hawking airtime at a stadium hosting a soccer match. One hawker may run out of credit due to the increased volume and in exchange for parting with some cash could get a credit “top-up” from another hawker so that the hawker may continue selling. As shown on the next slide, Tym2Sell allows hawkers to act in a collaborative fashion by allowing any hawker to transfer all or a part of their available balance to other hawkers.
Tym2SellCooperative Selling When Michael’s balance runs low after making repeated transfers to John (and possibly many other hawkers in his area), he deposits a large amount of cash into one of the vendor’s Tym2Sell’s designated bank accounts using his deposit tracking code in order that his Tym2Sell account is credited with the cash deposit. In fact Michael may act as the effective intermediary “banker” on Tym2Sell for a great many hawkers. Crediting their balances as their needs require and journeying to the bank to make deposits to “top up” his balance as required. However John may be too far from a bank, or the banks may be closed or he is currently selling airtime at a sports stadium and not wish to stop selling during this lucrative period. Therefore instead of John traveling to deposit his cash in one of the Tym2Sell’s approved bank accounts, he instead decides to approach Michael (another Tym2Sell hawker). At some point John runs out of credit on the system and the system refuses to issue more vouchers (or directly top-up customer’s pre-paid airtime accounts). In exchange for the equivalent amount of John’s cash, Michael uses Tym2Sell to transfer some of his available balance to John. As had been mentioned previously, as John sells airtime vouchers (or direct account “top-ups”) to customers, his balance on the system decreases and his wallet accumulates cash. With his balance credited, John can immediately continue selling airtime to customers. Many Hawkers John Michael
Tym2SellTechnology Tym2Sell uses a unique fusion of WAP, XHTML-MP and compression to produce lightning fast transaction speed and ultra-low data usage on almost any cellular phone manufactured in the last 6 years. The entire application is language enabled and all screens, labels and messages can be easily customized by client support personnel and simultaneously displayed to hawkers speaking a variety of languages. Hawkers are sensitive to cellphone data-usage as they typically pay for it by kilobyte. Tym2Sell’s design uses a miniscule amount of cellphone data usage. If a hawker goes through the entire menu system (multiple levels) and then selects a voucher to sell and sells it, the whole navigation and selling process involves just a single roundtrip to the server and just 4,200 bytes of data usage. In most countries 4,200 bytes of data will cost the hawker around 0.1 USA cent. Database design closely coupled with server-side application allows a small server costing less than $10,000 to easily handle 15,000 hawkers selling hundreds of thousands of airtime vouchers per day, all with sub-second response.
Tym2SellExtensibility Tym2Sell has “extensibility exit points” built into both the database (able to be customized by database administration personnel) as well as into the object model (able to be customized by programming staff) which allow full site customization by a customer to perform the following: Automatically feeding an external financial system with real-time sales data Allowing various discrete types of hawker discounting models based on sales volumes / minimum target levels or level in the distribution chain. Allowing multi-level recruitment royalty schemes to be implemented. These could be based on receiving royalties from more than one level of recruits or schemes whereby royalty percentages increase depending on the number or quality of recruits. Adding some additional incentives (such as weekly prizes) based on certain sales or recruitment targets being met. Performing some additional sales validation. Such as not allowing certain hawkers to sell certain items or only allowing certain hawkers to sell in a certain way (e.g.. SMS of voucher numbers only).
Tym2SellThe Savings • No data network costs (tiny cost carried by hawker) • No handheld or other devices (hawkers use their own existing cellular phones) • No fixed lines • No shops, stalls or other formal infrastructure required • No contracts (no trust needs to be established between hawker and cellphone company) • No credit exposure (as hawkers must maintain positive balance) • No equipment maintenance &insurance (the hawker’s cellphone is their POS) • You get a massive distribution network of tens of thousands of hawkers spread to the most distant and remote regions of any country within weeks as it virally spreads with an almost zero investment in infrastructure or marketing. • Stock holding is kept to minimum (all airtime voucher stock is on central server) – no stock held at various points throughout distribution network. • Positive cash-flow turns into a huge asset.
Conclusion Using a viral profit-based referral model Tym2Sell can build a country-wide airtime distribution model consisting of thousands of hawkers in just a few weeks and with an almost zero investment in infrastructure or marketing!
Tym2Sell! Air-time “top-ups” for the text generation
