Wabona buys a stake in Cinemo

During our accelerator program we partnered with RLabs start-up Cinemo to provide them with a large library of African TV shows, films and documentaries. Cinemo distributed video content via applications on MXit and Android. Through the partnership Wabona became Cinemo’s largest content partner. Cinemo was unique in that it made video content more accessible and data friendly by providing the video content in 4 minute clips between 550kbs and 4MB in file size. We tested their solution with 1 episode of Yizo Yizo (the trailer is below) and in one week we had over 45 000 episode downloads. The fit between the companies worked well and we decided to strengthen our exclusive partnership with Cinemo by offering to buy an equity stake with a view to becoming a majority shareholder in two years. The partnership of content and the Cinemo solution grew our combined audience from 300 000 to 470 000 in the space of 6 months, with 1million mini episodes of content consumed.

My contribution:

-Product management

-Marketing of episodes

-Leading negotiations on equity stake purchase and valuation

What I learnt

- What product market fit looks like and how quickly it can scale once its achieved

- Pent-up demand for digital services in non-smart phone customers

- Product management of mobile apps

- The potential of short form mobile video