Elon Musk, Vinny Lingham, Mark Shuttleworth are among some of the many exceptional, and famous, tech entrepreneurs that South Africa has produced. The list continues to grow at a rapid pace and the tech space in the country remains strong, regardless of political and economic challenges in the country.
And while the majority of the media houses focus on internet companies aimed at becoming the next unicorn, South Africa has many companies doing exceptional work. Among them is Consumatech, a Pretoria based tech company that is using technology to develop innovative solutions suited to African markets.
These companies may not be working on self-driving cars or rockets to Mars, but they do provide top tech products and create employment opportunities for IT professionals.
Growing in a family of academics Olatoye Amosun Founder and CEO of Consumatech found himself moving a lot as a child, living in Zimbabwe, and Cape Town where he concluded his studies at the University of Cape Town. At first, Olatoye says that he wanted to be an architect, his parents, however, convinced him that there was not enough money in that profession and advised him to study a course that had an element of math and science.
After learning about chemical engineering, Olatoye pursued this industry but by the time he was about to graduate he had doubts about taking the profession as a career. After working for several leading companies including Unilever, Absa Capital and SAB Miller, he decided to venture into entrepreneurship.
During this tenure with SAB Miller, Olatoye learnt a lot about servicing the mass market, distribution, and developing solutions that addressed complex African challenges.
“Apart from the fun side of working for a beer company, I learned a lot about the market, learned a lot about distribution as well about developing real-life African solutions in real African environments, simply because SAB has a direct distribution model and I had the opportunity to work in and around that department.”
After about 4 years working with SAB Olatoye ventured into entrepreneurship in 2012. He initially started out with a marketing agency called Olive Communications before starting Consumatech in 2015. Given his experience and prior corporate exposure, Olatoye says he was triggered to venture into entrepreneurship as a result of gaps he noticed in the market with regards to the way customers were being serviced and the lack of linkages within markets.
“While working for different companies, I noticed a lot of gaps in some of the things they were doing. Given my understanding of the consumer market, I figured that most companies were not geared to meet the needs of the market. With the knowledge and experience I had, I felt I was ready to go out and develop solutions to fill those gaps and create employment opportunities. I just felt that I was well equipped and it felt like it was the right time,” he says with a smile.
Olatoye credits his past failures as some of the lessons that have helped him grow in business.
He recalls a major teachable experience where his company was entered into a partnership with a major Audio/Video equipment supplier to roll out a digital signage solution targeted at bottle stores and taverns. Initially, all seemed to be going to plan and there were interested advertisers willing to become customers. Feeling very confident about the solution, his company entered into a hardware lease agreement with the supplier. Things took a bad turn when the software did not deliver as planned and the supplier decided to withdraw from the partnership and demand that the hardware lease agreement be honoured.
“It was a big lesson that has since taught me to be more careful with partnerships, be willing to start small and to go through the journey of proving and testing before making massive commitments. Between 2016 and now, we’ve often decided to take a step back from solutions we’re working on, rework the model and start again," he adds.
Featured entrepreneurs - Olatoye Amosun
Key Players - Tshego Mohlele, Olatoye Amosun
Age - 39
Year founded - 2015
Turnover - R3,000,000
Start-up funding - R700,000