Five questions with Kupatana

A traditional classifieds platform is one that allows its readers to post advertisements across many topics. In the past, these used to be sections in newspapers and bulletin boards, where people would post things like furniture, cars or electronics on sale.

With the Internet, classifieds are able to go online at a fraction of the cost.

Makusaro Tesha is a General Manager at Kupatana, a classifieds platform that allows people to buy and sell services in Tanzania.

Here is what we asked him:

1. What’s the investment of your business like?

The main owners of Kupatana are Swedish, and they have been doing this for 6 years now. Investment on Kupatana has mainly been in developing the platform, that is the website and the android and iOS app, so we can conclude that the investment is in three parts; in development of the software, second is the man power and third there is the operational costs which includes marketing, sales activity and etc.

2. How many people use your platform?

We get in excess of 500,000 visitors per month.

Kupatana has two platforms; the mobile and desktop website and we also have the app, android and iOS app. Most of these users come from the apps.

3. Which are the most popular categories in Kupatana?

We have three most popular categories, the first one is Electronics, that includes phones, TV, home appliances and everything, the second one is Cars, all types of cars, and the last one is Real Estate, in that order.

4. How does shareholding of a digital product look like?

When we say digital product, that is software, it belongs to a developer. That developer can be a company, that owns copyright, the company can have shareholders, those shareholders would have rights to that digital product as per their share ratio.

5. How did you choose your brand colors and how do you think it affects your platform?

The brand color on Kupatana is mainly Orange on a white background. The reason we chose orange is that orange stands out well on both print and digital, so we were thinking about our users on digital platforms, the color stands out, gives a positive vibrance to the viewer and the color is what people call a memorable color, users associate the color with our brand easily.

Buy and sell services at Kupatana HERE.

Read more:

• About classifieds (Wiki)
• Advantages of advertising in classifieds (Chron)
• Technology topics at Vijana FM