It has been two years since I began developing the Twezi platform. What a journey of learning, iteration, and conviction. During a recent strategy session with my tech team, I shared this chart on industry foresight, a simple yet profound framework that reveals where real innovation happens.
The red box represents the battlefield of the present, where companies compete on articulated needs of already served customers. It’s crowded, predictable, and costly. Everyone is offering the same product with minor variations, fighting for survival through discounts, promotions, and endless noise. This is the Red Ocean, stained with the blood of competition.
For Twezi, every fintech product looked the same: a lending app, a SACCO app, a payments app, a savings app. Different labels, same logic. We asked ourselves a bolder question: How do we tap into unarticulated customer needs and unserved customer types? How do we build not another fintech, but a movement?
That question birthed our Blue Ocean mindset. The Blue Ocean Strategy is the escape route from the red ocean trap. It teaches leaders to stop fighting for a slice of existing demand and instead create new demand in uncontested markets. You don’t outcompete rivals, you make them irrelevant.
Blue Oceans emerge when you shift focus from competitors to customers, from efficiency to value innovation, and from incremental improvement to reimagining the game itself. The red box is where survival happens. The blue ocean is where prosperity begins.
Twezi is our Blue Ocean play. It solves one of Africa’s most neglected yet powerful problems: community crowdfunding and benevolent fund management. It starts with people, not transactions. You build a community first, and the money flows naturally.
Check it out: app.twezimbe.com. The next frontier is not in apps that lend, it’s in platforms that bind.
I remain, Mr Strategy.
