ICTworks

Kayode Muyibi of Narihost has launched a new service for Nigerians – free SMS messages to and from any Nigerian mobile phone provider via SMSvolt.com. The service has caught on with a bang! He’s sending thousands of SMS per day.

Impressed with his innovation, I caught up with Kayode and interviewed him via Skype chat on the why and how of his service:

Wayan Vota: So why did you start http://www.smsvolt.com/? To see if you could do it? To test out a business idea? For the money?

Kayode Muyibi: I started sms volt as an experiment to test on the potential market response to sms based content. This is done through allowing anybody to send free SMS in restricted 120 character limit instead of the160 character limit per message.

Wayan Vota: Why the 120 character limit? What fills the reminding 40 char? Is that an ad? If so, what kind of ad? Can someone buy adverts in that space or is the inventory already sold to someone?

Kayode Muyibi: We have not currently decided on what to use the 40 characters for, but yes ads are a likely model, We would like to explore the idea. So, Instead of sending mass content, we merge it up with text based ads on the remaining space

Wayan Vota: It seems like its only Nigeria to Nigeria – no ability to send from a USA cell phone number to a Nigeria mobile phone number. So its sending within Nigeria, not sending to Nigeria?

Kayode Muyibi: We could allow just anybody to send messages to a Nigerian number, but we face a dilemma of impersonation and abuse. So for now we would only send messages from a verified number to any number. 702, 802, etc are the carrier codes for the Nigerian mobile providers. We do not think that people from outside Nigeria would likely use our service.

Wayan Vota: I would think there is a huge demand of the Nigerian Diaspora to send SMS text messages to Nigerian phone numbers.

Kayode Muyibi: Well this is something we would likely consider perhaps in the future, as for now, I would like to see the response from within Nigeria

Wayan Vota: Why is it free/cheap to send SMS in Nigeria this way?

Kayode Muyibi: We are using a local based provider that discounts on bulk, and this is a comparison between 15-20 Naira to free per message. So we are assuming the cost of sending as the marketing cost – the cost of obtaining a valid phone number

Wayan Vota: How long did it take you to code this? Earlier, you said 2 days – was that 48 hours of Mountain Dew powered coding?

Kayode Muyibi: Actually it took me about 6 hours to code it but the testing and debugging took another 12-24 hours considering I got feedbacks right after I launched through twitter, email and even through the site logs

Wayan Vota: Congrats on your skill and your success. I’m hopeful we’ll see even more innovation from you & your team.

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