Herman Heunis, the founder and MD of local mobile success story MXit, has taken to the stage to explore the evolution of MXit and how they captured the youth market.



Herman shoots out a question: how many of us (with kids) have contracts out on his name? Funny. But not so funny because it's a seriously popular application. So popular that kids are on mobiles at the dinner table, at school, in bed. And while some hate it, some live by it and many can't live without it. But where did this come from and why is it used by so many users? Herman starts to explain.

The application started in May 2005, now has 7.1 million users and continues to grow by 12 000 to 17 000 users per day. 6 million of these are from inside SA and the rest are spread across 119 other countries.

Herman makes a point to describe MXit as a lifestyle company. Beyond text messaging, they're focusing on music, social networking, fashion and more. Their mobile social network is set to launch in June.

Interestingly, their application is compatible with over 300 handsets. This is no mean feat with the aggresive release schedules from handset manufacturers.

Their current revenue split is 50% from advertising and 50% from users' Moola chat bundle purchases.

To illustrate the size of the MXit population:

• Logins: 12 million per day
• Registrations: 12 000 - 17 000 per day
• User messages sent and received: 210 million per day
• Data traffic sent and received: 120GB per day
• Application downloads: 600 000 per day

And all of this from an initial marketing budget of less than R100 000. At the start, they faced a nightmare combination of technical issues, software complexities, internet bandwidth, costs and customer expectations. Today, their challenges include innovation, competition and costs as they continue to grow.

Contributing factors to their success:

• SMS and MMS aren't true community tools because you can't see who's online
• Few competitors
• Free model and easy registration
• Viral marketing
• The press (yes, even the bad press)
• Created fantasy, characters and economy

A saying inside the company that keeps them focused is, 'we don't compete - we create'. So they keep an eye on the competition but they stick to their strategy of evolving and innovating.

MXit users have contributed thousands of ideas, from avatars to icons to functionality, over the years and continue to play a key role in their future development.

MXit demographics have changed over time and Herman suspects that as social networking is added, the age group will continue to swing towards an older group of users - a good thing for advertisers who want to advertise to people with disposable income.

MXit advertising opportunities include:

• Splash screens
• Bots, which allow advertisers to advertise products, extract info from users, provide info and get info back from users
• Tradepost
• Sponsored content
• Web advertising on mxit.com
• SMS advertising

Future initiatives will include:

• Interactive TV (idols, user generated content and voting)
• Online magazine
• MXit music
• MXit dcafe
• MXit clothing