Tunzaa is a fintech app that allows users to purchase items by making small pre-payments in advance. Tunzaa allows customers to purchase items by breaking down the payment plan into up to six months of paying period.
Tunzaa’s founder, Ng’winula Kingamkono, had expected uptake to be slower, only to be surprised by the reception from the market. Kingamkono, a 31-year-old tech developer, says he started to have a passion for tech at the age of 10 following inspiration from his mother.
“I was about ten or eleven,” he said recently. “One day, my mother told me ‘we are going to this place, after that you will be going to school.’ We went to a computer class. They opened an email for me, and from that moment I didn’t look back.”
Tunzaa’s model is that vendors sell directly on Tunzaa. This is after extensive vetting by Tunzaa’s team. Customers can purchase items by making the full amount or breaking down payments into small instalments. After the final payment, the product is delivered to the customer.
Prior to founding Tunzaa, Kingamkono worked with multiple unsuccessful ventures until he founded the software development company, Ellipsis, and later on Tunzaa.
“In the past, I used to just sit down and create products,” he says. “So, I have failed in many of them. With Tunzaa, I had to start with researching what people actually needed.”
To make sure he builds a product that is needed, Kingamkono held consultations with various people in two regions of Tanga and Dar es Salaam. Even after launching, they rely heavily on customers’ feedback on improvement.
Tunzaa was officially launched on June 2021. It was a moment that was filled with emotions, worries, and excitement.
“When I wrote the first tweet about Tunzaa launch, nobody really cared,” Kingamkono recalls. “It took three days for Tunzaa to have the first customer who bought on the platform and that gave me a new vigour.”
Now, Tunzaa has a total of 11,000 users. It has fulfilled a total of 775 orders. It currently has more than 1,300 orders in the pipeline.
Tunzaa is still being financed by its founder but the company is open to receiving investors and they have a few ongoing talks which are yet to materialize.
“Since we started I bootstrapped Tunzaa from my pocket,” Kingamkono revealed. “We are seeing interest from investors but nothing concrete [has come out] yet.”
I am amazed by the numbers we’ve achieved and the insights we have gathered throughout and it makes this whole experience worth it.
FUNDED
Tunzaa received funding from a European angel investor (based in Europe & Africa, a great friend and a mentor)…
— NK (@KneeNjure) June 9, 2022
You can watch the full Tunzaa interview below:
