mobical.me, a free all-in-one business tool for SMEs, schools, clubs and associations is a comprehensive platform to simplify business and personal digital engagement.
The platform was established as a means to help entrepreneurs and SMEs create their own web presence in under an hour, in order to reach their target audience where they are and at their convenience.
“As an entrepreneur myself I know the challenges SMEs face, and know how beneficial it is to have a digital platform that is the face of your company, school or organisation — a tool that can actually help SMEs operate as a successful business without the corporate costs,” says Saadiq Mathews, co-founder and executive director of mobical.me.
Mathews added that more South Africans are looking for alternative ways to make a living and are turning to entrepreneurship, which ties in with the Quarterly Labour Force Survey — QLFS Q1:2017 recently released by Statistics South Africa. The report shows that the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 27,7% quarter-to-quarter, with the number of people unemployed at 6,177-million.
“We also know that the South African internet user population passed the 20-million mark for the first time in 2016, reaching 21-million. This figure is expected to grow to at least 22,5-million in 2017,” says Mathews.
“With an expected 40% penetration of internet users, it goes without saying that if you are an entrepreneur your business should have a digital presence but few have time or the depth of understanding to manage multiple platforms such as a website and social media.”
The all-encompassing mobical.me platform can be used to sell products and services, plan and manage events, run fundraising campaigns, and communicate with a database of your contacts and the wider mobiCommunity via email, SMS or using the mobical.me app.
“The development of the tool was very much a collaborative approach. We would introduce users to mobical.me and then learn from them what their challenges were in terms of business operations. From this we go back to the drawing board with their feedback and create new features that we knew our users would use,” says Mathews.
The development of the platform was started by founder Thabiet Davids in 2013 as Mobical BETA and was launched as a mobile calendar for arranging and managing events both large and small. Today, the mobical.me has more than 5 000 individual users, with a loaded database of over 100 000 contacts, which continues to grow.