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The founders of Kountable believe that innovation needs to be better distributed. Today’s small businesses would benefit if there were more access to new business opportunities, especially in emerging markets. Yet small businesses in countries like Rwanda and Kenya have limited access to financial and other resources. Kountable is solving this problem by enabling entrepreneurs in emerging markets to access funding and connecting them with suppliers.
Kountable has built a secure, cloud-based technology platform where global organizations, governments, and corporations can engage the expertise and execution capability of qualified local small businesses as part of their supply chains. Kountable helps SMEs buy products from global brands and sell them to large companies and governments, which contribute to tackling the financial and executive challenges that SMEs have faced. Additionally, by integrating SMEs’ finance, operations, and portfolio data, Kountable turns unstructured data into structured data, which helps the platform aggregate SMEs’ business behaviors.
Initially, Kountable has come to us with the first version of their trade platform.
After raising $9M in Series A in 2017, the company entered into a high-growth mode and needed to increase their engineering capacity to take their product from the MVP to the next level. The opportunity was clear — and Altigee has become Kountable’s key partner to build a dedicated product-oriented engineering team to work on a new platform.
Kountable platform customers are entrepreneurs and small businesses that worked on important social and infrastructure projects for governments, foundations, NGOs and corporates in Rwanda and Kenya. With the help of the platform, they could connect with Kountable managers to
After a series of discussions with the Kountable team and the users, we learned there was a wide gap in product usability.
Rwanda and Kenya are mobile-first countries, meaning that most of our users consider smartphones to be their primary device. With new requirements being discovered along the way, we shifted our focus to building a more interactive mobile experience for our customers. We aimed to create a unified user experience across all our Web and mobile apps.
When everything was ready, we worked with the Kountable team to bring the MVP of the apps to Africa and test it with real users. We spent hours with the past and existing customers getting to know their unique perspectives and needs. In this way, user interviews and usability testing sessions allowed us to gather valuable insights about particular user cases or problems to be solved with our product.
Building a product for three different platforms and new changes in user experience brought fresh design and engineering challenges for us. As the complexity of the applications grew, we needed to establish consistency across all platforms and applications.
To do so, we created a design system that allowed designers and engineers to work faster while maintaining consistency and ensuring product quality.
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