They designed and built a prototype card machine that plugged into an iPhone using the old 30-pin dock connector that Apple used on the iPhone 3 and iPhone 4.<\/p>\n
Initially, the prototype could only read a card number. However, that was enough for them to raise initial seed capital.<\/p>\n
\u201cRamsey and I often would joke\u2026 when we went to my old man to say, \u2018Can we build this card machine?\u2019 and he said it would be a piece of cake. It was anything but a piece of cake.\u201d<\/p>\n
Putman said the card machine they designed went on to become the first such South African-developed device to be fully certified by International Card Schemes and PCI.<\/p>\n
This was quite a remarkable achievement, considering they had only brought in two additional engineers, one of which was fresh out of university, to help his father.<\/p>\n
However, there was little time to celebrate as the small iKhokha team were immediately thrown curve balls, the first being Apple switching to the Lightning connector in 2014.<\/p>\n
As Android began to scale aggressively in South Africa, iKhokha adapted its hardware to plug into a headphone jack, which required digital-to-analogue (and analogue-to-digital) conversion.<\/p>\n
Android\u2019s open ecosystem added an additional challenge because every audio driver for the headphone jack was different across various manufacturers, making a universal device difficult to develop.<\/p>\n
Putman said that any hardware design changes required going back to international labs for expensive and time-consuming recertification, adding immense complexity.<\/p>\n
The controlled environment of certification labs also differed from real-life conditions, where factors like static, cold, heat, and physical handling could affect the hardware\u2019s behaviour.<\/p>\n
To overcome these hurdles and focus on its core competencies, they decided to scrap building their own hardware and instead partner with a third-party provider from Eastern Europe.<\/p>\n
Putman explained that the hardware had become increasingly commoditised, with manufacturers in China building Bluetooth card machines.<\/p>\n
This let them double down on distribution, customer journey innovation, and developing their software stack, eventually leading to good traction and improved customer retention.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat took many years, and it was very painful. There were times where we literally had funding on a month-to-month basis and, depending how we did in a month, we would find out if we were able to make payroll,\u201d said Putman.<\/p>\n
He said that although it was very stressful, it was also \u201cquite a romantic time\u201d because they were a very small team of people all focused on trying to ensure the business survived.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe all worked really hard to do that together and, against all odds, I guess, managed to get product-market fit right.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"They designed and built a prototype card machine that plugged into an iPhone using the old 30-pin dock…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":174016,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[64,607,99117,99116,99115,99113,99114,2241,99118,20654,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-174015","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-entrepreneurship","10":"tag-fintech-innovation","11":"tag-ikhokha","12":"tag-matt-putman","13":"tag-nedbank-acquisition","14":"tag-sme-payments","15":"tag-south-africa","16":"tag-startup-success","17":"tag-tech-entrepreneurship","18":"tag-united-states","19":"tag-unitedstates","20":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115088787076638154","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174015\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/174016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}