At Future Africa, our mission is to partner with mission-driven innovators who are turning Africa's biggest challenges into incredible business opportunities by providing them with capital, coaching and community. As we mentioned in our post announcing our new direction, our coaching function is designed around sharing the practical wisdom of our founder community through the Future Africa Venture School.
Now, most people's idea of a school like this is to give you a long list of things to read and digest, maybe talk at you for an hour like a preacher on the pulpit. But we know you get enough of that already. There are a million startup schools, workshops and "training" for entrepreneurs already. Some are great and we can point you in their direction. Most are meh and its clear the people designing them are better at teaching startup than building it. Nonetheless, we believe the last thing innovators is another cliche entrepreneurship training - so we'll skip that.
However we know you have burning questions!! How do I fire my non-commital co founder? How do I get a customer to write the first cheque? How do I raise seed money as an African startup? Over the last few months, our founders have tried to answer a lot of these questions one on one. However, we realized that a lot of the questions we receive are remarkably similar but senders really have no way of knowing we've answered it many times already.
So folks on our team had a bright idea!
We started with a question:
Is there a way to collate these questions founders are always asking us and rank them so we answer the most important ones once and for all?
This way everyone who has a similar question gets one answer we can all improve over time with different perspectives from experienced founders, operators and investors. Think: stack overflow but for building a startup in Africa. Great idea right? Well, you have the amazing Future Africa team to thank for that.
So here we go with version one of FAVS. It is super simple.
First, you CLICK HERE to ask your question. Now if your question has already been asked - simply click on the thumbs-up sign to vote it up. Don't ask again. The funny thing is it actually increases the chances of the question getting answered - so no bonus points for being that annoying guy in every Q&A that repeats questions to look smart, at least not if you want an answer.
Second, sign up here to get on a bi-weekly live call with Iyin Aboyeji for 30 minutes where he and one of the founders in our portfolio and other experienced faculty, will talk through the top question. If you sign up, you get a slot to listen in live every week and you can ask us some follow up questions.
Finally, we will record the session, transcribe it and post it up on the forum right under the question. All you have to do is simply head there and digest the answer.
Let the questions roll in!
