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Day 10 of Our Field Experiment (please see profile for live data room link) The last few days of our field experiment have been interesting. For a while, our agents were getting a recurring response from merchants and business owners in the market. They liked the app, but they couldn't use it for their businesses without POS terminals and ATM cards. On Monday, our agents began changing their approach. Instead of focusing primarily on merchants and business owners, they started engaging people visiting the market to shop, run errands or take care of one or two things. The numbers changed almost immediately. In four days, we recorded: 📍 Over 40 conversations 📍 More than 15 new signups 📍 5 retained customers Of those five retained customers, only one is a businessperson. Interestingly, he uses Mabe as his personal account rather than for his business. This is where the experiment gets interesting. Changing our audience increased acquisition, but we're still trying to understand what it takes to get businesses to adopt the product. Yesterday, I had a conversation with the businessperson who retained Mabe. He likes the app and considers it a good product. However, he doesn't feel comfortable using it for his business because it doesn't have POS support. He also pointed out that Mabe isn't as fast as OPay, although he believes its network speed is comparable to products like Moniepoint and SmartCash. His feedback is useful because it separates product perception from practical business requirements. He can appreciate the app and use it personally while still finding it unsuitable for his business operations. Then he made a statement that caught my attention: "If you bring 10 POS terminals here right now, everybody in this place will open an account and collect one." (Video in Frame 3) We've been asking merchants what would make them consider a new payment product. POS terminals and ATM cards have come up repeatedly. Now we're seeing that when agents approach people who are simply visiting the market, the barriers to signing up may be different. This raises a few questions for us: 1. Are we seeing higher signups because visitors have fewer business-specific requirements? 2. Will these new users continue using the app after the initial interaction? 3. Can we convert personal users into business users over time? 4. How much does access to POS terminals actually influence merchant adoption? We're learning that the market isn't one uniform audience. A trader who processes transactions throughout the day and a customer who visits the market to buy something may evaluate the same payment app very differently. More signups are encouraging, but they don't tell us whether we've solved the distribution problem we're investigating. We're continuing to track retention, usage and the reasons different user segments choose to adopt or reject the product. Day 10. Still learning from the ground.