Adii Pienaar

By now you should know that I have a massive passion for social good and more specifically business that are in business to do social good. And this is exactly why I absolutely love African Cartel, which launched today.

Sure, it was launched by Mark (who is my co-founder at WooThemes of course) and his wife, Xenia, so perhaps I'm a tad biased. But in all fairness, African Cartel really is an awesome project for a whole bunch of reasons:

• African Cartel highlights exactly how capitalism doesn't just fill all the gaps that exists in marketplaces. Here you have entrepreneurs that are willing to work hard to earn a living, yet they don't have a distribution model or the skills to simply create one (something which we take for granted online, because it's quite easy to setup an online business). African Cartel creates that platform and puts a distribution model in place which will hopefully give thousands of people worldwide access to this art.
• Poverty remains a big problem worldwide and especially in developing countries. "Established" entrepreneurs - like Xenia & Mark have done in this regard - can create opportunities for others to earn a living and build a better future for themselves. That is social good. Hopefully African Cartel can empower these artists (entrepreneurs) to paint a better life canvas for themselves.
• This is a proudly South African project which again showcases the immense amount of talent that we have in our beautiful country. I'd also venture to say that most developing countries have a natural and inherent cultural buzz that could spawn similarly awesome projects around the world.

I'll stop gushing now, but I really love the project and all of the ideas behind it. Check it out for yourself.

This is a need-to-watch short film for the launch of African Cartel.

Except for being butt-ugly, I've been enjoying my love-affair with Kiva for quite some time now, because I absolutely love helping other entrepreneurs in whatever way I can. I've now made 26 loans on Kiva already, totaling a tad over $1000 and I'm constantly amazed at how easy they pull me to further grow that portfolio of mine.

Basically what happens every couple of weeks is that I get an e-mail saying that $x.x worth of loans had been repaid and that this credits were now available on my Kiva account. So I log into Kiva immediately and reinvest the money in new loans. But something else always happens: I invariably end up adding another $50 or $100 to the portfolio (in addition to redistributing the available credits).

I just think that this is such a great marketing strategy on their part, plus it's not rocket science or groundbreaking either. They're really just tapping into my own "need" to be involved in social good in one way or another.

Tweets like this makes everything so much more worthwhile. :)

We've just hired our 10th member of the WooTeam: Ryan Ray who will be our new Community Manager.

For me, this has been a natural progression of having a community that now exceeds 45k registered users and also reinforces our belief that community and user interaction is of the utmost importance. In comparison with most other online companies of our size (in user base, revenue and the scope of our operations), our 10 member team is relatively small and we've basically just been hiring new members organically and as we really need them.

There's a couple of reasons why this position specifically is so special and much-needed in my opinion:

• Continuous & real-time interaction with a community is a full-time job, especially when your product is not hosted.
• We'd become efficient in dealing with the massive demands placed on our interaction resources - especially e-mail - and the focus had shifted to efficiency and not delivering a WOW! experience. Whilst we've always been trying our best to give users the best-ever experience, it's simply impossible without the appropriate resources.
• Tech is becoming more and more generic in established markets, which means that user loyalty and community interaction is a massive competitive advantage.

So hell yes, I'm excited about Ryan joining the team and look forward to reporting back positively here. :)