Lakestream

How Exelerate helped Lakestream become the leading SaaS product for commercial real-esate in Africa

Deliverables:

Product Launch
MVP Developemnt
Product Management
Munya D. Island
CEO  Lakestream
Port Louis, Mauritius
 

Background

Prior to founding LakeStream, he was the Senior Asset Manager at Grit, a Pan-African Real Estate Investment Fund with $800M Assets Under Management. At Grit, he learnt the ins and outs of the African Commercial Real Estate Business and realised the whole industry was a broken, siloed system using pen & paper and Excel for managing thousands of assets worth billions of USD.

He saw an opportunity in creating a holistic software solution that would help Investments Funds within the continent to manage their portfolio and increase their returns.

Exelerate were able to deliver a very complex commercial-ready MVP within 3 months and a limited budget. As a result we were able to onboard two paying clients within the first week of launching.

Munya D. Island
CEO & Co-Founder of Lakestream

Headquarters

Port Louis, Mauritius

Industry

Proptech, SaaS

Investment Round

Pre-seed round

Valuation

$500K - $2M
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Challenges

The problem with building a B2B product, especially one whose goal is to replace the whole workflow of a corporation, is that the acceptance standard from the users’ side is much higher than that of a B2C product.

The problem with building a B2B product, especially one whose goal is to replace the whole workflow of a corporation, is that the acceptance standard from the users’ side is much higher than that of a B2C product.

You need to squeeze in every functionality that the business uses from multiple tools (pen & paper, Excel, email, etc.) and condense it into a single product. Outside of that, one business might have a completely different workflow  from another, meaning extra use cases that need to be taken care of. Doing all of that in itself is a difficult ask, doing it within a limited budget  and a 3 month timeframe is near impossible.

However, we are very bullish when it comes to the emerging African market, we believed in Munya’s vision and we wanted to be involved in the project, so we took up the challenge.

Munya came to us with a real market problem and a great product idea, however the product was far from conceptualised. On our first discovery session, Munya had a janky low-fidelity wireframes made in Excel (I know right... :D) and a mile-long feature list that would take a full engineering team an year to produce.

The only problem was that he was self-funded and only had a development budget of $30K.

Solution

The first thing we did was get familiar with the industry, the needs of the users (Real Estate Investment Funds) and defining the core functionalities necessary for acquiring early adopters.

Based on that we went to town on the initial feature list provided by Munya, and basically cut out 90% of the features he had defined. All that remained were core features that were must-have for the product to launch and be used by early adopters.

Once that was done, we took the janky low-fidelity wireframes and turned them into a high-fidelity designs based on the core functionalities that served as an MVP feature list.

Lastly we onboarded a single Startup Engineer that was able to deliver a complex, commercial-ready MVP version of LakeStream within just 3 months.

Value Delivered

Instead of quoting Munya hundreds of thousands of dollars for the initial version of the product he came to us, we were able to build a lean, market ready version of the product within his budget.

The best thing was that, as a result, he was able to launch his product and start selling it within 3 months instead of a year or more.

Within a week of launching LakeStream onboarded two Investment Funds, validating the value proposition of the product.

Team Structure

Fractional CPO
Ivan N.
StartUp Engineer
Martin P.

Technologies

React
JavaScript
HTML5
CSS3

Integrations

Google Calendar
Jira

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