Startup snapshot: Doing away with paper sales receipts


Johannesburg-based Snapslip Holdings is a digital receipting and analytics application that takes data from each receipt and produces spend, trend and predictive analytics for retailers, banks, insurance companies and manufacturers to increase their revenue streams. The company was recently selected for the Startupbootcamp AfriTech accelerator programme. Founder Lynton Naicker answers our questions.

1. Give us your elevator pitch.

Snapslip is a digital receipting and analytics application that eradicates paper receipts by sending these receipts digitally to a customer’s profile. It gives the customer a digital receipting repository. Snapslip then takes the data from each receipt and pairs it with customer profiling to produce spend, trend and predictive analytics, which it provides to retailers, financial institutions, manufacturers and insurance companies. These stakeholders can use these insights to know their customers better and provide greater product-market fits and offerings, thereby increasing their revenue streams and customers.

2. How did you finance your startup?

Bootstrap.

3. If you were given $1 million to invest in your company now, where would it go?

We would utilise this funding in order to scale Snapslip and gain a greater market adoption in South Africa and abroad to the US, UK, EU and Asian markets. We would also heavily focus on innovation in order to enhance our analytics offering.

4. What risks does your business face?

I think this risk applies to all fintech startups, but is definitely the risk of redundancy, as we live in a world that expects instant gratification. In an ever-evolving tech landscape, as a startup, you have to continuously keep improving and innovating your offering.

5. So far, what has proven to be the most successful form of marketing?

Social media. I think social media is a very powerful platform that can reach a much greater audience at a faster rate as well as be targeted based on viewer profiles and analytics. In theory, the right person gets the right ads at the right time.

6. Describe your most exciting entrepreneurial moment.

Being selected into the 2019 Startupbootcamp AfriTech cohort.

7. Tell us about your biggest mistake, and what you’ve learnt from it?

Building a vast amount of features to a solution without validating a solution. The most important learning is that as an entrepreneur your customer discovery is a very important exercise. These insights need to be vetted before any additional features should be built out.

8. In addition to your own company, name one untapped business opportunity in Africa.

Everyone is focusing on banking the unbanked within Africa, but I think an even greater challenge is financial literacy and upskilling people to better address their finances. In doing so, they are able to better their standard of living. So, definitely a financial literacy platform that educates people in order to navigate their financial journeys.