Afrigator Turns One Today
It has been a whole year since we launched Afrigator and since Rafiq posted the first coverage of the site and all of us involved simply can’t believe how the time has flown.
What started as a fairly small project has grown into something beyond our wildest dreams and we’ve had some great experiences during this first year. Even despite having very limited resources and money we’ve managed to do quite a number of things.
How the team came about…
Afrigator was originally started by myself and Mike Stopforth but very quickly we realised that we would need a very good designer to help make our concept visually appealing. We contacted Mark Forrester and he helped us out with the initial design but we were so impressed with what he did that we offered him shares in the company. We did this very soon after we launched because we really believed that Mark’s design helped give the project the momentum it needed and we also couldn’t really afford to pay him!
After our first major release I woke up to the fact that this project was going to take up a lot of my time and I decided that we needed an extra set of hands to help on the development front. At the time the only person I knew who wasn’t in a full-time job was Stii Pretorius and he was only too happy to jump on board. Stii worked on Afrigator from the end of April until beginning August without getting a single cent from us and we decided this simply wasn’t on. After some discussions between the three of us we decided to offer Stii some equity in the business and we formalised the partnership between the four of us.
We’ve really managed to build up a formidable team and I’m proud to be associated with these guys. Without them we wouldn’t be where we are today.
Major Development Milestones
While we’ve constantly been tweaking source code and improving functionality these are the major development milestones we’ve released this year.
- Alpha-1.0 on 3 April 2007
- Mobile Version 1 on 13 April 2007
- Alpha-2.0 on 21 May 2007
- Private Beta on 28 November 2007
- Public Beta on 10 January 2008
- Mobile Version 2 on 3 February 2008
- iPhone, iPod Mobile on 28 February 2008
Some cool Accolades
Amazingly, people have said a lot of good things about us and these are some of our major accolades thus far.
- #20 of 31 “top non-US startups to watch worldwide†by Business 2.0 (money.cnn.com)
- Featured on Read/WriteWeb
- VentureBeat.com features us
- Featured on Killer Startups
- Featured on Go2Web20
Some cool stats
We’ve put together a few slides on the stats of Afrigator during the year and you can flip through them below. If you can’t read the text in the slideshow below then view a bigger version over here.
What lies ahead?
We believe that we’ve only scratched the surface of social media in Africa and we’re hoping to expand and grow exponentially this year. Currently we are dominated by sites from South Africa and while we have a lot of them on board we need to expand that base to reach its full potential. In other African countries we lack the numbers we’d like so our mission this year is to get Afrigator to countries that simply haven’t heard about us. This time next year we want to have a more accurate reflection of social media on the continent and we have an aggressive plan in place to achieve this.
Finally, a word of thanks
While we’ve worked very hard at making this project a success we can’t ignore the most important contributing factor to our success this year – YOU! Without your support, blog posts about the project and general usage of the site, this project would have failed miserably. We are so appreciative of your support throughout this last year and we are hoping for an even better one ahead.
Afrigator Is One Year Old Today by Justin Hartman said,
Wrote on April 3, 2008 @ 09:04
[...] can’t believe this thing is one year old already… check out the celebration post on the Afrigator Blog. Share this post: Share this post with the [...]
Gregor said,
Wrote on April 3, 2008 @ 09:39
Congrats to the Afrigator team! Happy Birthday!
kmf said,
Wrote on April 3, 2008 @ 10:03
Still waiting for the Shirts.
Vincent Maher said,
Wrote on April 3, 2008 @ 10:36
Well done guys, its a great milestone and a lot of hard work that went into it so I hope you celebrate it properly
Afrigator’s Bday | geeksecret said,
Wrote on April 3, 2008 @ 10:43
[...] Full article here. [...]
bundublog said,
Wrote on April 3, 2008 @ 10:45
Congratulations Afrigator. Compliments on the great work so far, keep it up and get Africa noticed!
SA Blog Awards winners announced | SA Rocks said,
Wrote on April 3, 2008 @ 11:39
[...] what Mr Stopforth has to say on the issue. While I’m at it, congratulations also go out to Afrigator on their one year birthday celebration [...]
stii.za.net » Blog Archive » Hêppie, hêppie Afrigator! said,
Wrote on April 3, 2008 @ 12:39
[...] read a bit more, see the Afrigator blog. Sharing is caring:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and [...]
Afrigator Turns 1 Year Old Today! | Mike Stopforth said,
Wrote on April 3, 2008 @ 13:01
[...] our first birthday and in keeping with the spirit of innovation and community we’d like to ask you – the dudes [...]
Afrigator Turns One « TLC Studio said,
Wrote on April 3, 2008 @ 22:57
[...] Official Blog [...]
Jason said,
Wrote on April 4, 2008 @ 08:03
Nicely done guys. It’s been amazing to see how much passion, innovation and traffic you’ve crammed into the last 12 short months. Congrats
Khanya said,
Wrote on April 5, 2008 @ 06:20
Afrigator is one year old…
Afrigator is one year old today.
Afrigator is a social media aggregator and directory built especially for African digital citizens who publish and consume content on the Web.
Whatever that means.
Mike Stopforth has asked “Submit your ideas on th…
Bring competitive rankings back to Afrigator : nicharalambous.com said,
Wrote on April 5, 2008 @ 09:12
[...] want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting and do come back.In my honest opinion I think Afrigator has lost some fight since it decided not to rank blogs against one another. We, as bloggers, have egos. We also believe [...]
Afrigator 1-TH1NG submission | The Outlet said,
Wrote on April 5, 2008 @ 13:24
[...] of blogs with newest posts and a long list of all available blogs. They site is currently running a competition where the person with the best suggestions on how to improve the site wins a cool [...]
[Social media] Happy birthday, Afrigator! : Bizcommunity Blog said,
Wrote on April 7, 2008 @ 13:04
[...] African blog aggregator Amatomu turning one, so has African social media aggregator Afrigator also celebrated its first birthday. Here’s a handy list of its developmental milestones over the past [...]
Suggestions for Afrigator on it’s 1st Birthday said,
Wrote on April 9, 2008 @ 13:45
[...] late, this is in response to Mike Stopforth’s request for innovative suggestions for Afrigator, on it’s first [...]
Nick said,
Wrote on July 15, 2008 @ 15:51
Congrats. Job done and good luck with ’still to do’.
Afrigator is two years old today | Afrigator Blog said,
Wrote on April 3, 2009 @ 09:03
[...] I’m guessing that most of you aren’t aware of how Afrigator started so I figured it might be a great opportunity to point you to our 1st birthday post where we highlight how the company started as well as what we managed to achieve in our first year of operation. You can read the full post over here. [...]