South Africa’s Birthday-mates.com, is a birthday social network that that groups together people who share birthdays- usually within 1-3 weeks of each other and provides them an opportunity to have joint birthday celebrations in one location.
The social network allows users to exchange gifts with each other and receive gifts from family & friends on their birthday or create crowd funding campaigns for birthday gifts and other birthday related projects and more.
The founder, Kanayo Okwuraiwe says he’s naturally an entrepreneur at heart and has launched 2 previous startups, including owning several income generating websites in the past.
Birthday Mates works simply says Okwuraiwe.
“The main crux of the network is connecting people who share a common birthday, usually between 1-3 weeks apart, and offering them an opportunity to have a group birthday celebration,” he says. “Instead of doing the norm, be it with family and friend, or alone doing nothing, or the new norm of receiving dozens of happy birthday messages on your Facebook wall, Birthday Mates rather spend the day (or a few hours) with people who share that distinct day or week with you.”
Launched last September, Okwuraiwe’s task now is recruiting users by word of mouth in various Universities in South Africa and in other countries after that. Now self-funded, Birthday Mates revenue model is advertising and affiliate marketing. The founder says he’s looking to raise funds in the near future after signing up a reasonable number of users.
His immediate plan is to launch a project dubbed “Lunch with a Celebrity” where users in the network get an opportunity to have an all-expense paid celebrity with a celebrity of their choice in the birthday month. His second project is a free birthday lunch program, where users are offered a free lunch if they visit a specific restaurant.
The founder says he is in talks with several brands in both South Africa and Nigeria to work with him on this projects.
Though the world has various socials networks, Birthday Mates may or may not work depending on the team’s innovativiness and tenacity. It will be okay to pivot and add more similarities like location-based parties or interest-themed parties and events for birthday mates. When Facebook launched, it wasn’t the only social network but it thrived.
Deeyelys 