Welcome to IFFAC – Impact Fund for African Creatives
There are disappointed investors who passed multiple times on opportunities to invest in nascent-stage ventures like Uber, Airbnb and Google.
How can the world’s best early-stage investors not be able to see the future potential of some of the greatest start-up success stories, those that became mass market ‘must-haves’
Simple. They needed more evidence of market momentum (traction) before placing their bet on these would-be new market category leaders, precisely because they were non-obvious innovations, that where frankly (too) new for them to consider.
Today there is a scientific LEADING indicator of future new market category success that can be applied rationally to early-stage ventures before traction occurs – and powerful enough to predict future mass market adoption.
We know, the highest returns are only available to those who invest early enough, happen to be right, and also whilst the innovation remains non-obvious to others. Enter later, once it becomes an obvious winner, and your investment advantage disappears, as you now must compete to participate.
Never before has there been a rational, reliable and repeatable LEADING indicator of future market adoption.
TMARA’s (Target Market Adoption Risk Assessment’s) unique ability to locate the illusive market sweet spot for innovative start-ups like Uber, allows investors to know at the earliest stage, if home-run success is a potential outcome – and investors can then secure options (within IFFAC’s Fund), which can then be exercised once the success is realised (again through TMARA‘s embedded scientific product-category fit process).
Background to what’s behind the science of value creation:
For the first time in history, the business process of creating new value (market ‘must-haves’), has been reduced to a science-backed formula and recipe, built on the shoulders of giants, namely: Dr. Eli Goldratt (Theory of Constraints) and Dr. Nassim Taleb (Optionality) – that:
1. Enables start-up jockeys to perform at a much higher level of proficiency (decent jockeys can become great jockeys, and it will even cover the blind spots of the greatest jockeys.
2. Reducing something down to a formula or science thus shifting the focus from guessing the outcome (which needs great intelligence and lots of luck), to interpreting the progress (which needs great rationality and less luck) – logically determining where you are vis-a-vis the ‘promised land – aka the market’s sweet spot)
3. Provides a progress indicator -“are we on track or do we need to pivot towards the market’s sweet spot”.
Bottom line:
Knowing how to create value in the eyes of the market is no longer a mystery and is causing a major shift in the early-stage (Zero-to-One) space.
IFFAC (Impact Fund for African Creatives) now has TMARA ‘inside’ and is focused on making an impact in the African Creative industry, by co-creating new market category leaders in this space.
In a nutshell:
We co-create and invest in non-obvious new market category kings – that can gravitate up to 75~% of the market cap in their space
Our investors secure options on our early-stage creative ventures, all of which have the potential to become significant successes, because the scientific methodology of accessing and affecting mass market ‘must-haves’ is reliably and repeatably embedded into the IFFAC fund.
We invite superior non-consensus investors, who decide their own mandates, and who would personally appreciate a command of the science of creating market ‘must-haves’, to join our journey.
Co-create and invest in AFRICA’s (non-obvious) new market category kings – that can gravitate up to 75% of the market cap in their new-found CREATIVE spaces.
Welcome to the science to turning innovations into market must-haves.
For more info:
Roberta Annan
Virgil once proclaimed, ” Lucky is he who has been able to understand the cause of things.”
Said another way, ” Lucky is he who knows WHY”.
Successful start-up pundits claim to get better at predicting the winners by adopting a portfolio strategy. Their pattern recognition certainly gets better with experience, but let’s be equally frank, even the very best early-stage players still can fail up to 19 out 20 times (granted – respectfully- we’re talking really early stage).
WHY?
Because “Correlation (pattern recognition) falls way short of causation”. Causation is a different category of (scientific) thinking, with a different starting point, different journey and vastly different outcome.
What’s the difference! The rooster’s crow is highly correlated with the sunrise; yet it does not cause the sunrise”, says Judea Pearl in his award winning THE BOOK OF WHY.
Pearl goes on say to say that data is dumb – it can often explain WHAT happened, but not WHY. Data does not understand Cause and Effects (THE WHY), people do, he says.
So here’s what we’re highlighting…if one is able to transition from the correlation (pattern recognition) world to the causation (scientific cause-and-effect) world, your odds of knowing WHY something is caused, improve by a magnitude.
Here’s HOW?
If one acquires and commands the few fundamentals that govern this early-stage space (through science), then one is able to CAUSE or CREATE successes. In other words, know WHY a venture is likely to succeed (or fail) well before momentum and/or consensus kicks in.
The fundamentals have been discovered, the science now codified, and for the very first time, 2 key questions can now be answered rationally ….IF and WHEN……IF success is actually a potential outcome (before there is traction), and WHEN will it succeed.
Virgil again, ” Lucky is he who has been able to understand the cause of things.”
WHY is your startup going to be successful?
#beamusthaveWww. tmaragroup.com
Two related articles for further context:
When people are told to not think of an elephant, they can’t get the image out of their minds.
When President Nixon said he was “not a crook” what emerged was a reaffirmation that he was a crook.
So, it is necessary to be disciplined to consistently use the language of YOUR frame and never accept the alternative (THEIR frame).
Know that facts don’t really matter.
“It is a myth that people are rational and that some well-presented facts will change their frame-anchored view.”
“Successfully creating a new category or subcategory involves — in addition to finding a concept and introducing it into the marketplace — the active management of customers’:
- perceptions,
- attitudes and
- behaviours toward it.”
Remember.. first, we are building a market, then a business.
THE (SUB) CATEGORY BATTLE-PLAN:
- Win the (sub)category battle Provide unique customer MUST-HAVE(s)
2. Win the brand relevance battle Only we can deliver the MUST-HAVE(s)
3. Win the competitor battle No significant competitor, by default.
FRAMING!
#beamusthave
www.tmaragroup.com
