Fast and furious ride of a start-up wunderkind

UPSTART

Alexandria Procter

Melinda Ferguson Books

Review: Barbara Spaanderman

SOME people are born to stand out, not to sit back quietly and meekly waiting for things to happen, but to be out there making a difference, doing, changing, shifting paradigms.

By her own admission, Alexandria Procter was a precocious kid with the nice but tame name of Claire, which she changed to Alexandria to reflect her driven personality.

Her father is a medical doctor and her mother an advocate, and they live in the Eastern Cape overlooking Jeffreys Bay. Among other things, they have horses. Alexandria’s education was extremely privileged; she wanted for nothing.

After matric she embarked on a trip into the the wider world, ostensibly to “discover the meaning of life” and get “to the root of human suffering”, starting in India.

After an intensive trip with many great discoveries, including a night in prison, she headed back home to go to university, UCT.

In 2012 Procter started studying for a science degree in physics, discovered student politics, got involved in her unique wildly intelligent but disorderly manner, making the very significant observation which was to be instrumental in her start-up success.

“I put every inch of myself into my campaign ... The one thing I’m certain of is that I must stand out.”

Dressed in a bright red trenchcoat and blue wig, she spoke from the heart and not from prepared speeches, and thought she failed because she aimed for the top position instead of understanding the top is reached by due process.

“I have lost ingloriously.” Instead of accepting failure as a necessary part of growing up and “regarding it as market feedback ... on what works and what doesn't”, she behaved like a spoilt brat, burning her wig, not able to face anyone at university. And like a spoilt brat, she bought a ticket to climb Mount Kilimajaro.

Procter did join the SRC, but not as the president as she had vainly aimed for. She took up the position of day students co-ordinator “to help students who are living out and off campus”. Student accommodation was in crisis, and fortuitously this problem led to the idea of DigsConnect.

By operating at the heart of student affairs, Procter could see that a solution lay by connecting property and accommodation owners with desperate students in the same way as AirBnB works.

But ideas do not arise in a vacuum, and Procter was not the only student with this idea. Speed and agility would be key elements in her and her partner getting a website off the ground and becoming well branded among students, so they would turn to DigsConnect before going anywhere else.

Throwing R10 000 in notes around the campus after having placed stickers all over, gave Procter a huge advantage over any possible competitors.

Before long she and her partner had backing to the tune of R12 million, Procter had learnt her lesson well of standing out in a crowd.

Covid almost destroyed the start-up, but careful clawing back has continued to make DigsConnect the success it is.

“Upstart” is a fast and furious read, like the writer herself. She is young, erudite, bright, intelligent, extremely well read, and this start-up is just the beginning of her career.

Her story is inspirational. From a business perspective, it gives some important lessons in how to stand out from the crowd, and how to be grown up in the face of human adversity.