Helping you pay the bills
Well, we had yet another mini competition the other day. Today, we’re announcing the people who won themselves a copy of “Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days“. They are:
That’s how easy it is to be a winner over here, stay tuned for more and better competitions.
Incase you want this book, we’re sorry your only ope is Amazon or a bookshop near you.
Pata Jibu – this is an interesting looking Kenyan Q&A site. The design looks sharp and smart. Good job, I wish them success. They just need to market the site a little more and they could make it. Maybe.
DealFish – there are so many directory-type sites in the Kenyan space. And so many of them are so poorly designed. DealFish is not among those, it is extremely good looking and functional if you ask me. Real Kenyan quality, for a change. I just hope that they get the success they deserve…
50-50
KenyaSource.net – I don’t know, I don’t like the design. And it is yet another site in what is becoming a crowded space (directory-type sites). Despite not liking the design (which may be down to personal taste), I think the site is well made and it works. Their success will depend on how well they execute their business plan. Good luck, and kudos.
Flops
The Kenya Revenue Authority – There is no doubt that the KRA site is changing Kenya. I applaud them for bringing essential Goverment services online. I especially appreciate the online PIN and VAT services. Kudos KRA, you are doing exactly what Kenya needs! However, you can easily do it better. The KRA site is not particularly well designed, there is little in the way of usability design and your service is just “down” way too often. When you offer some services “online only”, you need to make sure the site is always up and working. I believe the KRA has the resources to do this the right way and that is why I am listing them as a “Flop” even though they’ve done so well.
Here’s a typical complaint against the KRA: I just hate it that if you were to visit their offices at Times Tower you’d be told that everything is accessible online while it’s like a puzzle to navigate the site!
Please act on this and improve, dear KRA.
If you are interested in entrepreneurship, innovation or you are just fascinated by the special chemistry and drive that created some of the best technology companies in the world, this book offers both wisdom and engaging insights—straight from the source.
Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company.
Where did they get the ideas that made them rich? How did they convince investors to back them? What went wrong, and how did they recover?
Nearly all technical people have thought of one day starting or working for a startup. For them, this book is the closest you can come to being a fly on the wall at a successful startup, to learn how it’s done.
But ultimately these interviews are required reading for anyone who wants to understand business, because startups are business reduced to its essence. The reason their founders become rich is that startups do what businessesdo—create value—more intensively than almost any other part of the economy. How? What are the secrets that make successful startups so insanely productive? Read this book, and let the founders themselves tell you. – Amazon
This is an absolute must read if you’re job, your passion, or both (if you’re lucky) has anything to do with creating technical innovation. “Founders at Work” is a wonderful meander through the stories of successful company founders – across several decades. Far from focusing on just those who made it big during the first dot-com boom or those who are profiting from Web 2.0, Jessica (the author) also includes some of the true pioneers in the field. She recognizes that, not only do these industry veterans have valuable stories to convey but, since many of them are helping to steer companies and venture capital funds to this day, their advice is quite topical and current.
You want to buy this book, trust me. Head over to Amazon.com to get it from about $5 (plus shipping). It is sadly not available (and probably will never be available) in our Chapaa Shop.
Alternatively, dear readers, you can get a copy of this book free from us. We recently gave away 4 copies of “The Richest Man in Babylon” and, today, we’re giving away a copy (or copies) of Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days. Interested?
All you have to do is leave a comment below. You can say anything at all (but it helps if you add constructively to the discussion). We’ll pick a winner randomly in three days. Good luck!
Update 25/10/2010: This competition is over and the winners have been picked.
Have you ever started your own business? Why not? What was it like?
I was reading a very, very interesting article on Hacker News on what to do when your new business just fails, and fails, and fails again. The initiator of the article is an entrepreneur whose products have not fared well. Below is a select few responses that he got. Business wisdom:
You seem to have been terribly misled. Only very rarely do products sell themselves. 99% of the time, the product is largely incidental to the sales process. Your idea doesn’t matter one jot, what matters is how well you can connect to customers and really sell to them.
Let me tell you about a fine English gentleman by the name of Joe Ades, now sadly no longer with us. Joe wore Savile Row suits and lived in a three-bedroomed apartment on Park Avenue. He spent most nights at the Café Pierre with his wife, sharing a bottle of his usual – Veuve Clicquot champagne. You might assume that Joe was a banker or an executive, but in fact Joe sold potato peelers on the street for $5 each, four for $20.
I urge you, I implore you, I beg you, stop what you’re doing and watch Joe in action:
That is what business looks like. Sometimes, once in a million, you luck upon a product so amazing the world beats a path to your door. For most of us, the best we can hope for is to be some chump with a thousand boxes of vegetable peelers. Anybody can sit out on the street with a box of peelers, but Joe sold them. Joe made his peelers sing, he made them seem like magic. He took a humble piece of stamped metal and created theatre. He did something so simple and strange and wonderful that people would buy a fistful of his peelers, just so they could tell their friends about this little Englishman they saw in Union Square.
Look at the Fortune 500, tell me what you see. I see grocery stores, drugstores, oil companies, banks, a funny little concern that sells sugar water. I see a whole lot of hard work and very few great ideas.
Forget about striking it big with a great idea, it’s just as childish and naïve as imagining that the tape you’re recording in your garage is going to make you a rockstar. Get out there and talk to customers. Find out what they need, what annoys them, what excites them. Build the roughest, ugliest piece of crap that you can possibly call a product. If you’re not ashamed of it, you’ve spent too long on it. Try and sell it. Some people will say “I’m not buying that piece of crap, it doesn’t even do X”. If X isn’t stupid, implement X. Some people, bizarrely, will say “yes, I will buy your piece of crap”. It is then and only then that you are actually developing a product. Until you’ve got a customer, it’s just an expensive hobby. Paying customer number one is what makes it a product.
“Honestly, there are 2 types of folks who make it: the lucky ones, and the persistent ones. Its hard as hell (and heck I haven’t beaten it yet) but you have to ignore the burnout and be one of the persistent ones”
“Why are you paying so much attention to your “launch day”? It’s an entrepreneurial myth that there is a mighty “launch” that sets the tone of your business. When was Twitter “launched”? When was Carbonmade “launched”? When was Balsamiq “launched”? Or SquareSpace, MailChimp, or Fog Creek? Sure, they “launched”, but who cared?
You are building a business. It does not spring from your forehead like Athena, or get pooped out of your pet Nibbler like Dark Matter on Futurama. Listen to what everyone else here has to say. Sure, pick something with favorable long-tail SEO dynamics. Sure, pick something with a viral loop. Sure, build yourself a tribe.
But then, for god’s sake, pick something you can stick with, nurture, protect, and grow over the long run. That thing you don’t have, that keep calling “a fucking great idea”? Most of us call it “a winning lottery ticket”. Stop thinking about playing the lottery. Get back to work.”
“Hang in there man.
What’s touched upon in various ways in all the comments is that “PR” and “Media Coverage” is not the end all be all. In fact the successfully software startups I know STILL email individual potential customers on a daily basis.
I think one of the great myths of the internet is that you should just create a product, throw it up on the internet with some SEO and AdWords and the customers will come. Sure it might work for a few people, but by and large you are still growing a business. And you often grow a business one person at a time, hopefully later you can learn to scale sales.
Often what is missing from people’s MVP’s and business plans is how are you going to very specifically market to your target customers, and what the cost of customer acquisition is. If you can’t identify a way to find your target customer, you’re going to have a problem. Again, I don’t think general SEO and SEM is going to work.
Don’t give up on your idea, start emailing people. 50, 100 people a day. Convert them one at a time. If your business idea is not specifically just some sexy piece of technology, direct mail may work too (if you don’t also have to educate people on why they need your product.)
Journalist want to write about what’s hot, not about what is a potentially decent idea in a decent market. They want to talk about iphones, ipads, and facebook, and the latest jargon.
Anyways, start finding your target customers and email them. Don’t worry about email campaign tools and crazy stuff, just starting email or calling them one at a time. Building a web based software business doesn’t mean you can just skip sales.”
I would say this is some of the best advice that can be given to new entrepreneurs. You can read the rest of the article here.
On 14th November, the League of Young Professionals will host Dr. Laila Macharia, the chairperson of Kenya Private Developer’s Association. She will talk on “Preparing for the Coming Property Boom“.
Dr. Laila Macharia 39, is principal of Scion Real, a Nairobi-based advisory and investment firm focused on real estate and infrastructure. In addition to her rich background in investment services, Dr. Macharia has wide experience managing international projects and transactions including at the New York office of Clifford Chance, a leading global law firm, and at Kaplan & Stratton in Nairobi.
She also has a strong track record leading constructive change in the private and public sectors. At USAID’s regional mission in East Africa, for instance, she led an effort to restructure, regionalize and regulate the freight industry along the Northern Corridor.
She is currently the Chairman of the Kenya Private Developers Association, a Trustee and Former Chairman of the Lollipop Project, the Vice Chairman of the Republican Club of Kenya and a director of several private companies.
Laila Macharia is a corporate finance lawyer admitted to practice in Kenya as well as in New York and Maryland. She holds a BA in Planning from the University of Oregon and several law degrees, including a doctorate in law from Stanford University. Dr. Macharia teaches executive education at Strathmore Business School and contributes regularly to the Business Daily newspaper as a columnist.
She is also among the six Kenyans who have been named Africa Leadership Initiative (ALI) Fellows class 2010.
The talk will be at the Marble Arch Hotel in Nairobi on 14 November 2010 starting at 6 p.m. Entry is free but please carry Kshs 250/- to cater for ‘refreshments’.
Kindly plan to attend. It’s a talk you can’t afford to miss. The Like Chapaa team will be there, we hope to see you!
Over the last two months or so, the number of people who visit Like Chapaa per day has increased by roughly 60%. This increase has resulted in more business for us and we are, naturally, incredibly happy at the fruits of our labor. Today, I wanted to share the things we did to make this increase a reality. (We hope that it is the things listed here that the actually resulted in our site-visitor surge but it may well have been caused by factors beyond our control).
How we increased our site’s visitor numbers
1. We invested in social media
We built a Twitter Application and a Facebook Application. This has resulted in increased numbers of people from those social networks coming to Like Chapaa. See, normally, people wanting to grow in social media just create quick profiles in Facebook and Twitter and start getting friends, etc. We realised we did not have that kind of time so we chose to build applications so as to automate things a little bit (everyone should do this!). This resulted in us being able to do some really cool things: for example, you can leave comments on this site using your Twitter/Facebook profile, among other things.
Twitter and Facebook combined now send us about 30% of the visitors to this website.
2. Continuous SEO
Our strong point, of course, is search engine optimisation and making sure everything that we do earns us favorably as far as SEO goes is a priority.
I must say we have done pretty well as far as this goes. For example, when you search for “make money in Kenya“, our website dominates the Google search results pages. Search engines, and Google in particular, send us 60+% of all the people who view our site.
If you are looking to grow your site, please do not forget Google. Social media may be sexy but you just cannot afford to ignore Google!
3. Uniqueness/Creativity
I do not know how to fully explain this. It seems that the Internet “rewards” you for uniqueness and creativity. Like Chapaa is, strictly speaking, a blog. You would not expect us to create or be involved in projects such as DukaPress, yet we are. The “side projects” have earned us both money, and countless new visitors to our websites. Two examples:
4. Getting Like Chapaa on other websites
Well, perhaps surprisingly, Like Chapaa is now listed at both Mashada and KenyaMoja. It seems that these two sites get quite a lot of traffic because they send us quite a lot of visitors. We were only recently listed on Mashada and that resulted in a visible bump in the number of people who come to Like Chapaa. Like Chapaa has also found its way onto Wazua, Kenya Unlimited, several Kenyan blogs and other smaller sites. The traffic that these nice websites send to us is significant!
I would not say that this is our doing because we did not ask anyone to include Like Chapaa on their sites. I would put it down to “if you create good and useful content, people will notice you”.
5. Email Marketing
Perhaps not many know this: Like Chapaa has a self-grown email marketing list of about 800 people. We do not send newsletters out often but all the articles published by Like Chapaa end up in the inboxes of our subscribers. Most of them always click back to Like Chapaa. This is a steady and stable source of website visitors for us.
Conclusion
The story of how we have grown Like Chapaa should inspire you. We have never ever spent any money to market this website and we started very quiety and, for months, got about seven visitors a day. But we persevered and, now, it is almost on autopilot – we just grow bigger. I put most of it down to luck and good fortune but here are some tips that may help you:
Good luck with building your site. 🙂
PS, Incase you do not know, you can hire us if you want help to grow your website.
Well, we had a mini-competition the other day. We decided to give the book to everyone who participated. Cool, he? maybe next time pia wewe utapata kitu just for participating!
So here are the winners, in no particular order:
Guys, thank you for participating. Please enjoy the book. Do let us know how you like it. 🙂
If you are late and you want The Richest Man in Babylon, you can get it by clicking here.
We’re aiming to have competitions like this regularly on Like Chapaa, please stay tuned. What kind of prizes would you like? Leave a comment below to tell us.
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