Do you Like Chapaa?

July 4, 2009 by Leave a Comment

So what’s this site about?

This site is about exploring the big wide web and discovering cool little things, novelle ideas, as well as ways and means of making our lives better. It focuses a lot on making money on the internet because I think it is about time us Kenyans got into this in a BIG way.

I know a little about this topic, and I am burning to share it with you. Why don’t you tell me what you need to know, so that I can write about it for your benefit? It’s super easy, you see. At the end of every article on this site, you can leave comments. It’s an easy way of seeking clarification. Why don’t you try it?

Alternatively, go here, or email me: chapaa[at]likechapaa.com (replace [at] with @)

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Tagged With:

Beat The Global Recession With An Online Job

July 1, 2009 by Leave a Comment

From the way things are going, doesn’t it look like soon enough milk will be be more expensive than beer? :p The good news is that there are plenty of undemanding ways to supplement your salary online.

From filling out short surveys to being a virtual PA or writing brief articles for online encyclopedias, you could soon be bringing in significant amounts of money every month. But how do you start? As companies scale back and cut jobs, sending people home, opportunities open up for freelancers. These organisations often turn to outside help to fill in the gaps left by employees sent home. So how do you attract clients when you have never had any?

  1. Establish yourself as credible and qualified – even if it means working for free, get some people who you can refer to as people who you’ve worked for before, doing similar things.
  2. Tell everyone you know that you are available for hire – initially, you will really need referrals.
  3. Network – networking helps build up connections with potential customers and it is vital. Some easy ways to network:
    • Join professional/local organisations – Depending on what organisation you join, you’ll gain a whole lot of things (the stuff that the organisation offers to its members) and also gain access to a number of potential clients.
    • Volunteer – Give back to the community by doing something that you love. You will not only help people but you will also broaden your network of potential clients.
  4. Never let an opportunity pass you by – always be on the look out for potential clients who haven’t yet heard of you and then tell them about you and what you can do for them.

Ready to start? Perhaps you could apply to become a freelance sales agent.

This post serves as notice that we intend to revive the online jobs section of this website. We’re working on something big regarding this but in the meantime, there shall be a weekly jobs listing & advice article which will list real online jobs that you could well do from Busia or Kericho. Why not subscribe to receive free updates and ensure you don’t miss anything?

Filed Under: Online Jobs

How To Find Profitable Internet Business Models

June 29, 2009 by 1 Comment

So, the much-hyped fibre optic cables are finally here! I don’t know about you, but I’ve been waiting for them for years… Why? The cables are very likely to change the way the internet is accessed and used in Kenya. The main benefits are going to, eventually, be cheaper and faster access to the internet. This probably means that:

  1. There is going to be a sharp increase in the number of people who access the internet
  2. There exists a big HUGE opportunity to make money online in Kenya and this opportunity shall increase as the number of internet users increases.

So, the big question (apart from reading Like Chapaa regularly – subscribe for free if you haven’t yet) is: how do you make money online? There exists big opportunity, but how do we take advantage of it? What can you do to make money online?

How To Find Profitable Business Models
When thinking of starting a business, any business, the part where most people struggle is the conceptualization of the business model. They don’t know what kind of business to start, what market to target, where the revenues are going to come from and so on. The same applies for web businesses, perhaps even more so. People often do not know what sites to create, or how they are actually going to earn money.

Wouldn’t it be great to have a place where you can go to and study, in detail, successfully employed web business models? Is there any place where you can go to to generate web business ideas?

Yes there is, and it is: www.flippa.com

Flippa is a place where people buy and sell websites. The site has had a lifetime total of USD 24 million in sales so a lot of business gets done there! When you visit the site you will find lots of sites for sale. Obviously, some of them are not worth your time so you need a way to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. You can do it in two ways: click on “just sold” or “browse all listings“.

Clicking on “just sold” will let you view websites that people actually bought. These sites are obviously built on sound web business models as they would not have been bought otherwise. You can click on each site sold to learn more about it and, possibly, why the purchaser paid for and bought it.

Clicking on “browse all listings” is even better. It lets you see a long list of sites up for sale but not yet sold. The thing to do is to browse through the list and check on the number of bids. If people have actually placed a bid on a particular website, it means that they are prepared to buy it. This probably means that the website in question is built on a good and workable web business model. You can click on each listing to learn more about the website.

Now, this is where things get interesting. Since people genuinely want to sell those websites, they will give all sorts of information about them, including details of how they built them, where they get traffic from, where their revenues come from and so on. Better yet, you can ask questions about specific points and the seller will gladly respond to them. Think of the possibilities: you can learn the ins and outs of a web business and then just duplicate it elsewhere.

Just today, I learnt that you can actually be paid for offering free magazines to your website’s visitors. I sincerely do not know anywhere else where you can learn so much detail about existing businesses for free. It’s a goldmine.

I haven’t even touched on the very hot prospects of buying a web business and running it yourself, or improving it and selling it for HUGE profits. Therefore, stay tuned to this site…subscribe to receive free email updates. Or by RSS.

Have a question? Don’t hesitate to ask!

Filed Under: Cool Sites, Make Money, Small Business, Tips Hacking and Reviews Tagged With: ,

Customer Service

June 27, 2009 by 2 Comments

I was at a bank today, one of the nice big ones (the mighty KCB, in fact). Guess what? I was in line for a hole hour and, get this, there were only two people ahead of me in the queue! The lady who was serving us kept disappearing into some back room for long stretches of time. God knows why!

So it got me thinking. Why do banks in Kenya always, always have long queues? And why is it that there is always a counter or two with no teller present? I cannot find a logical reason why “management” would let this happen. Can you? Perhaps it is the same flawed logic that opened up the opportunity for, and led to, the rise and rise of Equity bank. Who knows?

This just goes to show yet again that the average customer in Kenya is maltreated. And not just by banks, by everyone – with Safaricom being the chief and most visible culprit!

If you think about it, you will realise that that the maltreatment of the customer is not just a Kenyan affair, it happens everywhere. Often, the mentality is that customer service is some sort of necessary evil. Why else is customer service often an afterthought? Why else would companies, by the truckloads, be signing up to outsource customer support services (think overseas call center)? Jeez, outsource customer service? Really?

Customer service is not a cost center. Customer service is a profit center. Indeed it is the cheapest form of marketing.

Photo by 23am.com

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Tagged With:

The 13 Principles of Starting a Start-Up

June 24, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Paul Graham shares 13 sentences on startups. (Click the link for more info).

1. Pick good cofounders
Cofounders are for a startup what location is for real estate. You can change anything about a house except where it is. In a startup you can change your idea easily, but changing your cofounders is hard.

2. Launch fast
The reason to launch fast is not so much that it’s critical to get your product to market early, but that you haven’t really started working on it till you’ve launched.

3. Let your idea evolve
This is the second half of launching fast. Launch fast and iterate.

4. Understand your users
You can envision the wealth created by a startup as a rectangle, where one side is the number of users and the other is how much you improve their lives.

5. Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent
Ideally you want to make large numbers of users love you, but you can’t expect to hit that right away.

6. Offer surprisingly good customer service
Customers are used to being maltreated. Most of the companies they deal with are quasi-monopolies that get away with atrocious customer service.

7. You make what you measure
Merely measuring something has an uncanny tendency to improve it.

8. Spend little
Most startups fail before they make something people want, and the most common form of failure is running out of money.

9. Get ramen profitable
“Ramen profitable” means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders’ living expenses.

10. Avoid distractions
Nothing kills startups like distractions. The worst type are those that pay money: day jobs, consulting, profitable side-projects.

11. Don’t get demoralized
Though the immediate cause of death in a startup tends to be running out of money, the underlying cause is usually lack of focus.

12. Don’t give up
Though the immediate cause of death in a startup tends to be running out of money, the underlying cause is usually lack of focus.

13. Deals fall through
It’s very dangerous to morale to start to depend on deals closing, not just because they so often don’t, but because it makes them less likely to.

Filed Under: Make Money, Small Business Tagged With:

How to do what you love

June 22, 2009 by 4 Comments

What do you love?How many people do you know who really love what they do? How many people would keep on doing what they do even if there was no pay? I bet there aren’t so many such people, are there?

But yet, we are always told that to really excel at something, you need to love doing it and be passionate about it. How do we get there, how do we find such things?

An interesting and practical way to do what you love is to “keep producing”. For example, if you have a day job you don’t take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? Or are you waiting for that undefined moment in time when you can *start*? As long as you’re producing, you’ll know you’re not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate.

“Always produce” is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you’re supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. “Always produce” will discover your life’s work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof. (Paul Graham)

So that’s my advice to you, don’t wait till God-knows-when to start doing what you love. Do you even know what you love? How many even discover something they love to work on? A few hundred thousand, perhaps, out of billions. That’s why you need to start doing something, anything. “Always Produce” until you find something that really tickles your fancy.

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Tagged With:

Respect

June 17, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Yesterday I had the good fortune to make a presentation to a potential buyer to one of the companies that we are trying to sell. The young man just oozes self confidence and, I must say, some cockiness. He was very interested in the company up for sale and we spent a good while talking at length about it. Then things went to the dogs.

This young man, being very eager to see us have him buy the company, did something that pissed me off. His self confidence grew into self importance and arrogance. I felt the change, when he started viewing me as someone he could manipulate and/or coerce. Believe it or not, he delved deep into personal questions and made some not very subtle hints that if I should “assist” him, he would assist me – his main form of assistance being the implied subtle offer of a job with his company. How sad. The man could possibly have known that I do not care about jobs in the slightest.

So what’s going to happen next? His bid was immediately disqualified and he lost the deal. Why? He failed to respect me, and the organisation that I represent.

How do you treat the people and organisations that you come in contact with? Do you treat them with the respect that they deserve?

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