Don’t Punish Everyone
PayMPESA Helps Withdraw Your PayPal Funds to MPESA
There finally seems to be a legitimate, trustworthy way for Kenyans in Kenya to access their PayPal money quickly and easily: PayMPESA.
In case you are new here, some time last year PayPal did us a favour and made it possible to maintain a PayPal balance with a “Kenyan” PayPal account. This meant that we could finally receive money via PayPal in Kenya. However, withdrawing that money turned out to be a whole other story. Why? Because PayPal has no relationship (currently) with local banks. They need this in order to allow “Kenyan” PayPal accounts the ability to withdraw to a local, Kenyan, bank account. In plain English, this means that you can have money in PayPal but you cannot take it out.
The only way to take it out – and this is what PayPal themselves recommend – is to withdraw to a US bank account. Unfortunately, not many Kenyans have one so this is a very real and very serious problem when it comes to dealing with PayPal from Kenya.
Until now. With PayMPESA, all you have to do is to deposit your PayPal funds with them, and they will send it to you in Kenya via MPESA. Nice, eh? I think they are onto something very, very lucrative here and I wish them massive success.
Have you tried it yet? What do you think?
Online Strategy Vs Websites
I know you know, by now, that very many businesses in Kenya is thinking or has thought about getting online. Unfortunately, a lot of them simply just get an expensive website and fail to achieve anything significant via their internet efforts. Why is it so? This happens because many people think that once they have a website, things will suddenly magically happen.
Let’s take the example of a coffee farmers co-operative union who want to try and sell their coffee at better prices by using a website to reach customers directly. Nice strategy, ama? So what do the farmers do? They hire a ‘web designer’ who charges them Kshs 25,000/- for a nice flashy website (sadly most so called ‘web designers’ will not even make you a nice website). The farmers receive their website with glee and sit back and wait. Three months later, they are still sitting, and waiting. A while later still, they are still waiting, and waiting…
A website will not work for you untill you understand why you are getting it. Before you even get the website, you should think about:
- Who is your target customer?
- Is he/she online?
- How can you reach him online?
- Is it possible to get other customers (who may not be initially people that you target) using the Internet?
- How else can being online help the business?
Once you answer these or similar questions comprehensively, you will be in a better position to make a successful website. You will understand that a website is just a tool in your overall internet strategy.
Have a Good Business Idea? Tell Everyone!
A frequent question entrepreneurs have when they are just starting their company is: how secretive should I be about my idea? My answer: you should talk about it to almost anyone who will listen. This includes investors, entrepreneurs, people who work in similar areas, friends, people on the street, the bartender, etc.
There are lots of benefits to talking to people. You’ll get suggestions for improvements. You’ll discover flaws and hopefully correct them. You’ll learn a lot more about the sector/industry. You’ll learn about competitive products that exist or are being built. You’ll gauge people’s excitement level for the product and for various features. You’ll refine your sales and investor pitch. You might even discover your idea is a bad idea and save yourself years of hitting your head against the wall. – Chris Dixon
Unfortunately, when people think they have a good idea, they almost always want to be super-secretive about it to ‘protect it’. What are they afraid of? That someone will steal their idea and bring it to life? The fact of the matter is this: people do not copy ideas, they copy success. If your fabulous business idea is so simple that someone can understand it to the point of executing it in a matter of a few minutes, then the idea is probable not that fabulous. A successful business takes a lot more than just brilliant ideas. The key is in persistent tuning of the initial idea after a lot of rounds of feedback.
Related: Share your ideas liberally
Daily Nation’s “e paper”
I’m sure that by now you have seen or heard about The Nation‘s “e paper” initiative. Well, in case you haven’t, it is a new-ish project by the Daily Nation where they sell access to their paper for as low as $2.5 a week (about 220 why did they not quote in Kshs??).
Think about that – Kshs 220 a week. Right now we pay Kshs 40 a day so this fee of 220 for the epaper is about the same. Why would the Nation do this when they already essentially publish eveything in their paper at nation.co.ke? In my opinion, this is an experiment to try and see whether they can actually make reasonable sales of their content online. To understand why this is important, let’s step back in time to something Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape, said a while ago:
If you were running the New York Times, what would you do?
“Shut off the print edition right now. You’ve got to play offense. You’ve got to do what Intel did in ’85 when it was getting killed by the Japanese in memory chips, which was its dominant business. And it famously killed the business—shut it off and focused on its much smaller business, microprocessors, because that was going to be the market of the future. And the minute Intel got out of playing defense and into playing offense, its future was secure. The newspaper companies have to do exactly the same thing.
The financial markets have discounted forward to the terminal conclusion for newspapers, which is basically bankruptcy. So at this point, if you’re one of these major newspapers and you shut off the printing press, your stock price would probably go up, despite the fact that you would lose 90 percent of your revenue. Then you play offense. And guess what? You’re an internet company.” – Marc Andreessen
As Marc Andreessen points out, newspapers are in trouble. The problem is not merely that they’ve been slow to adapt to the web. It’s more serious than that: their problems are due to deep structural flaws that are exposed now that they have competitors. When the only sources of news were the wire services and a few big papers, it was enough to keep writing stories about how the president met with someone and they each said conventional things written in advance by their staffs. Readers were never that interested, but they were willing to consider this news when there were no alternatives. (Source: Y Combinator)
I must say that the newspaper business in Kenya is not as threatened as it is elsewhere but the Nation seem to be preparing for the inevitable in advance. This is always good to see, right?
Will the e paper be a success? That remains to be seen. Good luck to the Nation!
Zuqka Shuts Down
A while back, we had written that Zuqka was in terrible trouble. Zuqka is a portal site for weekend entertainment around Nairobi, but with a social networking component as well as video, audio and blogs. Sadly, even though it was backed by the powerful Daily Nation, Zuqka had been infested by spammers who had turned it into a lonely spam farm.
The good news – depending on how you look at it – is that Zuqka was shut down recently. Here’s the message you get when you visit www.zuqka.com:
Hi everyone,
We are looking forward to the new zuqka.com coming soon. But this does not mean the good times are over. Our e-mag is still available here: E-Mag and it will be available while we prepare the new zuqka.com for you.
Hope we keep seeing you here.
Zuqka Team
Normally, when one wants to upgrade a web service, they prepare the ‘new version’ and then switch over to it over a night or a weekend; or sometimes they run both old and new as users switch to the new. When the old version is shut down completely and users are made to wait for the new, then you know something went horribly wrong. In this case, the ‘old zuqka’ simply died a horrible spam death. That’s why it had to be shut down and taken offline completely.
Spammers 1 Zuqka 0
Let’s hope Zuqka comes back stronger than before.
How to Get An Online Job
We get so many emails about online jobs that we decided to do somethign about it and try to solve this problem permanently!
We’re pleased to announce that today we’re releasing our newest, and only, book: Dummies Guide to Getting an Online Job.
Have you ever thought about getting an online job? Imagine a job which you can do from your own bedroom, in your pyjamas. Imagine a job which you can do at your own time (you can wake up late everyday and spend the afternoons on Thursday playing tennis). Could this lifestyle be for you?
Have you looked long and hard and struggled to find legitimate online jobs? We wrote this book for you. Many people go out looking for online jobs without doing the basic preparations. They end up as an online scam statistic. Do not let this be your story. Our book guides you through the things that a beginners should know and we suggest several places where you can find well paying legitimate online jobs. We even go as far as guiding you through the use of one very popular online jobs website/service.