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Hustling Online Just Became A Little Easier

July 28th, 2010

DukaPressSo tuseme you want “in” on this Internet thing. You’ve heard people make money online, and you want your share. Of course the first thing you should do is get yourself onto a computer and head over to this blog and read up on all the things you can do to make money online.

There are hundreds of things you can do to make money online. One of the easiest, most fulfilling and most intuitive ways of doing so it to sell something online. This is something that most people already understand – you’ve probably sold dozens of things in the offline world. Selling those same things (or others) online may be a new experience but it certainly is something you already understand.

What do you need to do to start making money online in Kenya by selling stuff online? I’d argue that you FIRST need to think hard about your business. Selling online is no different from selling anywhere else. Your business plan must make sense if you are to succeed. You must think realistically and sensibly about what you want to sell, where you will find it, how much you will sell for, how you will deliver it to customers and how you will market and advertise your new shop. This is the hard part.

Next, you should think about technical issues – i.e. find a way to set up an online shop. E-commerce technology has existed for years and there are lots and lots of options here. A sad note is that in Kenya, even very simple online shops will usually cost you at least Kshs 50,000/-. This is a bit high, of course, but it is justifiable given the complexities involved.

Of course this was true only up to last week. Last week DukaPress was launched. What is DukaPress? It is a tool that lets you start your own simple online shop in less than 15 minutes. Have you ever tried to get a blog over at WordPress.com? That’s how easy it is to get a DukaPress shop up and running.

Why DukaPress?
There are many other options to DukaPress (akina Magento, osCommerce, CubeCart, etc etc), so what makes DukaPress worth it? In my opinion, DukaPress is probably the simplest way to get a fully functional online duka. Take Magento, for example, it has a fantastic feature-list but actually setting up and running a Magento shop is a nightmare that is too much to bear for the average person.

How Easy Is DukaPress?
Have a look at this online shop. That shop is powered by DukaPress. It was built in ten minutes! It is a fully featured shop and can accept payments via: AlertPay, Paypal, MPESA, yuCash, and ZAP among others. If you want to build the same exact shop in even less time, you can do so!

All you need to do is:

How easy is that? Should take you a few minutes in total if everything is ready! If you’re stuck, we’re here to help.

DukaPress is and always will be free to use, and it is from Kenya.

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Posted in Internet Culture, Small Business

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Take Control Of Your Business By Working Less

July 21st, 2010

Recently I was reading a book that was talking about the need humans have to be able to control things. While there were several experiments cited, one of the experiments was done in a nursing home where they had some younger people visit and spend time with two groups of residents. The first group could specify when their visitor would come and see them and how long they would stay. The second group could not specify when their visitors would come nor how long they would stay.

What the researchers found is that the group that had control over their visitors were happier, healthier, and were prescribed less medication than the group that could not control the visitors. 6 months after the study concluded a very sad after effect was noticed. A higher than normal percentage of the group in control of the visits passed away or became much sicker. What the researchers concluded (but hadn’t anticipated) was that being in control not only makes you happier and healthier but losing this control is much more damaging than never having the control in the first place.

Entrepreneurs Need to Control
One of the common characteristics of most entrepreneurs is their independence and need to control. When you think about it, it’s not that surprising. Some of the most oft-cited reasons for wanting to be an entrepreneur are:

  1. Be Your Own Boss
  2. Ability to Work From Home
  3. Set Your Own Schedule

In each of these cases, an individual is control of their work environment and their day-to-day activities. They intuitively know that gaining control makes them happier than not being in control.

The Reality of Owning Your Own Business
The realities of being a business owner don’t always match with the idyllic lifestyle of the entrepreneur who is their own boss and sets their own schedule.

You’re often in a deadline business. You can never rest on your laurels. There are always deadlines to meet. Customers that leave you. Customers that pay you slowly (A few that don’t pay you at all). Projects that get canceled. Amazingly, you are always on the hot seat – even when things happen beyond your control. Client expectations are often unreasonable. Competition is stiff.

How to Get Control Back
A clever entrepreneur is business owner who has built systems and processes into their company so that they aren’t critical to the day-to-day operations of their business. They don’t “hope”. They take control by creating systems that eliminates most of the uncertainty of a business.

  • Instead of hoping that existing clients give good referrals or people just happen to find you online or in the yellow pages, they create a predictable marketing system that delivers new prospects whenever they want to grow the business.
  • Instead of relying on client defined projects, they create products and services that they sell. They aren’t subject to unreasonable client demands because they already have the product.
  • Instead of worrying about cash flow and slow paying customers, they set up a billing process that means they get paid for the products that they provide.
  • Instead of trying to count on unreliable vendors, they define the production process.

These are a just a few examples of how you can gain control of your business. By not having to work for every single prospect and every single dollar that you’re owed, you can spend your time building your business or doing whatever you want. And once you gain control over your business, and hence, your life, you will become happier. It’s just human nature.

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Posted in Small Business

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DukaPress

July 13th, 2010

The Like Chapaa team has been hard at work trying to change the shape of the e-commerce landscape in Kenya. We have a dream to to make it possible for even the least tech-savvy people in Kenya to do e-commerce quickly and easily. Has our labor got any fruits?

DukaPress. Coming soon. Sooner than you think.

Interested? Be sure not to miss any updates by subscribing to Like Chapaa today, or signing up to receive free email updates so that you are notified as soon as we officially launch.

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Posted in Cool Sites, Small Business

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Websites Are Overated

July 8th, 2010

When setting up a website, it will be more profitable for you on the whole if you prioritize getting good content down before you go into the nitty-gritty of what the site should look like. Most people spend too much time worrying about how the site looks and fail to give the same attention to the content of the website.

Advertisement experts recognize the value of quality content. It is best to get your message out to people in a clear way so that they can understand. In the ad world, ads are constructed around a central concept. This concept must be translatabled into language your customers can understand before you even begin to elaborate on it. Unfortunately, many people spend too much time on fancy designs and features when they move into online marketing tactics. This is reflected when customers visit websites seeking more information about a good or service of interest and find the sites useless.

Since this is such a basic principle of advertising, it is difficult to know why companies have not integrated the formula of great content/good design onto their websites immediately after creating them. The best designed website in the world will fall flat if its content is nonexistent or poorly written. Especially when pitted against an ad with simply “good” copywriting.

So, why invest more time and effort into your content before you have constructed your entire website? People are sophisticated. By throwing up a smokescreen of flashy design and empty content you are ultimately discrediting yourself and your product, as your customers will be able to see through the show to the lack of content within. When people are making decisions about items important to their lives, they like to feel as though websites have informed rather than entertained them.

Also, writing is a solid foundation for anything online. Your main mode of interaction with your website-browsing customer is the content he or she is reading online. Think about it: would you rather buy from a website with beautiful graphics that offers no real information? Or would you rather buy from a website with rather plain design but clear and thorough information about its wares? In this situation, it almost seems as though the ill-designed website practices modesty while the well-designed website compensates for something (Kizuri cha jiuza, kibaya chajitembeza). Whether this is true or not, a customer’s perception that he or she is on firm footing when making a decision is paramount.

If you are not comfortable writing your own content, it can be easily accomplished anyway. Writers are there for hiring, whether you want to add one permanently to your staff or hire freelancers from project to project. It is usually best to hire a writer to work with your art people, or to use the same freelancers on a consistent basis. You must find a writer who understands the voice you want to have in your copy and who is able to put ideas in a way that explains them exactly how you would like. This is not always quick or easy to find. It is worth the expense and search, however, to have someone who is aware of your organization’s current and future goals and who is familiar with your staff.

Content is King.

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Posted in Internet Culture, Small Business

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Predictable Success

June 25th, 2010

This books explores the ‘secret code’ to achieving success in business. The author, a serial entrepreneur having started over 40 businesses, states that there is indeed actually a formula to success, its just that we do not know about it.

In his own words, “As a serial entrepreneur who has personally launched over 40 businesses, and as a consultant and coach to hundreds of business leaders, I’ve come to realize that the ‘growth code’ is out there, in plain view for anyone who knows where to look. There is indeed a code, a pattern, a DNA if you will, to achieving predictable success. The difficulty is that because most business leaders work in a limited number of business environments during their career, they don’t have the opportunity to see the pattern recur often enough to successfully decode it.”

Download the book: Achieving Predictable Success

What do you think?

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Posted in Small Business

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Landlord 2.0

June 21st, 2010

I want to be the “Digital Landlord”. I want to own website real estate that I can “rent” to small businesses.

This isn’t about owning domain names since that would not work. People would just buy different domain names – they aren’t that important for local businesses.

No, this is about owning the building, or the website in this case, that is set up such that it is like a goldmine for people, renters. Renters would be willing to pay landlords money if the property is on a prime piece of real estate that practically guarantees a certain level of business, right?

It is Better to Rent than Sell

One of the first rules of real estate is never sell properties (or something like that). What it means is that you don’t usually want to sell a great piece of real estate if you can make money hand-over-fist from it.

We’re marketers with web development skills. We could build websites and sell them to our clients, but what’s the value in that? We would rather make mostly passive income by renting out an extremely high value service month after month.

Websites are worth the amount of time that the designer puts into the website plus a premium based on the designer’s/company’s reputation and ability.

But let’s change the perception on that product from a website to a marketing system. If it can generate Kshs 30,000 consistently, the business owners aren’t going to pay for the amount of effort it takes to create, they’re going to pay for that high value that it generates for them. I don’t know too many business owners who wouldn’t pay you Kshs 5,000 to generate Kshs 30,000 in new revenue.

Let’s say that you can do this just 2 or 3 times a month consistently. Don’t you think the business owner would be more than willing to pay you Kshs 5,000 a month for a LONG TIME than Kshs 25,000 just once?

Build a Ton of Buildings
If this works one time, why not do it over and over again? I can build a bunch of different buildings, or “client generating systems”. And I rent out a part of those buildings to a ton of different clients.

Let’s put some numbers on it:

  • I can rent out my system to 100 different clients in the same industry across the country at Kshs 5,000 per month (I won’t get too greedy)
  • That’s Ksh 500,000 per month for just one “building”
  • Once that works, I can build 20 different “buildings”.

What’s better than being a digital landlord? And I’m sure you can figure out the math for the monthly income….

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Posted in Small Business, Tips Hacking and Reviews

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What If The People You Outsource To Are Not As Good As You?

June 18th, 2010

Following yesterday’s post, Outsource Everything, I got a few emails from people who wanted to outsource but were unsure whether anyone could get the job done as well as it needed to be. That’s an understandable reaction and it was something that I fought when we tried to outsource some of our work. Sometimes it feels like it’s more work writing up a description of what needs to be done rather than just doing it yourself.

So I put together a list of 5 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Care if Your Outsourcers Can’t Do the Work as well as You Can:

  1. So what? – My first response is so what if they can’t do the work as well as you. I guarantee you that they won’t be able to do things as well as you can because they can’t read your mind. The problem is that most people expect the work to be perfect right away. It doesn’t have to be. If someone else can do 80% of the work and you just have to go back and clean up the last 20%, you still saved a lot of time. Unless you find someone you really trust (and that takes a lot of experience), you should do some type of quality control over what’s done. Don’t just think you can hand it off and forget it.
  2. You’d be surprised how well they can do the work – This isn’t always true but it happens more often than you would think. Often times I send off instructions and just know that I will get some horrible deliverable and there will be a million questions along the way. Then I’m pleasantly surprised to see that they exceed my expectations.
  3. Some things you’ll never be able to get rid of - There have been some tasks that I wanted to hand off to someone else to do because I didn’t like doing them but then I realized there was no way to do this. These aren’t tasks that you should be outsourcing because they aren’t something that you can provide step-by-step instructions to. These are things that you have to think about and there is no way that someone else will be able to know what you’re thinking. Just outsource everything else, bite the bullet, and do this one yourself.
  4. Don’t hire them to do everything you do – Make sure you have specific tasks for them. Don’t provide them high-level needs and expect that they will think of everything. If you can’t write it down in steps, it’s not something that you should hire them to do.
  5. Find things that are monotonous – A lot of your activities might have a “thinking” component and a monotonous component. Don’t be afraid of doing the “thinking” parts and handing off the monotonous components. We do this a lot when we outsource web design. We determine what the overall design and feel of the site is and then outsource the actually coding with clear instruction on what needs to be done.

The key is to remember that you’re not hiring someone to solve world peace. You’re just hiring them to do some monotonous tasks for you. It’s not going to be everything you do but you’ll start finding more and more tasks that you can write instructions to and that you can hand off. And don’t be afraid to break it down so you provide most of the brainpower and they do the rest.

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Posted in Small Business, Tips Hacking and Reviews

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How To Run a Virtual Business

June 8th, 2010

I hate to call our business a virtual one, but that really is what it is. We don’t have a bricks-and-mortar office location (unless the post office counts) besides our home offices. Some clients might consider it unprofessional but by running our business remotely, we are able to operate more efficiently and at a lower cost. We have created systems to allow us to operate our virtual business with the same effectiveness if we had an office full of people.
The Advantages of Operating in a Virtual Business

  • The biggest advantage of running a business is the significant cost savings. Without having to pay tens of thousands per month in rent, we have more flexibility in our cash flow and a much lower overhead costs.
  • We can run the business remotely. We are not tied to a particular location. We can quite literally work from anywhere in the world.
  • No one has to be in the same location. For instance, I study in the US and only come home occasionally but the business still runs smooth! We talk often and e-mail several times a day, but we aren’t forced to be in the same location. We can also hire employees and sub-contractors from different locations.
  • You can live wherever you want. This is similar to the last one but it’s a bit different. When I come back home I do not want to live in Nairobi. If our office was based there, this would not even be an option.

Running our Virtual Business
Creating a virtual business was a necessity based on how we started – part time. If we weren’t working on the business full-time, there was no way that we could have justified creating a bricks-and-mortar office for a business in which we almost never meet our clients. Once we went full-time, there was no need to change what worked. Here are some of the simple steps we took by necessity and now, by choice, to run our “virtual busines”.

  1. Don’t Look like a Virtual Business – A business without an office, doesn’t always inspire the most confidence in potential clients, so make sure that you have all the outward appearance of a professional business. This is pretty easy and usually just means having office phone lines, publicly displayed physical offices (which my actually be your dad’s), normal office hours, etc.
  2. Always Choose Online Software – By necessity, we have always gone with online applications as opposed to desktop applications so that we could access the same information from multiple locations. For example, we are a huge fan of Google Apps over any of the other applications. We are also thinking of going with the online version of Quickbooks over their standard desktop applications. One of the other advantages is that it provides more dependability. Even if a computer crashes, we have nothing to worry about since it’s just a web site away.
  3. Make Sure Your Tools Work Remotely – Similar to the last point but one of the first things that we did when setting up our business was to get a VoIP business line. It’s not that big of a deal now but it was pretty new then. We wanted something that we could operate from anywhere and that was configurable and accessible from the web. We also use tools like eFax so that we can both receive faxes and we have an online version, which is much easier for us to operate with. We also have e-mail accessilbe phones so that we aren’t tied to our computers (which need to be laptops, of course!)
  4. Keep Soft Copies of Everything – Again, by necessity, we have been forced to keep things online instead of printing them out and dealing with them by hand. Instead of filing cabinets, we try to keep everything on an online back-up site.

The Future of Our Remote Business
Someday, we may get a formal office location, and that’s only because it will be more cost advantageous when we bring some of our outsourced work in house. However, that doesn’t mean that we won’t still run a virtual business. Since I’m so lazy, there is no way I will be able to make it into an office everyday or have less than 2 vacations a month. Therefore, we will still need to run everything remotely.

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Posted in Internet Culture, Make Money, Small Business, Tips Hacking and Reviews

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21 Ways To Make Money Online

May 10th, 2010

This post is a quick answer to all those among you, dear readers, who write in asking, “how do I make money online?”

We provide an ebook below that gives a brief description of 21 legitimate ways to make money online. I know that most of you have probably heard about all these methods but I hope that this article inspires you to do something with your knowledge.

What is the purpose of acquiring knowledge? Knowledge is only useful if one can use it to his/her advantage. It is important to read widely to get as much knowledge as possible. It is more important to do something with the knowledge that you gain. Set your goals high, make a plan and just do it. Don’t think or otherwise procrastinate, just do it. You’ll be surprised at what you can achieve.

What if you fail? So what? Everyone fails. Do you know of any smart or successful people that you admire? What you do not know is how many times they have failed in the past. If you have never failed at something before, it probably means that you have never really tried to do anything before. Besides, once you get successful no one will even remember your past mistakes and failures.

So, grab the ebook and get started. Do something, don’t just sit there!

Download: 21 Ways To Make Money Online

The ebook is somewhat dated (old) and does not go into much detail. Please leave a comment below if you require any more information – I’ll be happy to help with any explanations or advice.

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Posted in Make Money, Small Business

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Are We Missing Something?

May 3rd, 2010

I have a story for you: a few years ago, one of my best friends quit his job. He used to work at one of the best performing companies in the Nairobi stock exchange. He quit so that he could set up his own advertising agency.

Guess what? His parents and his whole family, really, were up in arms over his decision. They could not believe why anyone would leave such a high paying job. His uncles even took time visiting him to ‘advise’ him to go back to his old job. To this day, one of his uncles always calls him with contacts of managers at large companies – he asks my friend to send his CV to the managers so that he can ‘make something out of his life’.

What you probably won’t believe is that my friend’s business is doing quite well. He has about twelve employees now, and has been profitable since his first month. Yet his family still refers to his work as ‘jua kali nonsense’. He should go get a ‘real’ job like everyone else, they say.

Really?

Recently in Thika, I heard of a bizarre incident. My friend’s dad was interviewing job applicants. The quality of the applicants was impressive – almost everyone had an impressive CV full of various qualifications and accomplishments. Some of the applicants were university graduates with degrees and everyone seemed like they really wanted the job. Surprisingly, as it turns out, the job in question was that of digging trenches. Can you believe it?

On one hand we have impressively qualified people looking for a job, any job. On the other hand we have the brave few who have enough courage to try and start their own businesses. Who would you rather be?

Let’s face it, we do not have an entrepreneurial culture in this country. How can people who try and start their own businesses be looked down upon by their families and societies while what they are doing is precisely what is needed to address our high unemployment rates? We need more people starting businesses yet these people’s mothers and fathers won’t let them. They’d much rather have their loved one’s join the over saturated job hunting market.

We need change! We need people like you and me to start businesses today. We need society to stop stopping us. We need to embrace the entrepreneurial culture in this country!

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Posted in Miscellaneous

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