Shocking Stories of Business Failure!

October 6, 2010 by 1 Comment

Business failureYou know, when your friend or someone tells you of what they did to succeed in business you learn a lot. Learning from others’ experience beats learning from books any day, ama? You know what, though? Nothing beats learning from others’ failures.

In fact, someone once told me: Failure in business happens for a reason, it is the ultimate lesson.

In that spirit, I decided to share some stories of business failure. The smart thing to do would be for you to read them, analyse them, and learn.

I’ll start with my own little story:

Right after high school (6 years ago), I teamed up with two of my neighbors and childhood friends to start a video games arcade in the neighborhood.

It was quite the learning experience – everything that we did, I was doing for the first time ever. This ranged from getting the business licensed to actually building a small shed to buying a TV and playstation, to put a roof over our business. I think a lot of people don’t know how to actually practically do these things.

So after getting everything ready, we agreed on how to share the profit and started. It was a smashing success and we had all the neighborhood kids hooked! I was actually making my money from my own business. Life couldn’t be better!

Not really. We used to charge about Kshs 60 per hour per gamer. But we had only two gaming machines. Things were good at the start but we somehow decided to move the business from our self-built shed to a real building in the shopping center. Rent shot up from 0 to Kshs 10,000 a month. We believed that the exposure gotten from the shopping center would get us more customers and lead us to growth. We were wrong. We still had only two gaming machines and there was only so much we could make a day. Things started to get strained.

Before long, the business broke apart due to the stress and two of us left with very bad tastes in our mouth. My business #1 down the drain!

Lessons learnt: strategically plan your every move and never go with “hunches” – always try to make sure you make decisions based on realistic data.

Here are 25 other stories of business failure.

What do you think? Did you learn anything?

Hey, have you ever tried your hand at business and failed? Why don’t you share your story in the comments below? Thanks!

Filed Under: Internet Culture, Small Business Tagged With:

Sintel

October 5, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Ahh, the marvels of the Internet. Sintel is an open movie – meaning that it is licensed in such a way that you are allowed and encouraged to give it out, or sell it, without seeking permission from anyone. The people who made the movie are also giving away all the production materials – right down to the movie script!

The movie is a fantastic animation featuring a young girl who befriends a dragon, and somehow (I won’t tell you how) loses her new friend. She then goes out to look for the little dragon…

Amazing, eh? Watch the movie:

Filed Under: Internet Culture

The 3 Easiest Ways To Make More Money

October 5, 2010 by 2 Comments

1. Freelancing
This is simple – take your skills and find someone who will pay you to do something for them.

Advantages of Freelancing

  1. It is extremely easy to get started
  2. It is extremely easy to set a price for your work – there are lots of example to copy.
  3. The relationship between work and income is very clear – if you work, you get paid certainly.

Disadvantages of Freelancing

  1. Freelancing is hard work and freelancers often get stuck in a “rat race” i.e. you need to work to eat
  2. It is hard to raise your fees and there may be an upper limit to how much you can charge
  3. It is sometimes difficult to know if your skill set can earn you money. For example, not many people may care about how fast you can read a book.

How do you get paid?

  • Per hour
  • Per project
  • ‘Subscription’-based – for example, “you have access to my expertise for 3 months”

Examples: web designer, marketing consultant, babysitter, freelance writer, programmer, etc

2. Productizing
This is related to freelancing – instead of, for example, offering yourself as a freelance marketing consultant, you could write a book on marketing and sell it. When you make your knowledge into a product, you can generate revenue even when you are sleeping. However, while this method can generate higher revenues, it is also higher risk as you are not sure if anyone will buy your products.

Advantages

  1. You can make money even when you are sleeping, or sick, or…
  2. It is easier to make more money than in freelancing – you can sell your book to hundreds of thousands of people but you cannot write for that many people as a freelancer in a short period of time
  3. You get more freedom

Disadvantages

  1. The logistics of selling products include specialist software like shopping carts, payment processors, email marketing software etc
  2. You need to know how to market your product online – this may include blogging, SEO, social networks, etc
  3. It is difficult to know who will buy your product, at how much, and how to price it
  4. The Internet is a sea of horribly crappy products and so it is difficult to convince people that yours is any different

How to earn money

  • Freemium model where you give something for free and then charge for upgrades e.g. DukaPress
  • Charge for single products like books or ebooks e.g. Kiosk 3CB
  • Create a product where you can charge recurring fees e.g online courses e.g. Membership Site Masterplan
  • Create valuable content and then market affiliate products. Here’s how to do this.

Examples: OBS, Kiosk 3CB, DukaPress, WooThemes etc

3. Getting a Higher Salary
Truth is, the vast majority of us are employed so this is an obvious strategy. Yet, very few of us think about it in this way. To get a higher salary, you need to improve your skills at work and demonstrate this to your boss. Hopefully, this will translate into increased responsibilities at work and a higher salary. Simple enough for you?

Advantages

  1. You already know what to do! Just make your boss happy with the quality of your work.
  2. Salary increases tend to follow you through to the end of your career and they are cumulative. If you get a 10% salary increase, it will likely continue like this for the rest of your career and often can only go upwards.

Disadvantages

  1. It is hard to know exactly what kind of behaviour will get you a raise
  2. Everything is out of your control and depends on your boss’ discretion and your company’s budget

Which road will you take?

Filed Under: Make Money, Online Jobs, Small Business

Biashara 30 Confessions II

October 4, 2010 by 29 Comments

Does anyone else like that Usher song, Confessions II? Well, I love it! And, keeping with the spirit of that song, here are our Biashara 30 (Season 2) confessions….

What is Biashara 30?
Biashara30 is a premium club meant for people interested in making money online. People who join Biashara30 will learn everything we know about making money online and, to complete the program, will be required to set up an internet business either as a group project or alone. A very important part of Biashara30 is ensuring that everyone who participates earns online before the end of the program. At every step, we will be on hand to guide and advise the members of Biashara30.

Some Background Info
At the beginning of this year, we accepted about 20 people into the second season of Biashara 30. We received well over 150 applications to the program and decided to pick 20 or so of what we felt were the best presented applications.

And, honestly, the people of Biashara 30 Season 2 were pretty amazing. At the beginning of the program, I felt very confident that we’d have lots of fun and that someone (lots of someones) would make some money!

Sad Happenings
Sadly, things did not turn out the way I had hoped. Slowly, the whole thing degenerated into the oblivion of inactivity. Biashara 30 Season 2 was not successful. Why?

  1. At the start of the program, myself and wham (we run Like Chapaa and Biashara 30) unfortunately got a really huge job that we just could not pass up. This meant that we could not participate as directly as we wished we could.
  2. A good number of the Biashara 30 Season 2 participants were simply inactive. It beats me why you would take the time and energy to apply and then never even show up.
  3. With all due respect to all Biashara 30 Season 2 participants, I would say that in general I felt a lack of sufficient focus and sense of purpose. I am willing to say that this was in part our fault in that we suddenly did not have enough time to spend on the program. I feel that, ultimately, the buck stops with you if you want to earn more money online or elsewhere.
  4. I do not know how to put this last point respectfully. I apologise if anyone feels badly for this. I had various one-on-one chats with the Biashara 30 Season 2 participants and while some of them were simply unimaginably amazing, some were less amazing than others. Let me give an example, one participant wanted an online shop, of sorts, and we helped that participant get a domain name and gave that participant free webhosting and even helped set up the website for that participant. These are things we charge for daily but they are available free for B30 guys and gals. I would have imagined that giving so generously that the participant would have gone on to do great things with the new shop. But no, the participant always came back to us in a situation which turned out to be sort of us doing all the work for the participant. I don’t appreciate laziness, and B30 will never spoonfeed anyone.

Some Thoughts

  1. We have to rethink the whole approach to B30. It is easy to sit back and blame the participants for two failed attempts but I realise that this is more likely an indicator that something is fundamentally wrong with how we handle the program. We have to find a better easier and more efficient way of transferring knowledge from us into other people.
  2. It seems to me that there is something of a general attitude problem in our great country. People very often have grand ideas and the skills to match them but they end up doing nothing at all with that. It almost feels like people (especially those wanting to earn more) read all these books and websites and…..instead of actually trying to do something, they seek yet more information and read more stuff and never do anything about it.
  3. The expectation of spoon feeding is a serious problem. People are looking for silver bullets and magic formulae instead of being ready to do real and hard work.
  4. There probably needs to be some “real life” (offline) element to B30 to make it feel more real to the participants.

Some Good News
So, was there any success story from this edition of B30? Well, yes:

  • The seeds for DukaPress were sown during Biashara 30 Season 2 as there was a lot of talk on online shops. In fact, we build DukaPress so as to enable ordinary people in our great nation to set up online shops that just work easily and quickly and be able to work with local currencies and akina MPESA. DukaPress has gone on to make wham and I lots money, too. 🙂
  • One of the Biashara 30 Season 2 participants, Crystal, continues to amaze me with her hard work and “get-it-done” attitude. I can testify that she makes lots of money online! Though I would not say that B30 helped her achieve this. It is more a case of a dedicated individual following her passion and her dreams to fruition.

The Future & Biashara 30 Season 3
So we just laid it bare for you to see. Biashara30 1 and Biashara30 2 both failed to achieve my own personal goals for the program.

However, my dear readers, we know how to make money online. We do make money online. We believe firmly that we should all be making money online and it can be a significant force in helping even just one person in our nation earn more and live a better life. We believe in helping people. We, therefore, are preparing to go through all this again. Yes, Biashara 30 season 3 is coming soon. Would you participate? Do you know anyone who would?

Since B30 Season 2, we have spent a lot of time soul searching and thinking of how to deliver a better program. We feel that we are now ready to try again. Here are some of our thoughts:

  1. B30 Season 3 will be even more selective. We only want to work with people who won’t end up to be a waste of time for us.
  2. We’re thinking of hiring someone to lead the program so that if we get another big job, it will not impact on the program negatively.
  3. The focus of B30 Season 3 will be on the three easiest ways of earning (that we have identified) money and we hope that by the end of the program, everyone will have made money online, or elsewhere.

But We Need Your Help
We realise that we are not authorities in anything. We need your ideas and input on how to make this thing better. How do we solve the problems identified above? Please help us by commenting below.

Are you an aspiring applicant? Would you please share your ideas, questions or queries with us by leaving a comment below?

Is anyone out there willing to help us run this thing? Please leave a comment below.

How To for B30 Season 3
We have not yet put up the application form. However, the application process starts TODAY! If you want to participate in Biashara 30, Season 3, you have to leave a comment here on this article. The comment should not be telling us why we should pick you, it can be anything else that is relevant. Remember that if you do not leave a comment here, you have no chance of joining B30 Season 3. Good luck!

Filed Under: Biashara 30 Tagged With:

Opportunity: Online MPESA Agent?

October 1, 2010 by 12 Comments

If you look at the sidebar here on Like Chapaa, you will notice a “Most Popular” section. This lists 10 of the most popular articles, ever, on this website. If you look closely, you will see that FOUR of those 10 most popular articles are talking about How to Receive Money Online in Kenya. What does this mean?

It means that there is a very great amount of interest on how to efficiently and conveniently receive money online in Kenya. This is probably because if you are doing any kind of business online from Kenya, you know that getting the money you earn has been and continues to be terribly difficult. It seems to me that people would jump at anything that would make this easier. It seems to me that there is an amazing opportunity that no one has addressed very well.

What would the ideal solution be?
I have done no sort of extensive research on this but I believe that the ideal solution would be a service that:

  1. Allows people to easily and cheaply transfer their money from services like PayPal, MoneyBookers, AlertPay, etc into a more locally accessible location
  2. The best “more locally accessible location” would be the mobile phone – MPESA, YUcash, or ZAP. SO the ability to transfer your money from akina PayPal into your phone directly.
  3. The whole thing needs to be done to international quality and security standards
  4. The service needs to be VERY transparent
  5. The service needs to exist for, and make us that its primary aim is not just to make money but actually to serve us. Other organisations offering similar services have struck me as being out to ‘make money ruthlessly’ instead of offering good service.

Can anyone build that? I’d be your first customer! I know that several Kenyan establishments are offering services that may come close to what I describe them but the fact that so many people who need this are still looking for a suitable solution means that this “market” is untapped.

Other things
Apart from transferring money from akina PayPal into services like MPESA, I would love the ability to transfer money from akina MPESA directly into services like PayPal.

I’ve been thinking about this a long time (because I feel the pinch and I need this badly) and it just seems so very doable that I wonder why no one has yet stepped up and tried to do it.

What would you need to do this?
As you read this section, keep in mind that I have not done any extensive research into this and what I say may just be plain wrong.

As I stated earlier, I think building such a service is not particularly challenging, at least not technology-wise. Here’s my idea on how it can be built:

  • You need an agreement with one of the Mobile Networks. I feel that Zain is the most approachable of the four Kenyan mobile operators. I remember having good conversations with their engineers on how to more deeply integrate ZAP into DukaPress. The kind of agreement you need from them shouldn’t need to be too different from the agreement that they currently have with ZAP agents. Something similar, but they need to know you will operate online.
  • You need to notify akina PayPal, obviously, that you will be offering this kind of service. Paypal, in particular, has elegant APIs that should make building your service easier.
  • You would need to build your application in such a way that it accepts money from akina PayPal into your registered customers’ accounts securely and then, on demand, transfers that money into your customers’ mobile phones. The good thing with ZAP is that you can send money to any phone network in Kenya.
  • You would, obviously, need to structure your pricing in such a way that you take a small (it has to be small) percentage of the money that passes through your systems as your fees. As you plan this, you need to work around withdrawal fees za akina MPESA as well as the fees due to akina PayPal
  • It would be an extremely good idea to make your whole application work fully from a mobile phone and not just the web!!
  • Your system needs to be secure; it needs to inspire confidence.
  • You need to anticipate the possibility of PayPal partnering with local banks (it is rumored they shall be partnering with Equity). This poses a significant threat to your business. You need to build your application with this in mind and strategize on how you shall deal with it. Which I personally think is very do-able.

So, what do you think? Is this build-able? What do you think of the whole idea? Leave your comments below. 🙂

Filed Under: Lazyweb Tagged With:

How NOT To Make Money Online

September 30, 2010 by 7 Comments

One of our nice readers sent this email:

“I spend too much time on the internet doing nothing. Sometimes it is fun but it does not pay the bills. I’ve been sort of freelancing for awhile and paid a web designer to do a fancy website that I couldn’t maintain myself, and that thing didn’t generate any leads. Now I don’t have a website, but I have a blog that I don’t even use. Nini mbaya na mimi?

Hakuna kitu mbaya na wewe!

What we all need to do is to stop building all these fancy websites and complex marketing strategies. Are you making money online? Would a blog and Twitter and Facebook help you get your first three paying customers? The plain simple answer is NO. At the beginning your focus should be to get three paying clients (because one or two may just be a fluke).

After you do this, you will have established that your business idea is actually viable; you will have proven that people will actually pay for whatever you are selling. Afterwards, you can start thinking of the blogs and Facebook and other fancy stuff. Not before. I’ll say it again: skip all the fancy stuff that you hear (SEO, social media, etc) and just get your first three paying clients!

The funny thing is that almost everyone who hears this advice does not like it one bit! Instead, you like hearing things like:

  • You need a Twitter page with lots of followers
  • Everyone spends his time on Facebook, you need to get a facebook page
  • You can’t do business without registering a company…and don’t forget business cards

You know why most people prefer the above to actually getting down to work and getting paying clients? Because it is so much easier to start a blog and Twitter and pray that somehow money will just flow in. It is much harder to sit down and make a plan on how to get three people to pay for whatever you are selling.

I have been blogging for more than six years and I’ve pretty much seen it all. If you ask me, 99.9999999% of all bloggers make a shameful amount of money, something like $2 per month. Does that really tie in with your high horse dreams of making it big? We have to be realistic about things, my friend. If your goal is to make money, do not waste time on social media.

Focus on setting up your business, not on the technology; focus on understanding your customer; focus on testing whether your idea is profitable; focus on how to build the best product or service that you can.

Filed Under: Make Money, Small Business Tagged With:

Interesting Kenyan Sites #6

September 28, 2010 by 7 Comments

Easy Fax – this is a website that provides virtual fax services, in Kenya! I must say that the site is pretty well done and the user experience just seems miles ahead of most Kenyan offerings, kudos to the people behind this. Now you can receive faxes for free, via email, in Kenya. Check it out.

Kenyan Listings – well, I would say that directory-type sites in Kenya have a heck of a lot of competition. It shouldn’t be a reason not to try make one successful, though. Kenyan Listings seems to be well done and functional. Good luck to them.

Flops
Penumos – this is just a shamefully poorly made website – made by a supposed web designer!!! yet another reason why you should be careful who you hire to do your web design.

Mike Sonko – for a supposedly filthy wealthy individual, you would expect a better designed website, no? Hopefully it’ll get a face-lift soon.

Special thanks to Jaffar Mohamed and Shiko Nduta for contributing to this week’s article.

Update 29/9/2010: The Penumos guys have promptly updated their site.

Filed Under: Cool Sites Tagged With: