Progress does not occur in one particular direction. In a constantly changing environment, you have to be able to react and the decisions you make affect not only you but everyone around you.
“Failure is where all the lessons are.”
We had figured out a repeatable business model and yes it was a struggle to keep serving new clients manually, but we knew that if we got smartphones in the hands of the washers, we would start making profits and continue growing.
The search for funding
We applied for various competitions to try and meet as many investors in the hope of attracting some investments in our product. The investors were never interested and this continued through the end of the year.
We got accepted in various competition with the hope of raising money but everyone who liked the concept told us to "come back when you have a few thousand customers". We also saw a similar trend with our target customers who didn’t want to use the service but thought the service was so cool. But, entrepreneurs make money when you use their service/product not when you think it’s so cool
Google launchpad was one of our last competition. And, around the time our co-founders were busy pitching the product in Nairobi, I started going through the financials. I discovered that the business model was repeatable in a sense that customers were returning to the product but weren’t scalable in a sense that the new customers were not efficiently matched to the washers and this lead to high operating costs.
Honesty
I believe being honest with yourself is the first step in the right direction. Even if wrong, you won’t regret something as long as you were honest about it. So, in 2017, I was determined to do more of what worked and less of what didn’t work.
I also discovered that we had one great source of income that steamed from doing payment integrations for certain businesses and we had also figured out something with powder detergent market research.
While the team was in Kenya pitching, I called them up and told them that we might have to pivot from laundry and either focus on enabling as many businesses seamlessly accept payments or focus on recruiting as many washers across the country so that we can own the market research space for partners like IFF.
Ego (noun): a person’s sense of self-esteem or self-importance
The pivot idea wasn’t received well. I know it wasn’t fair for people to be pitching one idea and then here I was telling them that the laundry business was losing money and we had a unique opportunity to exploit one of the two opportunities we had on our hands.
We had a lot of back and forth and at the start of 2017. But Isaac built an MVP that enabled any business to do a one-step checkout payment via mobile money for any business. We brought back the product to the team and explained how it would work. This was the start of a very long chain of ego-centric emails and no work was done.
Diversification destruction
Forget the single mothers, forget the customers, forget the profitability, this was a head-on collision and there was going to be only one of us left standing.
Our brand name had created a lot of trust in the community and I thought if we rode on this name, we would create a suite of products that different people would use because they liked Yoza. The plan was also to make money from the payments product in order to fund the smartphone acquisition for the washers, straightforward right? WRONG.
The conversation became so bitter that nothing really mattered. Either Solomon got his way or I got my way and after a bunch of meetings with the team, it was obvious our focus had changed and the company we started as friends was tearing us apart.
We couldn’t even look each other in the face while talking to each other. We couldn’t allow each other to finish a sentence. We argued and there was no way forward and as I went home that evening I realized had been removed as an admin on Facebook and deleted from the company Whatsapp group.
The mountain
I immediately knew this had gone out of hand. I called up one of my mentors who told me something I have carried with me ever since.
Mountain climbing is based on prioritized goals. First to come back alive, Second to come back with the friends you left with and finally to conquer the mountain.
You set out on this journey as friends and succeed if you come out of this journey alive. That’s your first priority. If you can do that then come out with the friends you set out with on this journey. If possible, summit the mountain but make sure you get down to take on another mountain.
We decided to let Solomon run the laundry business because he felt there was a lot he could do. We came out of this alive and as friends, Isaac myself and other partners set out to take on another mountain.
Yoza has struggled since then. The website is now owned by some company trying to sell Bitcoin and the app is no where in the play store.
I would like to end this by apologizing. First, to our customers, the people who actually used the product and the people who are still using the product by placing orders via phone calls. I apologize to our partners who trusted us and because of our selfish reasons, we messed up all the value we created.
Lastly to the team and especially to Solomon, the summit is not important. What is important is the journey, the thrill of starting something and watching it change people’s lives.
The lessons that we learned along the way were crucial and we now get to use those lessons to be better stronger and wiser to take on our next mountain.
This post is in series. Here are part one and part two in case you missed. All have appeared on Nicholas Kamanzi's Medium account and we reproduced with his written permission.