“If you are truly building for the customer, you are halfway there.” This is the story of Pickup Mtaani as narrated by Okiya Kennedy.
Hi Okiya, what is your backgrounds, and what has been your careers?
My name is Okiya Kennedy. For my university education, I did B. Com Finance Major at Kenyatta University.
I’ve always been fascinated by technology since I was a child, especially video games, in my free time I would try to fiddle with things just to see how they worked. This is what created that spark and got me interested in what’s behind the hood of these games, apps and software.
The peak of my interest in apps and games came about when I managed to get my hands on an Android phone. If you can remember the “Ideos” phone, it was quite rare back then and I was among the first ones to have such a cool device. I bought it using my first salary while I was at a gig my father had helped me get during our long holidays.
Having that phone opened up a whole Pandora’s box for me on what could be done with technology, I realized that it was possible to make your own great apps, have them in the play store and possibly make money from that.
What are you working on currently and how did the idea come up?
We were still working on games with a few of my friends including Robert our CEO, we did this even after campus but after a while it became evident that it would not be a sustainable business for us. Possibly it could also be that the heart wasn’t in it a hundred percent.
After this we moved to make a website like Jumia, specifically for made in Kenya products, this also didn’t do well but it was during this time that we got introduced to the concept of E-commerce, over time logistics stood out as a major need for our clients as compared to the other services related to E-commerce, more so in terms of a model that could become a sustainable business. It was something that the customer wanted and needed thus we decided to double down on it.
This is what we are working on currently, Pickup Mtaani. Providing logistics as a service using agents and a platform that consolidates this service for both the end customer and merchants selling on social media and on other E-commerce platforms as well.
Our model centralizes logistics for E-commerce then decentralizes it, how? We have a central location in the Nairobi CBD where parcels are brought to after which they are sent out to the many agent locations in the different estates and localities in Nairobi. These agents are mainly small shops similar to the M-pesa agents where people withdraw or deposit money at. The parcels can also be sent from the mtaani agent in your estate to another mtaani agent in another location/estate. Our central CBD locations enables for smooth movement of the parcels. The end customer can then collect their parcels from the mtaani agents or even from the central CBD locations depending on their preferences. We also have a rent a shelf service for merchants so they can have their products centrally placed at the CBD and started offering doorstep delivery at very affordable rates to customers a while back.
We are an E-commerce company that has optimized for logistics.
How did you build it?
When we started out we were doing the deliveries ourselves using motorbikes, this went on for about 2 years. This allowed us to really talk to the customers and merchants and understand intimately what their pain points were. Listening to the customer has been a key factor to the growth of our company, this has enabled us to work specifically on what is necessary and needed by the people we are providing this service to.
Our aim was to lower the cost of delivery by a huge margin; how does the product get from the merchant to the customer affordably but in a timely manner. By doing the deliveries we managed to collect a lot of insight from customers in the different parts of Nairobi that helped shape our model. We also had to do a lot of research and look at what had been done by other businesses even in other countries. We discovered that the model we were looking at had been done in other countries such as South Africa, India and China, even here in Kenya Jumia had attempted using pickup agents and M-pesa had perfected it by bringing accessibility to cash closer to the customer using agents where people reside, thus we simply localized an existing model and made it work.
When it comes to tech we employed more or less of the same approach, we are not trying to reinvent the wheel, we are simply innovating in the space that we work in. We are optimizing our processes by digitizing our already available services.
How did you get your first customers/users?
We reached out directly to them mainly on social media. Then over time we found other sources for customer acquisition.
But one thing that helped our growth was the virality factor of our business, we had solved a major pain point for people selling on social media and reducing the cost of delivery by more than 70% was a huge deal for them. People started talking about our business and sharing it on their own accord, to this day we are still baffled by what was and still is happening.
We were getting unsolicited free advertising from the people using Pickup Mtaani, both customers and merchants. People would mention us on their YouTube channels, on Twitter, write an article on their blogs and even on Facebook. We were helping them for real and they were talking about us for free.
If you are truly building for the customer, you are half way there.
Financially/user acquisition wise how is the product doing?
We have done over 1M+ deliveries for over 25,000 social commerce sellers in Nairobi delivering goods worth over Ksh. 500M in the past two years.
What are some of the challenges you have faced, mistakes made & some disadvantages of working on the product?
Being that Pickup Mtaani is one of the products that we put a lot of thought into, our journey has been more about learning and growth. The mistakes in hindsight were part of the learning curve, it’s hard to pin point to a specific scenario where a mistake was done that cost us a lot.
Maybe in terms of challenges, I would say learning customer service was a tough one because our business is highly about the customer and their feedback, locking this down took a while.
What are some of your future plans?
Our main agenda now is to build out the tech that supports our systems. Mainly geared towards building trust as far as social commerce and E-commerce are concerned, as well us empowering the merchants that use our services financially so that they can be able to grow their businesses further and help us also grow as Pickup Mtaani.
We are also looking to grow beyond Nairobi into other cities and possibly into other countries in Africa as well.
If you had the chance to do things differently, what would you do?
Listening to the customer from the word go would be paramount. We would start engaging the people we are building for right from the start.
Where can people go to know more about you and your work?
Check out our website https://pickupmtaani.com/
And our Instagram @pickup_mtaani_cs
Bonus question, what does success look like to you?
The realization that possibly in the years to come, a lot of Africans have been able to lift themselves out of poverty and I have contributed to this in one way or another.
In my small corner of the world, if I am able to help another African better themselves financially, this to me is success.
Startup spotlight: The Kulture Ke
An event ticketing system that allows admins to create events and sell tickets online while having full control of the system.
One of the biggest selling points of this system is that the admin can create promo code links specific to an influencer this way they can track how many tickets an influencer has sold and pay them accordingly. Ensuring that your investment on influencer marketing translates directly to sales.
The system can also be customized to meet the brand guidelines and requirements of the customer.
Built by Michael Munavu, check it out here 👉🏽The Kulture Ke
Wishing you a great week ahead, if you loved this issue, share with your friend to share with their boss.
