Success to me is the freedom to be anywhere I want, doing anything I want with anyone I want.
Hi Kevin, what’s your background and what has been your career?
Hi I’m Kevin Oduor, just another young man who decided to follow his dreams. My background is in Law which I pursued at the University of Nairobi. I am also a self-taught web developer.
Apart from that I’m a curious person, I love to tinker with things, everything I come across I touch to see how it works, if it breaks and if I can put it back together.
Before I started to build products I was in the service business, I had a digital marketing agency called Kichaka. I started with Facebook marketing and Ads mainly for club events way back in 2015. The service is still live but the approach has changed, I only current deal with E-commerce stores.
Yes, this is the gist of it, as far as my background goes.
What are you working on currently and how did the idea come up?
Currently I’m building a healthcare assistant, a healthcare companion for anyone seeking accurate medical advice anywhere at any time of the day.
The product is called Niah (AskNiah) and is an AI assistant built on top of the WhatsApp API. So you simply chat with the AI via WhatsApp as you normally would your other contacts but in this case you get medical feedback for your minor concerns be it a stomachache, headache etc.
I come from Kisumu and there is one time I had travelled back to Nairobi and got a severe case of Malaria after a few days, of course there are those mild symptoms that you get early on that can tell you what will be coming later on but there was no simple & accurate solution of really getting feedback for these symptoms apart from going to a hospital which is not cheap and eats into your time.
This is why I came up with Niah.
At first I wanted to build it as a mobile app but figured apps are too bulky and there are already too many apps, thus I decided to build it on exiting platforms that people use already starting WhatsApp, then Telegram, FB and SMS.
To ensure our AI gives accurate data we have a database of diseases and the different symptoms associated with these diseases as far as Kenyan patients are concerned that we train it on, so we are focused not just on the symptoms as per the book but also those that real Kenyan humans/patients have experienced. It is not perfect yet but with more training it gets more and more accurate.
How did you build it?
For the frontend part I used a simple tool called Carrd. The other technologies and resources I use are the OpenAI API, WhatsApp API and Airtable.
I’ve been building it since 2019 now.
How did you get your first customers/users?
The first people to use it were friends and family.
I’ve also used social media platforms quite a bit for marketing, LinkedIn even closed my account just recently as a result of my extreme marketing. Now I’m using X (Twitter) more often.
Word of mouth has also helped. I tried paid Ads once but currently I’m focused on building a community organically on social media.
What are some challenges that you have faced and how did you overcome them?
Some people are pretty mean out here, sometimes when the service has some downtime people send me messages asking why I have the product on my bio if it’s not working.
Since I’m building on top of a 3rd party API (OpenAI) I don’t have full control over the product, their API is down a lot and this means my product is also not working when their service is out.
A final challenge would be convincing people to use an AI product, I once put up a post on X (Twitter) and someone commented saying “AI is from the devil”. Educating the public is a challenge but I’m getting there with time.
Financially/user acquisition wise how is the product doing?
Currently I get about 14,000 visits per month to the website. So every month I get 14k people trying out and/or using Niah to get solutions to their symptoms.
What are some of the mistakes you made & some disadvantages of working on the product?
I think the biggest mistake was taking too long to launch Niah. Speed really matters when starting out in business. Put it out fast and let people start trying out your product so that you can get customer feedback faster and improve upon your product.
The biggest disadvantage is that healthcare in Kenya is a cartel’s game, it’s controlled by a few thus to penetrate in this sector is not easy. The government is also trying to centralize all healthcare systems and this makes it even harder to penetrate the market.
What are some of your future plans?
The current product is free for everyone but I want to sell the technology to small clinics and hospitals (as packages) so that it helps them automate routine tasks such as making doctor appointments, sending lab appointments and such.
If you had the chance to do things differently, what would you do?
I would start by launching faster so that I can get feedback from customers early on and build a superior product in less time.
Any recommendation in terms of who to follow, YouTube videos to watch, a useful website or books to read?
I love the book “Almanack of Naval Ravikant”, a curation of Naval’s wisdom from Twitter, Podcasts, and Essays over the past decade. It’s so inspiring and talks about how to build products and how to market them.
Another really good read is “The Psychology of Money” by Morgan Housel.
And my final recommendation would be the book “Start with why” by Simon Sinek, I love this one because it emphasizes the need to build products that inspire people.
Where can people go to know more about you and your work?
You can find and follow my journey on X @unstoppablekevv and check out Niah on the website askniah.com
Getting personal, what does success look like to you as an individual and at what point would you say you have achieved said success?
Success for me is the freedom to be anywhere I want, doing anything I want with anyone I want.
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Startup Spotlight: Solutech Limited
This one is less of a startup and more of company but I am inspired a lot by the founders of this business, how they run it and how they share insight on X (Twitter) for other founders to learn from.
Solutech Limited is a bootstrapped company and one of the leading sales force automation companies in Africa for manufacturing companies, distributors and wholesalers. They have operations in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Zambia, DRC Congo, Ethiopia and Sudan.
Led by Alexander, Mutie, Jinal and Rayyidh.
Click on their profiles to learn much, much more.
Thank you for reading this far and remember to share with your chief to share with the governor.
