For Brian the new area of focus is AI, the new frontier and building niche products that can offer value to various industries in Africa.
Hi Brian, what’s your background and what has been your career?
Hi, I’m Brian Kariuki a full stack developer currently based in Nairobi and building products online.
I started building products as soon as I started coding.
My first app was FPL Station an app that helped users manage their fantasy league teams, I think to date I have done three revisions of it, the first launch was in 2020 during the Covid period.
This was also when I started learning Flutter and decided that instead of building sample projects I could work on a complete project around a passion of mine that people could actually use.
I’m passionate about football so as my first try I decided to build a product around that for the African consumer.
Currently I’m focusing mainly on AI based products as this is the new frontier in tech and is changing many industries by the day.
What are you working on currently and how did the idea come up?
Currently I’m working on a project called Rafu AI, it was initially called Jumba but I found that the domain had already been taken so I renamed it to Rafu which translates to shelves in Swahili, it’s a name that interior designers and architects can relate to easily.
I had been experimenting with stable diffusion for a while, there is this thing called ControlNet and when I looked at the ControlNet blocks there is an example they give on how to transform an interior of a room to look different, you give it a picture and it outputs a different picture with the style that you are going for.
It looked cool and I thought why not build a frontend for it, there were others also experimenting with it and building products so I decided to go for it as well. In my case I focused on a niche category, that is a tool for interior designers and architects.
How do you choose what you work on and what tools do you use?
I’d say I get many ideas while scrolling on Twitter and seeing what others are working on and the other way is by working on things that I’m passionate about.
I’m a dev by profession thus I spend a lot of time building. My tools are the technologies used for building apps like Flutter, Typescript, Nodejs and Data Analysis, JS to mention a few.
How did you get your first customers/users?
I’m not that fond of marketing and there is this quote I like by Naval that goes something like “first learn to build then learn to sell”.
I’ve been in the building stage for a while now and currently I’m just reading about marketing and learning from the experience of others who are building and marketing.
Even so, I had to do marketing for FPL Station mainly in terms of engaging people online on different social media platforms, posting on Twitter during football match days, I even had a YouTube channel where I would post animated videos showing my Fantasy team, players to go for who are performing well etc.
My marketing has mostly been about talking to people online and posting in the right forums and groups.
What are some challenges that you have faced and how did you overcome them?
A big one has been financing the projects. You need money to be able to do certain things like possibly get good hosting for the app, paid APIs and the likes, this comes from my pocket and if the app is not generating enough revenue to sustain itself, it becomes quite hectic.
There are also challenges as far as tech stack is concerned, for example when starting out, what you use can be okay for crud operations [create, read, update, and delete] then when you get to real time functionalities, you have to reach out to other tools that you have to manage and this can also become hectic.
Marketing is also a very big challenge, I’d say for most devs. Once you build a product then what next.
I’ve been reading a lot on this as mentioned earlier and looking at the different platforms that I can use for marketing going forward such as Tiktok which can really help with user acquisition among other social media platforms.
Financially/user acquisition wise how is the product doing?
Rafu is my new product and still in pre-launch mode, my main aim was to get the website out there and get it ranked on Google, get some eyes on it. But it’s done and I will be doing a full launch soon.
FPL Station has about 5000 downloads
What are some of the mistakes you made & some disadvantages of working on the product?
The biggest risk is working on a product that no one wants to use. Looking back, an approach I would take would be to do a simple landing page and a sign up form then find a few people who would be interested in the product before committing to building it fully.
For FPL I knew I’d get users because there are about 10 million players in Fantasy Premier League and about one million join annually, there were also other apps similar to mine thus this was proof of product market fit.
When I started working on FPL Station I was using Flutter and it was my first time using it so I had to do a lot of learning before building. The first version was okay but it wasn’t that good. I was using a new technology that I had not worked with before and only discovered its short comings later on.
What are some of your future plans?
I’ll be more focused on AI tools. This is the new money and I believe AI is here to stay so I’ll be looking to solve niche problems using AI.
I’ll also be porting FPL Station to the web and finishing up on the football forum app for Africa which is also very closely related to FPL Station.
Focusing more on marketing as well is on top of the list.
If you had the chance to do things differently, what would you do?
I would find potential users for my product first before building. Build a simple landing page and get people to sign up to measure interest for the product first.
Any recommendation in terms of who to follow, YouTube videos to watch, a useful website or books to read (learning resources)?
There is a channel called Microconf for independent SaaS Founders to Launch, Meet, Learn, and Grow.
They invite entrepreneurs to talk about their products, struggles while trying to find customers/users and grow their products. It’s a really good resource for people building SaaS products.
Where can people go to know more about you and your work?
Check out Rafu the new product I’m working on and FPL Station on the Play store and you can find me on X (Twitter) @briankariuki
Getting personal, what does success look like to you as an individual and at what point would you say you have achieved said success?
For me success is about your well-being, if you are contented with your work and life, in good health and in good terms with the people in your life, this is success.
These things also determine and influence financial success and how we run businesses. Being well and whole as a person, finding joy in what you have built.
I’m working on this part of myself as well, it’s not easy but I’m getting there.
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