To outsmart his competition and get more customers, Duncan decided to add a delivery aspect to his restaurant business in a remote part of Meru called Nkubu.
To outsmart his competition and get more customers, Duncan decided to add a delivery aspect to his restaurant business in a remote part of Meru called Nkubu. The simple app would be the beginning of another useful app for campus students not far away. Read the story below.
Hi Duncan, what’s your background, and what has been your career?
My name is Kinoti Duncan Mutugi a graduate of Electronics and Computer Engineering JKUAT class of 2021. I’ve also tried a couple of businesses over the years, one of which (a restaurant) led to the birth of what we’ll be discussing today. A friend of mine called Jeff did an E-commerce website for me back in 2018, I tried to get that off the ground but it didn’t work, nonetheless, this is how I got interested in software development.
What are you working on currently and how did the idea come up?
We are currently working on an app called Liquid. This is a mobile app that allows people to order food, drinks and groceries and get these items delivered to their doorstep. We are currently focusing on areas around major tertiary institutions and our main area of business currently has been the estates and areas surrounding JKUAT (Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology).
The idea came about during the COVID19 era while I was running my restaurant (called Liquid) back in Nkubu, Meru. To be unique and improve customer acquisition, I decided to have an app where my customers would be able to order food from and have it delivered at their convenience. Tech wows people, especially if the service itself works and it proved a success.
I was able to capture a large customer base because of the deliveries, this included people working in the banks and SACCOs around the area.
When schools reopened in late 2020, I decided to transfer this model to the restaurants around my campus and build a business around it. With the help of a few great friends, Steve Biko and Tom Orina, Liquid was officially born in January 2021.
How did you build it?
The first version of the app was built by my friends’ (Oscar and Karim) mobile development company called Crysoft Co-operation. I was busy running the restaurant thus they came in handy for the development work.
This accommodated only one restaurant so later we just added features that would allow other restaurants to sign up and use the app for their own deliveries. The app was built using various mobile app development technologies for Android.
How did you get your first customers/users? (marketing strategies)
Being that I had a restaurant in Meru, it was easy to get the first people to try out the app. When we scaled and moved to Juja to get our first users (customers) we simply shared the app with friends who also shared it with other friends mainly via WhatsApp.
Since we were still in campus it was a lot easier to get the students to try out the app. The hard part was getting restaurants on board because initially we had very few customers using the app but it picked up pretty fast.
Financially/user acquisition wise how is the product doing?
We currently have 4620 users or people who have downloaded the app. Number wise we have done about 30,000 deliveries in the 2 years plus that we have been operational and have helped restaurants generate revenues of more than Ksh. 4.7M.
The revenue is quite impressive considering a lot of the food being sold ranges between 100-200 shillings.
What are some of the challenges you have faced, mistakes made & some disadvantages of working on the product?
One of our earliest challenges was the resistance from restaurants to try our product mainly because we were small still but we solved this by simply doing more marketing around campus.
One mistake we did was thinking that we had to buy everything for our business to run smoothly, we bought two motorcycles to help with delivery but later resorted to on-boarding the local motorcycle taxi guys to do delivery at a small fee. Using what is already available instead of starting from scratch.
One disadvantage is that our main customers are students, this means that every new year we have to do aggressive marketing to introduce the new students to the product as the old ones graduate and leave. We are solving this by expanding the reach of our app to the working class group of customers as well in areas like Kenyatta Road.
What are some of your future plans?
Our major plan is expansion to other major towns. We have had to secure the funds for this as marketing will be key during this drive as well as streamlining our delivery operations.
We hope to one day be the go to trusted delivery app in the country. It will take time, but it is doable.
If you had the chance to do things differently, what would you do?
We would not waste time and resources trying to but things like the motorbikes that we bought. Where we can we would use already available resources to get things moving faster. We would channel those resources to marketing.
It also took us a year to figure out how to make money from the business as well, maybe we would figure this out sooner.
Any recommendations in terms of who to follow, YouTube videos to watch, a useful website or books to read?
Not sure about this but in place of it I’d say let your dream of seeing something work inspire you to get it done. For me it’s mostly been about seeing this work and work well.
Where can people go to know more about you and your work?
Have a look at our twitter @liquid_ke, Instagram liquid_delivery_ke and on our website https://liquid.co.ke/
Bonus Question, What would you say success is for you?
Success for me is about seeing your dream work, seeing that product work in real life.
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