Back in 2020 before Kace and I built Fom, a simple platform that allowed upcoming Kenyan artistes to sell their mp3 audios directly to fans and receive instant payments in real-time to their bank accounts or till number via Tinypesa, we had a different idea, aka “house party”.
You see before late 2020, every idea that we had, had required payments so that customers would pay with ease and merchants would be able to receive their money without too much hustle. The only problem was that going live with M-pesa’s Daraja was a whole thing with major loops to jump through, and even with access to Daraja, splitting payments so that every registered merchant would be able to receive their funds directly to a till number or bank account was another hurdle in waiting.
Until Tinypesa came along in early 2021, just in the nick of time. We could not only integrate payments without the bureaucracy that was Daraja but also allow every merchant to sign up with their own till number/bank account and still be able to receive their funds without us touching it. We were free to run with the ideas we had shelved for years. Back then, payment integration was quite the headache.
Initially we wanted to build a simple app for exclusive events where Kenyan Artistes would host a maximum of 30 people per event and give them a time of their lives, capitalize on FOMO. It sounded like a good idea but we didn’t want to go into dealing with the hustle that is planning events, so we went back to the drawing board.
We were still on the events thing, we just needed to give it an angle. While brain storming, we reminisced over our house party days back in campus and how hard it was to invite girls to the parties when you knew very few of them. There was always that one guy who had many female friends and he was the one they trusted to invite them to good parties, in my crew he was called Maxy.
Alas! A light bulb moment. What if we created a house party app where guys in campus would create an event or really just a hangout, every guy who would attend would then register to that event prior to and pay their dues, they would then include a location and what would be available at the event.
On the other hand, the girls would be able to see the budget for the event (actual money that had been deposited), who would be attending including their profiles, where the hangout would be and the other nitty gritties upon which they would also choose to register to attend or not.
A Tinder, sort of but you meet via these small events/hangouts. We were even to adopt the same marketing tactic Tinder used where they on boarded the girls first and then went to show the guys that “look, there are girls already on the app”.
We thought it could work because most campus students have been to a house party or five depending on the course that they take. Guys would definitely like to meet girls, talking to them is usually the not so easy part so if they could meet in groups then things could get easier and maybe one or two would be able to secure life partners.
This idea never really went past that first brainstorm session because of a few reasons; how would we guarantee people’s safety? How would we verify identities so that ill-intentioned people don’t use the platform for their ill-intentioned activities? We were also not in that house party phase of our lives any more so it would not have been a long term endeavor.
Maybe instead of house parties we would have looked at day time hangouts for small groups with a fixed number of people. Infuse that earlier FOMO thing with a Tinder like experience but for groups.
What do you think?
