en years ago, when John Waibochi quit his job working for an Internet service company with the goal of starting an online shopping channel, the idea of running a Kenyan IT house was still edgy for most entrepreneurs.
In 2000, armed with Sh400,000 sourced from angel investors, the then 30-year-old hoped to create a Kenyan version of the popular trade website, Amazon.
“We quickly realised that we had no real business model, and that e-commerce could not be adopted readily here. There were issues with logistics and payments as we would import the goods from the US and sell them here,” said Mr Waibochi.
In 2004, just when pricing of mobiles and call tariffs slipped to more consumer-friendly rates and the mobile industry started to grow, Mr Waibochi’s company Virtual City branched out into selling airtime, later becoming Safaricom’s most successful dealer for that year.
“It was then that we discovered that many companies struggle with supply chain, and many were being forced to buy expensive foreign software, so we started to create solutions that would help them automate that process,” said Mr Waibochi.
For many of the early investors in the Kenyan IT services market, the route to longevity in a market characterised by the short life of start-ups has been marked by several strategic shifts in business models — in short, change is the only constant.
The story of Virtual City, the company that won Sh80 million in a Nokia challenge this month for its mobile distribution system, is replicated for many other home-grown case-stories such as Alliance Technologies, Seven Seas Technology and 3 Mice, who have all ridden the changing tides in the shifting ICT landscape to produce local technology solutions.
Virtual City enters its second decade at the same time as many other tech companies around the world celebrate their teenage years.
Source:-http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/-/539444/1020710/-/12orlycz/-/
