You are a dreamer. So you want to be rich and famous (perhaps one more than the other, but you get the point) and have the whole world eating from the palm of your hands and that’s not wrong because in the end everyone wants to matter. I bet every night when you go to sleep, mattress on the floor in your one room bed-sitter apartment in one of the less graceful residential areas in Nairobi, and all you dream about is how you are going to make it (I know I do).
You are going to move out of that small apartment and to a mansion and maybe just maybe if you are a dreamer of dreamers, you’ll own your own skyscraper in the city (my personal dream) like Tony Stark from Iron Man. But then you wake up and realize it’s all but a dream.
Now at the risk of sounding cliché I’m here just like Lupita Nyongo’ to tell you that your dreams are truly valid. And maybe you won’t own a skyscraper by the time you are 20 but the first step is always ‘baby steps’.
One story that inspires me so much to achieve my goals would have to be that of Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba and ultimately one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world.
You may have heard of him, or of his company Alibaba (the world’s largest online market place, connecting buyers and sellers at an international level), or not but stay with me and you might just get to understand why this man is an inspiration and perhaps inspire you too. One thing that most people don’t know about Jack Ma is that before the success Ma was like most young Kenyans today unemployed. In fact he failed his equivalent to K.C.S.E not once but three times, most of us would give up after this point and so he did, he gave up on taking the test.
The next step would obviously be to search for some unfulfilling minimum wage job to atleast put some food in his tummy and get him through life. You think that shouldn’t be too hard but as fate would have it was for Ma.
He applied for more than 30 different jobs and was turned down for all of them.
“I went for a job with the police; they said, ‘you’re no good,'” Ma told Rose. “I even went to KFC when it came to my city. Twenty-four people went for the job. Twenty-three were accepted. I was the only guy …”
By now honest I would just have given up on life all together and so would most people, but Ma still had one trick left up his sleeve. And that was when he founded his business Alibaba in 1998 and even then there were still hardships that he met.
His business did not make any money for the first three years that it had been operating. Ma was now forced between a rock and a hard place being deep in debt, but instead of closing down his business like any logical business man would have done, he got even more creative.
That’s when he introduced Alipay, . “So many people I talked to at that time about Alipay, they said, ‘This is the stupidest idea you’ve ever had,'” he said. “I didn’t care if it was stupid as long as people could use it.”
And that’s when his fortunes finally changed. Alipay finally allowed the buyers and sellers on Alibaba to finally make payments through the site and thus he was finally able to start making money. Today, 800 million people use Alipay.
Alibaba now attracts over 100 million shoppers in just a day, and Ma the once poor ‘life-reject’ is now worth an estimated $20.4 billion, making him the richest man in China with a population of more than 1 billion people.
Where once he couldn’t seem to make any money, now money literally looks for him. “I remember, in 2001, we went to raise some $3 million in venture capital in the U.S. and got rejected. So we’ve come back and raised a little bit more: $25 billion.”
Now the once unemployed entrepreneur has created about 14 million jobs in China alone and his business has grown from 18 people in his apartment to 30,000 people on four big campuses. Ironically he could now buy KFC, who refused to employ him, 20 times over if he wanted to.
Moral of the story, don’t give up on that dream of yours no matter how insane or stupid people around you say it is.
Back home, we have several online shopping websites all in the race to becoming Kenya’s very own Alibaba. Jumia, Olx and Kaymu are three of the biggest online shopping market places in Kenya right now and despite the differences in how the operate, they all serve the same purpose of providing a platform for small businesses and corporates to sell their products just like Alibaba does.
“Kenya is a fantastic market to be operating an ecommerce business. Along with rising data penetration, there is a rising middle class that has a clear need for access to better products and more convenient shopping channels. Kaymu is able to provide this service in a safe and reliable way, so it’s no surprise that we have been growing so quickly,” says Aleeda Fazal Managing Director Kaymu.
Kaymu which is the youngest of the three websites but already it is getting a lot of visitors to the site, most of who are from the middle class looking to get great products at even greater prices. But most of all Kaymu has helped many young entrepreneurs running their own small business and raking in a lot of money thanks to sites like Kaymu that connect them to the ever spending middle class
