Stephen Maingi, is a young developer with a great entrepreneurial
spirit and many good ideas when it comes to developing applications.
Through the Nokia Store, he has managed to convert his ideas into cash; netting around 100,000 KES per month from downloads.
Stephen’s entrepreneurship journey began in 2009 when he started
application development, all self-taught by using resources from the
internet e.g. YouTube.
Shortly thereafter, he developed a suite of 14 applications called
Kyuste Mobile Suite. These included apps like: My.Manager for adding,
viewing and editing contacts; Scriptures covering a collection of bibles
verses; Finance for personal finance management; Diary for management
of daily and future events; I.Record for storing important information,
SMS. Chat and many others.
Sure that he was onto something good, he began the process of looking
for investors to raise the necessary capital like any other
entrepreneur would do.
Despite presenting at a number of Innovation Forums and knocking on
several doors, Stephen made no progress on his dream of commercializing
his suite of apps.
He then went the route of direct sales by personally visiting schools
and marketing his applications to teachers. However, with no personal
transport and some health issues, this process was slow and limited, and
eventually he had to get a regular job.
During this time, Stephen did manage to get 12 apps registered on
GetJar where users would download the applications and get the
activation code after paying for the app via PayPal. However, the
commercial success was very limited with many users either not having or
using a PayPal system at that time, and the sum total of his efforts
amounted to around 2,000 KES per month.However,
in August 2011, Stephen’s dreams were re-ignited when he heard about
the Nokia Store and the ability to publish apps for free. By
mid-October, he had published the first 12applications, rebranded under
his new company Dolphins Data Systems. Within the first 2 weeks, Stephen
had already received revenue of almost 19,000 KES from his downloads.
With this incentive in mind, he pushed forward, more determined than
ever, and has since published around 200 applications to Nokia Store.
These now generate an average income of around 100,000 KES per month for
the young developer.
“My journey with Nokia has been an amazing one,” says Stephen. “Based
on my success, I have already started work on a Qt and Windows Mobile
version of my apps, and I hope to capture the smartphone user base next.
I recently attended the Open Innovation Africa Summit in Nairobi and
this has inspired me to keep on developing mobile apps – there is so
much opportunity in this space. The ‘3 idiots’ movie reveals it better:
Make your passion your profession”.
Do you have what it takes to monetize your business ideas like what Stephen did? .... Courtesy of Fenesi
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