At the age of 35 years. Dennis Makuri, a Kenyan by birth is a co-founder and CEO of Onfon Media, a $5 million (annual revenues) value-added telecommunication service provider.
Onfon Media’s product portfolio includes everything from basic messaging applications like bulk SMS and shortcodes to include caller ring-back tunes, mobile banking solutions, media production, Enterprise resource planning(ERP) systems and digital signage.
Clients include leading commercial banks, government agencies, and media houses.
I recently had a brief chat with Makori where he recounted his entrepreneurial journey and talked about the challenges of running a telecoms business from Kenya.
This is what he said:
Onfon Media was conceptualized in January 2006 over a cup of coffee with a former college mate, Andrew Mbuya, who is currently the group MD. Our idea was to start an SMS advertising service that connected companies to consumers of their products.
It took us one year to have the company registered as a value added service provider by the Communications Commission of Kenya, CCK (now know as the Communications Authority).
We realized that as long as humans are roaming the planet, they will be consuming information; the only thing that changes is the medium. At the time, the mobile phone was the medium of the future.
We funded the venture from our personal savings; venture capital was unheard of when we started out and we both came from humble backgrounds so family funding was out of the question for us.
In order to keep our costs low, we did most of the work ourselves and we even built a DIY network server from one of the computers in our office. Our initial investment was around $15,000.
One of the challenges we faced, in the beginning, was that download speeds of the wireless access protocol (WAP) were very slow and this would force our users to leave their phones connected for a whole night to download an MP3 file of approximately 5 megabytes.
On top of adding to the total cost of accessing the content, this meant that we could only sell a limited quantity of content on any particular day.
Currently, Onfon has a combined customer base of 10 million subscribers spread across 5 African countries namely: Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Our product portfolio has grown from basic messaging applications like bulk SMS and shortcodes to include caller ring-back tunes, mobile banking solutions, media production, ERP systems, and digital signage.
Our services evolve to meet customer demand which is met by either launching new products or by re-orienting existing products to the changing expectations of our clients.
As an example, our ‘Name Tunes’ service was born out of the realization that a large section of the urban population grew up in urban centers, far from their ancestral homes.
Most of these urbanites do not understand the origin or meanings of their names and we decided to offer an SMS service that they could use to search for the meanings of their names.
Later on, following the advent of self-publishing online platforms like Facebook and Twitter, we decided to re-orient the service to allow subscribers to publish the meanings of their names through their ring back tune.
My advice to young entrepreneurs is that they should know what they want and then pursue it relentlessly.
To use a Swahili proverb, Ukiona vyaelea vimeundwa (‘If you see them floating, know they have been worked on). So if they see things that inspire them, then they need to know that those things were created by people like them and that nothing comes out of nothing! One has to work for whatever he or she wishes to achieve.
I would like to encourage them to build something for themselves, for their countries, for Africa, and for the world.