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Showing posts from June, 2022

The why behind Asaqeni

As I document my entrepreneurial one of the fundamental questions I need to answer is: Why? Why am I doing this? Why did I choose to work on this specific project and not something else? This article will talk about the problem on a macro level as well as the desired outcomes. The problem Some days back I was joking with a friend about how someone who left our city, Bulawayo 30 years ago, would probably return and find it virtually the same, if not worse. They definitely wouldn't get lost and neither would they be in awe of what's been built in their absence. Mainly because nothing significant has been built in the City since then. Some background Just to put things into perspective- Bulawayo was once considered the industrial hub of Zimbabwe. It's strategically positioned to connect Zambia, Mozambique, South Africa and Botswana. Thus the National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ) is headquartered here. We had huge engineering companies like O'Connolys, Hogarths, Nimr & Ch

Part 6: It's a lot harder than I expected

It's been months since I wrote and I'd like to apologise for the silence. I have no excuse besides that its freaking hard! Everything's much harder than I thought it would be and here I was thinking there wasn't a punch I couldn't take.  What distinguishes a startup from traditional businesses is growth. A business can be profitable and all, but if it's not growing rapidly then it's not really a startup. So with that in mind, I built the foundation which is Asaqeni , a web platform to link aspiring entrepreneurs with useful startup tools. Since I'm starting from a zero-budget, my plan was to get users via organic means such as SEO, social media and blog posts. I started with LinkedIn since it's the network for professionals. After about 4 or so months, we're still stuck at 7 followers.(What are you laughin' at? #angryFace) Facebook is also a great starting point, considering I have close to 1000 friends on the platform.  However the page is s