Like Chapaa

  • How to Become an Expert in Your Customer’s Eyes

    Posted: November 29, 2010, 10:59 am by wham

    One of the founders of this website (www.likechapaa.com) is a trained accountant. When we started Like Chapaa, it was very much (and still is) a for-profit venture. Along with wanting to help people, we wanted to make money with this site. Now, none of us was what you call a “computer” or “Internet”, or even “business” expert. But we believed in ourselves and we believed that we know how to do things with computers and the Internet that make business sense. The problem was how to convince people – our customers – that we really did know our stuff.

    Are you faced with this problem? How do you become an expert in your customer’s eyes? How do you become the person the customer most wants to work with? How do you then increase prices 300% (which we have done) and still have customers wanting to work with you?

    I mean, think about it. Would you hire a boring old accountant to do your website or even just improve it? Would you hire an accountant for anything other than accounting? That’s the kind of challenge that we faced. No one knew us as experts. Now, it didn’t matter how many times we looked in the mirror and called ourselves experts. We still were not getting any respect, let alone money in the bank. And it drove us crazy.

    (For the record, I would personally not hire an accountant for anything but accounting!)

    Interestingly, that is precisely why Like Chapaa was born. We thought that the easiest, fastest way to convince the world that we knew what we talked about was to start a site and write about the content of our brains. We started Like Chapaa to show the world what we knew. So yeah, we started pole pole but surely. We wrote articles. We used to get 7 visitors a day but we continued writing articles. Day after day, week after week. It was hard, extremely hard – and we had few, if any, successes right away.

    Then it all changed. We suddenly started getting emails and calls. Emails and calls from people who wanted us to work on their websites, their Internet strategy, their projects, and so on. We had planned for this, but the success of our little plan shocks even us.

    A lot of people struggle with marketing their business, and we did too. But we figured we could either go nuts calling people and walking the hard roads of Nairobi, or we could sit at our computers and write an article. And have a customer call. (Ooh, I did like the sound of that phone ringing). That is the power of the Internet, if you ask me.

    Information is expertise – just ask any author; any consultant; any trainer. Just ask us.

    The thing is, anyone can do this. You do not need any special qualifications; all you need is creativity, imagination and time. You have all three so go for it!

    If you need any help you can always hire us to help you, you know?

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  • Interesting Kenyan Sites #15

    Posted: November 29, 2010, 9:15 am by Kelvin

    Rupu.co.ke – this is a group marketing tool that features heavily discounted deals for products and services from various industries. It is yet another Kenyan “deals” website made in the mould of Groupon. Though the site lacks somewhat in content, I find it to be very well designed and the people behind it seem to have a solid plan on social media marketing. Kudos and good luck to them.

    GotIssuez this is a place where you can rant and rate issues that affect you. It is a nice idea, eh? If Safaricom, or KPLC, or anyone elses pisses you off, you can talk about it at gotissuez. Really nice idea and well executed, so far. I only displike the design a little bit.

    50-50
    Elma – we wrote about Elma a while back. While I really like what Elma promises to offer, I don’t really like their website. The design is okay, but I feel they can (and should) have put more effort into making the site more interactive. They are, after all, collecting people’s views – they should have made all of the user-generated content available online (right now they only display a selection of the latest ‘wishes’). I feel that their objectives may have been better served with a more interactive and ‘social’ experience (and this could easily be achievable by making all the user ‘wishes’ available and enabling people to comment on them. Still, good effort.

    Flops
    KwaSwa – these guys are web designers offering to make you a site for Kshs 7,500/-. However, I find their own website to be a little lacking. For instance, this page is currently inexistent even though it is a prominent link on their site. I would also argue that since they are web designers, their site should more visually appealing.

    Churchill.co.ke – I presume this is Churchill’s (the comedian) website. It is currently down and has been down for a while. Somebody isn’t taking care of the site…

    Churchill fail (click for larger image)

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