What business problem made you start learning tech?

For me it was the M-Pesa messages piling up and never knowing my real profit at the end of the month. I run a small shop in Kitui and stock was just in my head, so I started learning simple spreadsheets on my phone just to track sales and expenses. That one little step saved me so much headache. What manual thing are you dealing with right now? Let's see if we can find a simple fix together.

That's exactly the kind of thing that got me too. I was helping a friend reconcile M-Pesa payments from his chama members every month, took hours copying transactions from his phone. Learning a simple Google Sheet with a few formulas cut that down to maybe 20 minutes. For anyone stuck like that now, even just typing out your daily sales or payments into a note app is a start, you can worry about fancy automation later. What's one small manual thing you're dealing with right now?

For me it was trying to figure out how much maize my dad was actually losing between harvest and sale. We used to guess yields by counting bags, but the numbers never matched. That led me to a simple spreadsheet on a cheap tablet, and eventually to building tools for other farmers. For anyone still staring at a pile of M-Pesa messages or a notebook full of chicken sales, just start by writing down one number every day, that alone changes how you see your business.

The M-Pesa message pileup hits home. I once helped my mum count her chicken business transactions from her phone and the numbers just weren't adding up, so we started with a plain notebook before moving to a simple Google Sheet. What are you using to track your stuff now, or are you still at the "where do I even start" stage?

Man, the M-Pesa message struggle is real. For me it was the same thing with my delivery hustle, trying to figure out which orders actually paid and which ones I was chasing for cash on delivery. I ended up using a simple WhatsApp broadcast list to remind customers, but the real fix was just writing down each delivery in a notebook before typing it into my phone later. Still figuring out the app idea though. What about you, what’s the one thing you wish your phone could just do for you right now?

That "where do I even start" stage is exactly where I was last year, helping my sister run her mitumba stall. We just wrote down each sale in a simple exercise book before even thinking about a phone. Now she uses a free app called M-Kopa Soko that came pre-installed on her phone and it does the basics. If you're at that stage right now, what's one item you sell or track that gives you the most headache?