
A little background here:
I launched Zahomy as a side hustle business back in 2015. Over the years I’ve seen things go up and down and up again and down again. So I’ve always been on the look out for a new idea, you know, the sort that will make that extra income. And maybe grow to be the main gig. I haven’t found it, so if you’re on that journey as well then just know we are out here.
It’s been seven months since we launched the business app for Zahomy. It’s a value-add-app
I still remember the very moment when I thought I really needed a solution to the problem I was facing at the time.
I, like majority millenials(as they prefer to label us), have a side-hustle, an online business, where we sell wrist-watches that is zahomy.com.
I’m primarily a programmer and I work for my other company Recarp Tech, along with a few other guys, so I spend most of my time building apps and websites for the dollars. Anyway, one day my assistant at Zahomy got sick and I had to step in for her, the pains of SMEs. I have a small team.
Even though we have a decent website, which has everything we sell, our customers tend to prefer WhatsApp.
So the way we work at Zahomy is, customers ask for our products through WhatsApp, Messenger, calls etc , then we send images, they get back to us with their choices then we deliver in the quickest time possible. The whole process is pretty straight forward.
But….I realised I had some serious pains with sending multiple photos with prices. I have to admit ladies can be very very patient. You see, every time a customer asks for images of what we sell, she’d have to select them from the gallery, set the different feature descriptions and prices offered then. In total about 40 images, with prices. Repeat that for 40 customer requests. All the while you have to listen to customers in other channels. 1600 images daily!!
Who’s got the time for all that?
It quickly hit me that a solution was needed. I tried out a couple apps from Play store but none really did it. So I opted to do it. At least for my business.
That night I built a simple buggy app that stored all the images neatly with their prices and descriptions. Simple, right??
All I had to do was tap and send. It may sound simple but the experience was breath-taking. I cut the time needed to send images by approximately 99%, anecdotal. The next day I was quite easy, because I could spend that “new” time for other equally important activities.
A few days later(my assistant quit, just never came to work) I was talking to a customer who had visited our shop and asked how we were able to send all the photos so fast. So I simply sent the raw app apk to him via email.
It quickly hit me that maybe other businesses might need it, so I invited other guys who I’ve known over the year to try it out. However, they didn’t like it. At all! In fact one told me that the app was making her phone turn red and crash. Another said if only it could help him track his debtor customers. Others didn’t communicate back at all, even though it was free of charge. Can’t blame them. That was arguably the first setback and an SOS to abandon ship.
I’m really not sure what prompted me to upload it to the store. Because other than me, no one liked it. I guess it’s the feeling of rejection and needing validation. Yes am old, but I still need validation. Don’t you? I was hoping that someone would install it and massage my broken heart. Anyway, I forgot about the app in the store.
About a few weeks later, I got a positive app review notification in my email, from a user.
When I checked the app page I saw it indicated 1–5 downloads. That was about as much validation and proof as I needed to be positive. You see am simple like that.
Over the course of seven eventful and long months, the product has really morphed into something that I actually give a lot of thought and work. In the beginning it was so simple and scrappy that there was no registration or any analytics. Just download and start using. Simple as J.O.E. Later on I added Google analytics to see how the growing number of users were using it. I was really surprised because the number of returning users was much higher than I expected.
So having established that users were actually using it much more than I had anticipated I returned back to the feature-request-list. There were a couple of features that had cropped up from multiple users and now they needed to be built, ASAP. Except, I was, then, the only dev at Zahomy, lol. And this app not making any money meant that it didn’t deserve much attention. But… sleeves up!
Top of the list was: “if users could work as a team in their businesses”, same catalogues different team members.
I remember this was the first request by the first lady who I installed it for in Westlands, Nairobi, back in February. It had been a challenge for me as well because I had to keep asking the new assistant to update new prices for the new discounts that we were running for the week. It took two months to finish a working multi-user solution and once fully working I realised that actually many businesses were using this sync feature. They liked it! PMF? No, not really. Because producto gratis don’t qualify. We’re getting there though.
I could list many other features, but I will outline most of them in the next few articles.
Here are some screenshots:






Conclusion
I know it’s a very short post, but thanks for reading.
I hope you enjoyed and learned at least one thing from it. If not, at least you learnt my name. I would love to hear from you, please feel free to comment with your questions. You can reach out to me on Twitter or email me.
If you own a business or part of a business team you can try Zahomy app for free.
Zahomy App is on Product Hunt today if you want to support us :)
Obrigado!
