DUMA: Arielle Sandor’s Efforts to Improve Kenya’s Surging Unemployment
What’s up readers,
Welcome to another edition of PiE, where we interview the brightest entrepreneurs and VCs from Princeton and beyond. For this issue, I interviewed Arielle Sandor, cofounder of DUMA, an automated job matching service for mobile phones in Kenya. Arielle is a Princeton Graduate (Class of 2012) who spent time in Kenya while attending Princeton in order to conduct street theater, encouraging the youth to participate in plays and performances, and raise awareness for public health. While in Kenya, she realized there were many talented people who lacked the connections for jobs and work. Along with her other cofounder, Christine Blauvelt (also Princeton class of 2012), they came up with the idea for DUMA, which would serve as a gateway for Kenyans to source jobs for themselves. While a successful business emerged from their endeavors, they encountered many obstacles along the way. Ultimately, Arielle is proud of the fact that DUMA was created and exists in order to foster change, improving the lives of Kenyans suffering from high unemployment rates, one connection at a time.
How did you recognize the opportunity for a job matching service in Kenya such as DUMA?
“The idea all came from being there and having conversations with friends who were talented and just didn’t have a means of accessing opportunities in an easy way.”
“That’s where it started — it didn’t actually start from the business opportunities, it started from the impact opportunity side and then we slowly made our way around to what the business model would look like.”
“We knew that there would be people who would want to sign up. We also knew that there were people who also had trouble finding others to work for them; so anecdotally, we heard it all the time. Getting to the bottom of that side of the equation took a bit longer but we definitely wanted to do something to facilitate that connection.”
How significant were the resources you had at Princeton in the development of DUMA, more specifically the eLab incubator (a school-run program which provides students with valuable resources for their entrepreneurial ventures)?
“eLab was amazing! We also participated in TigerLaunch (a Princeton Entrepreneurship Club pitch competition). In fact, we met our initial angel investor at a hackathon weekend at Princeton, and that catapulted us into actually doing something and getting a team together.”
“We recruited a couple of engineers from Kenya to work with us and build the software and when eLab came around in the summer. eLab gave us the runway to be able to build more. eLab also gave us a stipend for the summer that we used for the business, and it connected us to so many mentors whom I’m still in touch with, even to this day.”
“I met so many important people through that program. The idea phase and the startup stages require a lot of imagination and they provided us with some great inputs for what we wanted DUMA to look like. We moved to Kenya immediately after the program, so basically all those [lessons] we took from over the summer, we ended up bringing to Kenya. The eLab was extremely helpful.”
What were some obstacles that DUMA faced, considering that you were running a startup abroad?
“You always ask: What are the unique superpowers of the co-founders that are going to get them across the finish line?”
“Aside from sheer determination, I think in that sense Christine and I started from a point of weakness because we weren’t Kenyan and we didn’t know the market like the back of our hands — so we might have been making bad assumptions. We had friends whom we asked and talked to all the time, and we had people in Kenya that were doing the motorcycle tests for us, but we ourselves were not our target audience.”
“We didn’t have that much experience, so I think one of the biggest challenges was the amount of time it took for us to understand the market and new environment. Second of all, during the eLab program or during school, we were trying to make advances on DUMA but a lot of the stuff we were doing had to happen remotely.”
“I think that it’s a matter of time. We were slowed down because we weren’t there to get the feedback in real-time. So that was definitely difficult but then we moved [to Kenya], so we learned a lot more quickly.”
In the early stages of DUMA, you decided to test the Kenyan transportation sector with a motorcycle taxi matching service. Did you ever see more potential in that idea?
“Honestly, no.”
“The number of challenges that come with the transportation industry is tremendous. Logistical considerations, as well as the danger of riding at night, created some major complications. The only cases that people were really interested in were the edge cases where it was night and you’re in the middle of nowhere since those are the instances where you’re most likely to get jumped.”
“We were also constrained by SMS since we weren’t on smartphones yet. The phones hadn’t started flooding in from China in 2012, so we were constrained. The payment method was also problematic and the location-based hack we did, in order to get GPS from somebody’s phone, was insane, so no.”
Where is DUMA today?
“We kind of went the full cycle. We started in the MVP stage: we raised funding, almost $1 million, from angels and impact funds, and built a team. But recurring revenue is what ate us up and we just never broke the code there.”
“I think most job platforms haven’t broken the code [in Kenya], we had a hard conversation with the team and say we’re willing to keep this alive, but we’re not going to actively build products, like software, for it.”
“We have the platform that we used to match people and we have the database and a great team, so we told everyone ‘If you want to stay, we’ll keep it open and you all will just be the shareholders in the business, and you’ll take on some equity in the Kenyan entity.’ And so we let our investors know, and this was actually one of the most beautiful outcomes of the whole journey. We have three people from the business who decided to stay just because they loved it and felt like they wanted to be working together.”
“There is now a country manager facilitating operations out of [Kenya] and we all hop on a weekly call for about 30 minutes. It’s also really nice since we’ve all known each other now for so many years, so it turned more into a mom-and-pop business, not high growth, but it’s just a breaking-even, paying-the-bills type of company.”
“Most importantly, our customers are still happy. TBD on if we keep it open but for now. People have gotten additional jobs, so they’re multitasking and getting money from both sides.”
“We’ll see, but the thing I’m most proud about is the team we built.”
Lastly, what advice do you have for young entrepreneurs?
“The true sign of leadership is understanding that you are always responsible for the good and the bad.”
“It is worthwhile pushing yourself to always assume that responsibility.”
“Of course, sometimes it’s on somebody else. You need to give feedback, you need to get coaching, but if you can get to the point where you’re always asking yourself, ‘How could I have improved that process?’ or ‘How could I have caught that before anyone else?’ or ‘How could I have helped that person?’ it’s beneficial for the company and it’s beneficial for your team.”
“It’s also beneficial for yourself because it puts you onto a different level of understanding of self-integration with all the different aspects of your world and your personality.”
“It brings you up to a different level of maturity and perspective, and I would say that it’s not related to the business of making money.”
“If you can coach yourself and work together with your mentors to gain strength, nurturing that instinct would be the most worthy pursuit of time.”
