And It’s Day 6

Today started with a great lesson on innovation and creativity by Nihal Ahmed. Most people think that innovation or creativity can only be measured by how many new things or new inventions you come up with — I used to think same.

I have learned that the best entrepreneurs are those that get inspirations from the things that others consider very mundane.

Great intellects are skeptical and always ask the question Why? Practically asking this question (Why?) to about 5 levels of “why”gets you deeper insights into how to position yourself to solve people’s problem.

Thanks to the Golden Circle essence by Simon Sinek — People do not buy what you do, they buy why you do it. In essence, you are not selling the product, you are selling yourself. This led us into a sales challenge: We went to the streets to help people make sales and this was a very exciting and very informative exercise for me. I’ll summarize my learning thus;

• Test a lot of assumptions to know the ones that will work and those that will not work.
• Teamwork is so important.
• Why? — Always keep this question at the back of your mind.
• Take note of the competition
• Focus on the important 20%.
• Get important information from the market

The crowning of the day was a great time with Simeon Ononobi, the man behind SimplePay. It was a great to know how he started to where he is right now plus the several challenges he faced along the road to success.