Dennis Makori is a co-founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Onfon Media, a Kenyan value-added telecommunication service provider.
The company, which operates in over 5 African countries, offers various services, including bulk SMS, shortcodes, caller ring-back tunes, mobile banking solutions, and media production, among others.
Onfon Media was born out of Makori’s passion for entrepreneurship, thanks to his Electrical and Communication Engineering skills.
Together with a friend known as Andrew Mbunya, the two decided to start an SMS advertising service that connected companies to consumers of their products.
Other services they offered include sending bulk messages and offering inspirational, devotional, and love quotes at a fee.
Providing these services required the Moi University graduates to have a license from the Communications Authority of Kenya, but this proved to be a setback as they had to wait for over a year before receiving it.
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”It took us one year to have the company registered as a value-added service provider by the Communications Commission of Kenya, CCK (now known as the Communications Authority of Kenya (CAK). We realized that as long as humans are roaming the planet, they will be consuming information; the only thing that changes is the medium. At the time, the mobile phone was the medium of the future’’ says Makori.
The duo funded their business with personal savings. In the initial stages, they reportedly made between Sh5,000 to Sh10,000 a month.
”Venture capital was unheard of when we started out, and we both came from humble backgrounds, so family funding was out of the question for us. In order to keep our costs low, we did most of the work ourselves,’’ added Makori.
It was not long before they landed a deal with Safaricom to provide premium content in 2007. They were paid Sh44,000 for the service, and by the end of that year, they had made Sh500,000. As of 2012, the business had reportedly amassed over Sh400 million in revenues.
Makori credited their first million to sending love messages as over 150,000 people subscribed to get daily love quotes from their platform at a fee.
”My advice to young entrepreneurs is that they should know what they want and then pursue it relentlessly. To use a Swahili proverb, Ukiona vyaelea vimeundwa (‘If you see them floating, know they have been worked on). So if they see things that inspire them, then they need to know that those things were created by people like them and that nothing comes out of nothing,” he advised.
