Roy Omollo and Mercy Mbevi are the names credited to the success of Msaada Opus, an online platform linking buyers to essential service providers.
The idea of launching the platform popped up after Roy encountered difficulties securing a good electrician to fix the wiring system connecting power to a house he had built for his mother.
He discovered no online platform offered search services, identifying a gap that needed to be filled.
“I had to look for people who lived in the neighborhood so that they could give me a credible referral; otherwise, I could easily end up settling for someone not qualified enough for the job or who could even short-change me, knowing that I wasn’t in the country,” said Omollo in an interview with Powering SMEs.
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Roy, who resides in the US, also realized his friends and famith in Kenya and abrod, had also lamented the challenge of getting such services.
“When people are in need of services such as laundry, or perhaps catering, the easiest option for them would be to go online to search for the service providers; however, most of these businesses quite often do not have an online presence,” says Omollo.
In partnership with Mercy Mbevi, a finance expert, the duo invested about Sh7 million into starting the business.
The money was used partly to develop the product, which took three months, ano to set up an office in Kenytold facilitate local operations.
The IT expert and his partner approached other partners, including YMCA Kenya and Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub, as they sought to market their platform as well as get professionals onto the Msaada Opus platform.
Before being onboarded onto the platform, sellers would go through a vetting process to ascertain that they were well qualified to undertake certain projects.
According to Mercy, people were excited about the platform, and within three months since launching in August 2022, they had already managed to onboard about 1,500 sellers.
These sellers were grouped into 23 different categories, ranging from agriculture to mechanical works, food, and technology.
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The firm currently does not charge sellers to sign up to the platform, although they soon hope to start monetizing by charging users a subscription fee once they have generated enough traffic to the platform.
According to Roy, lack of adequate financing is their major challenge, which has limited their expansion.
Roy unveiled plans to extend their services to other African countries, adding that his firm is open to funding partnerships.