My notes:
Cowsoko is a social Business. And you should think like a CEO! You need to
see how this service is going to be popular and be making money too!
Otherwise some other copy-cat company will come up and take over faster
than you think possible. So some of my suggestions are as follows.
Your financials reflect that you are looking at only the website and tech costs. You
need to realize that most of your costs are going to be offline. Travel, HR and
marketing costs need to be in there.
Initially, you will have to travel to farms such as Baraka Farm, take pictures of the
cows that are for sale, and put it up on the website by yourself. You will have to
mobilize the vendors by meeting them and talking about your service. This will involve
travel and marketing costs. You can even hire an intern from your ex-college to do
some work for you.
And before you advertise about Cowsoko, you need to get at least 25-40 vendors
signed up on it!!! I would suggest you get 10 vendors of dairy cattle, 10 vendors of
feed, 5 vendors of other products (say AI services), and about 5 dairy training
institutes / courses listed before you launch. You can do a county wise listing if that
makes sense. The quality of the vendors listed will make or break your business!
Once you have the vendors listed, you can have a formal launch of the website. You
can have a small event to publicise the site. Event cost need to be reflected. Also, PR
costs such as a radio ad or getting Willens guy to talk about the service on his show is
not a bad idea. Apart from physical ads, you will have to have a firm doing your
search engine optimization (SEO) and social media outreach. Put in that cost!
You need to make the user interface (GUI) as easy to use as possible. Depending on
your web analytics, you can continuously change the look and feel of the website.
That should not be a major problem. Moreover, you don’t need 3 hackers. Remove
that! Say you need a QA person to test your site.
As the CEO, your salary should also be taken into consideration. You can add a
nominal fee that reflects your efforts at Cowsoko. This is a cost that many
entrepreneurs miss out on. And this is not ownership – it is about a salary as an
employee!
You also need to have a partner page on the website. Once you have the approvals,
you can list SNV, Cowsignals etc as your partners with their logos and website
addresses. This will improve the authenticity of your website and bring in more clicks
on the site!
I can only think of these at the moment. But will keep adding as I reflect! I think you
are going in the right direction though. So, keep at it!
Goodluck!
-V
PS: The following could be your one minute pitch : Cowsoko - Brokering deals for the livestock markets in Kenya
Cowsoko is an online market place for connecting vendors and buyers of livestock and
related products. The Cowsoko platform aims to transform the dairy sector in Kenya
by significantly reducing the costs related to market and information access for small
and medium scale dairy farmers.
Cowsoko offers quality dairy cattle, feeds and other livestock inputs for private sale.
The cattle offered for sale through Cowsoko platform are bred by quality cattle
vendors from their own recorded pedigree and non-pedigree herds, providing buyers
with invaluable detailed information. With Cowsoko, buyers are able to see what stock
is available across Kenya, and then deal directly with the vendor, giving them the
opportunity to assess the farm and stock, check the health status, breeding history
and records of the cattle, see the quality and quantity of feeds and inputs available,
negotiate and pay, with no intermediaries.
Cowsoko also provides information on training courses in dairy farming, and access to
various materials on feeds, cow maintenance, milking techniques, hygiene and quality
standards, alternative revenue sources such as bio-gas etc. There is no cost to buyers
for using the Cowsoko service.