One of my goals this year was to launch a “soft” start-up business. Something easy to run on the side without taking up too much on my time or resources. Some may argue that this is not the right approach when running a new business. That’s true.

However, this is something I want to do in my free time without worrying about budgets and deadlines and all of the other things that make life hectic at ‘normal’ start-ups.

After some thought, I decided my ideal soft start-up would be:

• Powered by WordPress (and DukaPress if need be). Because it would then be super easy to launch.
• Something that would take less than an hour of my time everyday
• Something in which I could easily outsource the “kazi ya mkono”.
• Something through which I could experiment any way I like. For example, I want to test new marleting ideas, site optimization, SEO methods etc.

I had all the above down by the beginning of the year. Now I just had to find a damn start-up idea. An idea presented itself one day when I had to kill two hours in the Nairobi CBD. I’m not known to love shopping but I found myself wandering the streets looking at shop windows. I noticed that almost every second shop had some sort of special discount on their products or some sort of sales offer.

And thus, Funua was born. Basically, Funua is a website which is where you want to go if you want to know about sweet discounts and sales offers in Nairobi. You want to go out shopping? Why don’t you open up Funua.com and see if you can save some money? Uchumi ni mbaya and if you can save something then you should. Funua is your friend. 🙂

What did it take to make?

• WordPress
• Genesis Themes
• A bunch of WordPress plugins to help with SEO and other things
• I hired someone to walk the mean streets of Nairobi lookin’ for deals-you-cannot-refuse.

The website development cost a grand total of Zero shillings. Though I wonder how much it would have cost if I did not do it for myself.

What do I think I will achieve with this?
No delusions of grandeur here! I am very alive to the fact that it could be dead in a month or two. But I’m hoping to:

• See it grow to a respectable level of traffic
• Maybe – and that’s a big maybe – a high level of traffic will mean that we can charge businesses to be “featured”
• Primary method of monetization will be Google Adsense so that it can, at least, pay for its own expenses
• Perhaps most importantly, it will be a test-bed for all my socal media, SEO and other ideas. I’m looking forward to this!

So, if you want the scoop on the latest and greatest sales and discounts in Nairobi, you know where you want to go.