When Martin Gicheru set up Techweez.com 6 years ago he was also working as a Systems Admin at a Real Estate company. It was inspired by his passion for media and tech. Even though the blog was a passion project he quit his job after 2 years to concentrate on his blog full time. Fast forward to now, Techweez has grown to being a top 100 gadget blog globally according to Technorati and has been quoted by big media houses like Anandtech, The Verge, Android Authority, Windows Central among others. It has also been nominated in the Kenyan Blog Awards in the Best Technology and Kenyan Blog of the Year categories.
We had a chat with Martin on his journey as an online publisher in Kenya.
1. When was Techweez founded and what was your vision for it.
Techweez was started in 2010 as a one man show, back then there were no commercial bloggers and I was starting it hoping that this could end up being the case. In my formative stages, I loved languages and story telling. I thought I was going to be either a lawyer or a journalist. Somewhere along the line I met a friend who told me that IT was cool. I went for IT and ended up becoming a system admin after leaving college. I still loved telling stories and big blogs like Engadget, TechCrunch and Mashable inspired me to start Techweez. Back then I liked that being a blogger earned me access to some nice product launches in good hotels, but there wasn’t revenues then. I still stuck to my guns believing that this was going to change for the better. Of course going by what was happening in developed markets.
2. Which challenges did you face when you were starting out.
Running a blog and putting in work to grow a readership base and then generating revenue out of was not easy in the beginning. It required plots and lots of hours put in. I didn’t have an office and there was a time I even had a really bad laptop to work with. Internet access of course was a big hurdle. As a blogger you need full-time internet access, because you need to be on top of news as it happens. Fortunately I moved to a house in an area where there was Wimax internet at good prices and this made it a lot easier.
I have run Techweez for many months with zero income and no other tangible source of income. Later, things started coming together nicely for the website. Brands started realizing the value of working with me and other bloggers. It was around the same time that BAKE was formed and it helped make blogging more visible and the rest as we say is history.
3. Take us through the growth of Techweez
As I mentioned earlier, Techweez was a one man show. Many months in, after brands started working with me, I was able to get an extra hand and we were a two man team. We were able to fill a void that existed where traditional media didn’t give emphasis on tech coverage and would always cover the business side of things as their audience was and still is the masses. They don’t target the converted internet users primarily and want to appeal to even those who didn’t know what technology was.
Thus we found that companies with tech products, especially niche B2B companies warmed up to the idea of working with us commercially. We were reaching their target audience without the fluff.
My colleague, Emmanuel Chenze was still in college then and would make his contributions on his free time and during holidays. I remember this one time he wrote a proper exclusive while I was in Dubai on a work trip, and he broke the servers. Traffic as we had never seen before from numerous countries came knocking as we had broken a world exclusive. I had to go back to the hotel to frantically try get our server hosts to up our capacity. Good times.
We realized we were a force to reckon with when we started getting great interviews from global representatives of multinational companies who’d visit the country. This progressed on and we’d get interviews both in Kenya and Internationally when we would travel to global events like IFA Berlin, GITEX Dubai and MWC Barcelona. Business became more regular and Techweez looked like a growing business. But it was still a sole proprietorship.
4. Has Techweez received funding?
In April 2015, Techweez received an investment from a private investment firm to improve on the product and scale. We incorporated a company and we moved into a new office on Lenana road after previously working form a shared office on a Riara Road office for 2 months. Previously I was working from Nailab together with the BAKE team.
5. How have things changed, if at all, for you as an entrepreneur now that you have an investor.
After we got investment, Techweez added more people to the writing team. We are currently 5 in the editorial team plus two support staff. We also have a board member from the investment firm who is mainly an advisor to ensure we understand systems and processes of running a business. With a physical office, a great team and good coffee we, as a team, have a lot of energy to tackle the business world. With the additions to the team, I am able to delegate tasks like human resource and business management. This has made me focus on specific tasks like product development, thus running the business better. I don’t have to worry about statutory deductions or other non-core functions.
6. What is the future like for Techweez? Are there any plans to expand out of Kenya?
We have a big vision at Techweez. The team is full of energy and we regularly have strategy meetings to make things better. Expanding outside Kenya is somewhere in our mid-term plans and we want to ensure that we do things step by step. We moved from quick decisions made out of haste to proper strategic planning with short and long term plans. We became better due to this and it’s not even about the money, but more about the environment that we now have to dream big.
The idea is to make tech media as big if not bigger than traditional media. Media consumption for the connected is largely skewed towards the internet, especially the mobile phone. And those not already doing that are doing so because of limitations like lack of smartphones or internet access. Something that’s changing very fast.
We are always listening and working on our editorial to fit what our readers want while at the same time being innovative as it’s not always that consumers know what they want. Sometimes they want to be surprised, it works most of the time.
7. What are future plans as an entrepreneur?
As an entrepreneur I have a lot of work to make the current product what I want it to be. Future expansion plans would include venturing into new verticals in digital media. I’d say there’s a lot to look forward to and seeing how young online industry is, only dreamers can shape the future.
8. What is your view of online publishing in Kenya today and going forward?
Online publishing is just starting out in Kenya (it is barely 5 years old). There shall be disruptions and disruptions, and these shall come from dreamers who are willing to take risks in the sector. We shall continue seeing new players come in and make it big. The opportunities are immense and this is especially due to the fact that Internet access in Kenya is growing quite fast.
We shall see more investment in online publishers with a vision and interesting product, and we are already at a point where more and more advertisers are investing in online advertising as a first before considering traditional media.
Also that with every product, you follow consumer habits, baby boomers had their way of approach, so did millennials and now centennials. We already moved from waiting to read the news at 7pm, we can expect to see new ways of delivering information come up. We are a mobile first economy, and with nearly 30 million internet users in Kenya, we are going to see more and more people relying on online media primarily for their news. It can only get better.