Naturally, humans tend to focus on the positive side of life. We encourage ourselves when things get hard to continue pushing forward with the hope that perseverance will bear fruit. When that fruit comes, which we call success, we celebrate. We dread failure and seldom want to be associated with it.
Although success often follows perseverance that helps us overcome a series of failures, I tend to think that failure is a necessary step on the path to success. Also, sometimes we need to be aware of our lives and the efforts we are pouring into tasks, or whatever we are building, well enough to know when it is the right time to give up and when it is the right time to persevere through the pain. There are trade-offs.
In this post, I take you through a real-life journey of self-sacrifice that has reached a point where I must make a difficult decision of whether to keep pushing beyond the micro-failures or to redirect my efforts completely to another pursuit. First, I will give a background of myself so that it sets the stage for the story I am sharing.
Background
First, I am human. I think that’s all that matters. Consequently, I find it very hard to box myself within a specific job title or a clear distinction of whether I am a left-brain or right-brain person. I have excelled in many things in life, including school. I have been good in all subjects: the sciences, the arts, the languages, and in extra-curricular activities (that is, the games). I can build buildings, code websites, write poems, ride bicycles, play badminton, sing, create videos, write blog posts, teach at the university, and speak in seminars, among many other things. Math, science, art, athletics, yeah.
However, I understand that the current world likes to categorise people according to their careers and frowns upon individuals who they can’t really box into one distinct category. That is also how the education system has been designed – pick one path, one title, and die with it. Anyway, I am a professional quantity surveyor and construction project manager. I obtained a Bachelor of Quantity Surveying from the University of Nairobi and am finalising a Master of Construction Project Management at the Technical University of Kenya. That is for your context.
As an individual, I treat the work I do as solving problems. I like to think of myself as a polymathic individual. One who has broad and in-depth interests in various disciplines and combines knowledge from these disciplines to come up with innovative ways of solving life problems. My mind wanders, observes patterns, and connects dots, and when that curiosity is ripe, I dig deep into a knowledge area, enough to find gaps that I can creatively fill and contribute to the advancement of society (okay, this may be an overstatement, but at the very least, to the advancement of myself).
That said, during my studies and practice, over four years ago, I discovered a gap that I thought was worth investing my time to create a solution, and in the process, build value for myself too – from an entrepreneurial perspective.
The Genesis
Back in 2017, I found myself struggling to complete a university assignment that involved developing a virtual 3D model, 2D drawings, and documentation for a building. So, I went to YouTube to look for tutorials because we were working on software that was new to me.
I grew up in a remote village without electricity, let alone computers. So, I had been introduced to computers in high school and never really had a chance to learn how to use them properly. A few months before joining the university, I bought my first-ever laptop. I learned most of the things from online, from other people’s blogs or videos on YouTube.
I found tutorials online that helped me practice and deliver the assignment, but there were challenges that I also experienced with the tutorials. Most of them were made by people from outside my country, with a foreign and unfamiliar English accent, and sometimes not speaking English or not speaking at all (they would have background music and the video playing).
I thought I needed a voice that I could identify with, and so I decided to record some videos to experiment. A friend challenged me to share my first video on YouTube, and even though I was not confident about it, people online loved it. They kept watching, writing positive feedback on the comments section, sharing criticisms, and that was a green light. I decided to keep recording and uploading, and that’s how I started a YouTube Channel.
I continued with this even after leaving the university, and in the process came to another idea. The software here is ArchiCAD, and it works by allowing you to put together building elements, modules, components, fittings, and fixtures to form a virtual model of a building. These items are either represented as design elements or library objects. An ordinary installation would come with a limited set of objects and would not be enough to represent all the possible mutations of real-life building elements, components, materials, fixtures, fittings, among others, especially in the local markets. Therefore, users tended to create their own custom library parts and templates, which they used to come up with more realistic models in the local context.
That was the same for other software, such as Revit (with Revit templates and families), AutoCAD’s CAD blocks, SketchUp models, etc.
Some people had created their custom local libraries and templates and were either giving them out for free or selling them on their personal websites. Other users were downloading them, and I could see how they were being sought after in official user community groups on the various platforms that I had joined.
So, I thought to myself, why not create a platform where these talented creators and designers could pull together all these resources that were scattered across independent personal websites and blogs to one place? So that if anyone was looking for these assets from anywhere in the world, all they needed was to get to the platform, browse, compare products, pay, and download.
I decided to put myself to work. The idea was to build a web-based marketplace that would allow multiple vendors to sign up, list their assets as digital objects (for any construction software they were using), set prices, and share these amazing assets with the rest of the world. Users would come to the platform, download whatever they needed. If the products are paid for, I earn a percentage as the owner of the platform, and the specific vendor makes money too. A win-win for all of us. So, I set out to build what I called “a global BIM marketplace – BIMGOODIES.COM.”
Progress So Far
In May 2022, I launched the web-based multivendor marketplace. That same year, I got an opportunity to speak in one international construction event. So, I tagged the website in my intro as one of the things I had done in my career. It was a perfect match, because the theme of my talk matched this product. So, the traffic started building up. Vendors started registering and listing their products, and steadily, the user base started to increase. Then sales started coming in.
I wish you could see the happiness every time I saw those PayPal notifications and emails of new orders getting completed. I felt like I was living the dream of a successful founder! I had conceived this idea in my mind, built it alone, during the nights and weekends after leaving my day job, and see here are real people buying and selling products on it. Real products, real money – that was the market validation I needed to start scaling this solution.
Btw, this is the desk sitting at the corner of my studio apartment (where I lived then), where I launched the marketplace from in 2022.
The next efforts were to get more people to sign up and list their products, so that we could offer users more variety of digital assets to choose from. Then one morning, I woke up to many PayPal notifications and order emails, more than I had been receiving before. That was good news. I thought to myself, we are starting to grow big now. I was both right and wrong at the same time. This increased activity opened a new set of challenges that I had not envisioned.
Challenges and Lessons
PayPal sent me a notification that they were limiting my account, and I needed to submit some business registration documents and account opening authorization proof to lift the limitations. I did that, but the issue took longer to be resolved by PayPal. During that period, orders could not be completed because PayPal was the only payment processor I had integrated on the platform.
When users try to pay for products, and it fails, they don’t wait for you to sort out your issues; you lose their trust, and they bounce out to other alternative places on the web. This was working to my disadvantage. Finally, this issue got resolved, and we got back to successful order processing and payments.
Then, after some months, and this happened recently, I got the same email from PayPal again asking me to submit business registration documents for verification. I submit these, and the next response I get from them is that my PayPal Merchant Account has been permanently deactivated. What a blow!
Any African entrepreneur who has had issues with PayPal services knows how hard it is to reach out to their support for a resolution, especially when they decide to terminate their services to your business (and without explaining the specific reason for their decision).
So, I watched orders fail on the platform. Each “failed order” email was a reminder that the platform was now heading in the wrong direction. So, I decided to seek an alternative solution. My search led me to Paystack, a Nigerian financial technology solution that provides payment processing services for businesses across Africa.
I created a user account on the platform, submitted business registration documents, and applied for a business account activation. They promise to review accounts within 7 working days, but I didn’t receive feedback within that period. So, I tweeted their support account asking for help. The next day, I received an email asking me to respond to some questions so that the review process could be finalized. I responded, and the next thing my business account was disabled (I cannot process payments)!
I tried to engage their support to understand why that was happening. We had a lengthy conversation, where I explained how my business (that is, the marketplace) works, and they also explained to me the services they are currently supporting for businesses in Kenya. It turns out that there was a mismatch between the marketplace’s business model and Paystack’s currently supported business operations.
The marketplace’s business model is simple. We allow multiple vendors to sign up on the platform and list their digital products for sale. They get a dedicated creator page, where all their products are listed. The products also show on the marketplace's main products page, and other feeds and collections on the website. When a customer buys a paid product, we earn 15% of the amount, and the rest (85%) goes to the vendor.
This is where it becomes interesting. The payout splitting is not automated. A vendor can see their earnings on their dashboard, but the money is not split and sent automatically to their bank account or wallet. In the current model, we collect all the money in a common account, then manually send out payouts to the vendors after they have initiated it from the vendor dashboard. Also, the platform is global, and vendors come from all over the world. So, we are not dealing with business from Kenya only. Also, the customers are buying these digital assets from anywhere in the world. That very nature is what made Paystack shy away from supporting us.
According to them, they argued that we operate the platform as an aggregator, facilitating payments on behalf of vendors. These vendors are not only from Kenya, but also from other parts of the world. While they have a solution for automating payouts to split the platform's earnings and the vendor's earnings and send them out independently, they have restricted themselves to serving businesses in Kenya with that feature, because they send money to local bank accounts after you have made sales. Whether a fair assessment of the situation, I do not know, but there’s a solution to this.
The solution to our payment challenges is implementing automated split payments, where the payment processor of choice collects money paid for a product and splits it according to the percentages, and sends it to our account and the vendors' accounts. That way, we stop collecting money in our account for us to send out payouts later. This payment processor should then be able to support our identity verification for vendors, fraud protection, handling refunds and chargebacks, split payments, global payouts, and the ability to collect payments from all over the world. That way, we will be back to business, with a more automated business model, with us only receiving our share of earnings and not handling any vendor money directly.
Paystack is limited when it comes to that. I think PayPal, with its marketplace solution, can support that, but most reviews point to Stripe Connect for platform and marketplace payments as the best solution to implement, owing to its global coverage.
This has all the functionalities and capabilities we need, but there’s one issue. Stripe operates in Kenya mainly through their partnership with Paystack, whose current business offering cannot support what we are currently implementing. To use Stripe Global, we are required to have our business registered and operating in one of the supported countries. We are only registered in Kenya, so for now, we cannot benefit from Stripe Connect payment services!
Give Up, Maybe?
It has been over four years of investing my nights and weekends to build this platform. Currently, the traffic to the website and the number of transactions happening on the platform have been increasing before these payment issues started. The site’s reach keeps on growing, and I am confident that marketplaces like this will be the next big thing when the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industries globally move to adopt the practice of building information modelling (BIM) to deliver projects.
Now, I have reached a point where I need to make a difficult decision: give up on the platform, maybe. How do you know whether it is the right time to quit anyway?
I am weighing on the following options for now:
- Close the platform and accept that I have failed to sustain it long enough to see it scale successfully. The marketplace model is very simple and easy to monetise. However, the payments are a challenge. Africa has not built the right infrastructure to support that for now (maybe something will come up in the future). I have learned my lesson and could use them to build another digital business.
- I am also considering partnering with another business or individual in one of the countries where Stripe offers their platform and marketplaces payment service. We can register a new business there as proprietors and get access to Stripe services. My payment problem will be resolved, and I can continue building the business to attract more vendors and customers to exchange digital products on the platform.
- Or I can sell what I have built so far to another person or business that has the capacity to resolve the current issues (especially implementing automated split payments with Stripe Connect). Then I will retain a technical advisory role and help develop and grow the business.
If you are reading this and are interested in partnering with me or buying the business (bimgoodies.com), write to me at hello@nzangimuimi.com and let me know.
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