You Don’t Owe Anyone But Yourself
You don’t owe anyone but yourself.
That’s the weight nobody warns you about: the responsibility of not letting yourself down.
You’ve lived the Kenyan life. You know what it costs. And you want more. Fuck it, you want better.
Then you watch other people getting there, getting the money, and you can’t help asking: why not me? Why is it taking so long?
So you worry. And the same sentence loops in your head: I should be rich by now.
You scold yourself. I’m smart. So why am I not rich yet?
Here’s what I learned about that.
You make money and start to grow, but at some point, it stops. Or it all comes tumbling down and you’re back at zero. That was me, before I started a subscription-based business.
Most people start a business primed for one sale per customer. But look closely and you’ll notice that some of the most successful businesses are built on subscriptions.
Take school. In Kenya, nearly everyone attends, and families pay fees for almost 20 years of their lives. Multiply that by the population and you’re looking at a mandatory subscription service. Then there are taxes. And at the lighter end, streaming platforms.
So here’s the truth: if you want to make money, you have to sell something. But if you want to get rich, you need to turn customers into return customers by building at least one subscription business.
There are many ways to get rich. But I want you, the person reading this, to try this one for a year.
The target: 1,000 paying customers who stay.
It might be the ultimate test of value, and perhaps the biggest business challenge you’ll take on so far. It won’t be enough to build a great product. How you treat your customers will matter just as much. That’s a good environment to build a business in. It will demand commitment and discipline, and it will teach you to show up for something every single day for a year.
If you take it on, there are only two possible outcomes:
- You hit 1,000 customers and build a business earning over a million shillings in a year.
- You fall short, but you learn what it takes to truly commit to yourself, and you walk away with recurring income and a blueprint for making year two the year it works.