A Creator Solving for the Unemployment Crisis In Kenya/Africa

“Building a product that wins is success. Building something people love and use.” Matt Magera.

Hi Matt, what’s your background and how did you find yourself in tech?

Hi, my name is Matt Magera, the Creator of Jobzy, we dumped the founder title 😅.

I’m just excited about technology, I’ve been doing this for some time now, possibly 4 plus years, most of which have been spent on building Jobzy.

What drew me and the guys I work with to tech was the excitement in solving big or tough problems.

Finding employment is a big problem in Africa and so we felt we could deliver a meaningful solution that could tackle this very real challenge in Kenya and in Africa as well. This has been a major part of my tech journey.

In terms of my background, I would say I started out professionally as a website developer doing a few gigs here and there, worked in a few organizations and built some communities before focusing on what I’m doing currently.

How do you choose the products that you work on?

I’d say we like big problems, things that excite us. Problems with a big market opportunity and with the possibility that the product could be a solution for people and players across multiple industries.

You could have decided to work on anything else, why did you settle on Jobzy?

Finding employment is a really big problem, it needs no introduction.

Jobzy initially started as a way to build technology for the informal sector which is the biggest contributor to most of Africa’s economies and the overall GDP. It was/is a big segment and we felt that we could bring real, meaningful value by solving one or two challenges for the people in this sector.

We’ve encountered some challenges along the way and made a few pivots where necessary and are now working on Talent which is our new product still under the Jobzy umbrella.

Talent is an app that helps people looking for jobs and internships find them faster, we have a vast list of jobs and openings on the app that users can look through and apply to. Currently it mostly has openings in the tech industry but we are expanding it to accommodate other sectors as well.

We are currently doubling down on the professional recruitment space and we want to build tools and provide infrastructure that makes it easier to find the right talent and professionals for any job. So other players in this recruitment space will also be able to plug into our offering to make their work easier. Screening, background checks, vetting etc, this will all be done and ready to go for anyone who needs it.

How did you build it?

There’s nothing too fancy on our end.

Initially we did too much, hired a number of people, spent a lot of money and it all didn’t make sense so we went back to basics. We put together a small founding team that has all the necessary skills that we need to build, deliver, ship and push the product that we are working on at the moment.

Currently we are just a two-person team, tech and business.

How did you get your first customers/users?

Mostly through the networks that I’m in, the different communities and most definitely friends in the space as well.

If you are building something that people actually need and solving for a problem that exists, you will find users to try out the product. Before you even build you should identify guys who will use what you want to build, it makes things much easier.

For Talent, I already had people asking me about job and internship opportunities via DMs and on different platforms thus there was an existing need already for the app.

What are some challenges that you have faced and how did you overcome them?

Costs is a big one. There are services that we have to pay for and being that the product is not generating any revenue yet we have to figure out how to pay for these services, but one way or another it has to get done.

Ensuring that we deliver the product on time and as required is also a challenge, but this is one we can definitely handle.

Financially/user acquisition wise how is the product doing?

For Talent we are 500 downloads and hopefully it keeps growing steadily, we just launched about a week ago.

What are some of the mistakes you made while working on the product?

Building a product or company without the right skill set within the founding team. You need the people in the founding team to be able to do the fundamentals that are required to get the product out the door and working. If not, you waste a lot of time and money doing useless things that add little to no value.

Not talking to customers and not understanding the problem well enough to solve it. Talking to customers helps with understanding the problem and this should have been done early on.

One very good way of knowing if you are solving a real problem is if people are willing to pay for the solution, even with Talent being that it’s still free to use, we still don’t know for sure if we are solving a meaningful problem but we are onboarding users and they are trying it out.

What are some of your future plans?

We are working on a couple of features that will be primarily for recruiters to help with identification and verification of potential hires, streamlining some of the key processes that make recruiting cumbersome

If you had the chance to do things differently, what would you do?

I wouldn’t have spent too much time on fund raising rather I would have spent a lot more time talking to customers and on the business itself. If I would have spent more time understanding the customers and their needs, they are the ones who would be paying me and sustaining the business.

Spend time on the things that grow and sustain the business.