KUUZA

Micro and small businesses are the lifeblood of developing economies and I would dare to say that every person who lives in developing economies has been impacted by a small business. The problem is that these small businesses are not achieving their ideal growth due to informal processes and fragmented operations. We know the health of small businesses directly contributes to the health of family, community, state, regions and world and we believe we can change financial timelines for them through technology, connection and creative automation. 

In Africa 9/10 businesses are small businesses. When we look at East Africa, the data trends the same and in Kenya the data is even more promising where 9/10 small shop owners have a smartphone, 5.5 million are informal and 64% of small shop owners are already using an app in their businesses. 

Zooming back out to the continent as a who 1/3 business owners don't know why they aren't using a product such as KUUZA in their shops, really highlighting the latent demand that exists in our market. 

The market is ripe for a solution that truly meets their demands and expectations and we are here to give it to them.

Our solution is KUUZA an operational guru that fits into your pocket.

KUUZA is a phone app that works online and offline and allows businesses owners to attach employees and managers giving them oversight into their operations regardless if they are in the shop or not.

Right now KUUZA automates 6 core operations for a small business owner- HR, sales, inventory, customers who buy on credit and expenses. 

Where we want to take our product is one that acts as a live guru for your businesses handholding you into growth and we will accomplish this through our exciting and extremely niche product roadmap.

DEMO: 

KUUZA is focused on micro and small product based businesses that have a storefront and a smartphone. As you know this is a popular market and I don't believe they have been underserved but have been misserved leading to a lack of adoption.

Our market is one that demands affordable excellence, they are not beggars who will implement anything just because it is technology. Just like any customer in the west, they also expect technology to make their life easier and to help them gain control to lead their businesses where they envision them.

The difference is that our market needs more than just graphs put in front of them, they need real-time interjection, ideas and explanations to get them to where they want to grow to and that is what KUUZA gives them.

Our co-founders are deeply passionate about driving economies forward that is rooted in financial inclusion/health and technology. We bring compatible yet diverse experience to our vision. Caitlin has been working with small businesses in East Africa since 2017 through different capacities. She has a knack for identifying patterns and listening to what business owners need and working with Ken to create a tech solution. Ken is a full stack android developer that is deeply aware of our market’s behaviors and threads that into his creative yet practical build of our product KUUZA. Ken is always thinking 10 steps ahead in our build to ensure that we are laying a foundation of scale, flexibility and impact. We have capability to build out our vision and change our users financial timelines through our product, KUUZA. 

Our MVP has long-term paying customers and we have seen a 72% increase in spend. We launched KUUZA in Feb of 2023 and used last year to really understand what our market expect of KUUZA and how KUUZA interacts in their enviroments (spotty/no data, multiple users, etc). 

Last year gave us a clear picture of how we need to expand our product and the foundation that is necessary for a smooth user experience when dealing with the realities of our market's environment.

We have also raised our angel round with external investors that has allowed us to get this point and are currently raising our pre-seed round.

We are applying to Solve due to your market experience especially in tracking and monitoring impact and your network.

We are at a pivotal time where recognition in the right networks is important and having partners who can help us lay the foundation for a scalable tech solution is crucial.

Ken and I understand our market and where we need to take our product and we are also first time founders who want to use others knowledge to sidestep common mistakes to put us on the efficent track of scale.

KUUZA is a niche product with a niche vision that addresses a large market. Our vision for KUUZA places us in our market as a true ally to our user's success and allows us to layer on offerings that deepen our impact and understanding of our market. 

What sets us apart in our space is our creative problem solving and being able to translate that into a tech solution. Those creative solutions can't ask users to change their behavior but needs to work with their current behaviors to give them transparency and guidance when it comes to how their business operates.

We already know that our product is having an impact in our users businesses due to feedback we have heard.

One user who owns a hardware shop told us they fired two employees because KUUZA was able to give evidence to some of their suspicions around sales being recorded.

Another user who sells lactation cookies uses KUUZA to help reconcile bank accounts and noticed 3 days of mobile money transactions not being reflected on his bank statement. When he went to the bank they identified the deposits were in his account (and showed him) and that for some reason wasn't reflected on the statement.

Right now we don't have a process in place to track all the ways KUUZA is impacting our users but we know the features that they need that will impact their business in a positive way. 

Our north star is that every KUUZA user will feel confident enough in their business to take a two week vacation and we aren't quite sure how we will track that.

Why is this our north star? Because when we look at economies where small business owners are able to do this, the economy is thriving. It also means the business is healthy in revenues, profits, operations/processes and employees. 

This is also our north star because when we interview our users about where they see themselves in five years they see themselves in a CEO role where they are high level supervisor which aligns with the ability to take a two week vacation. We believe KUUZA will be a key player in this coming into reality.

KUUZA is a cloud-based phone app that works both online and offline which has been fully built in house by our CTO/co-founder, Ken. 

We are a team of two:

Caitlin Seandel, Co-Founder/CEO 

Kenneth Waweru, Co-founder/ CTO

We are both working full time on KUUZA.

Ken and I have been working on KUUZA since May of 2022. Caitlin started Kuungana in 2020 with initial funding from her grandfather of $40,000 that was red taped, "None of this can go towards technology." So she created a financial wellness training where she trained 300 small business owners in both tangible and emotional operations of business and money. 

Caitlin started building KUUZA in September of 2021 with a different developer which was a bad hire. She met Ken through a mutual friend in April of 2022 and they started building KUUZA from scratch in May of 2022.

Caitlin is the original founder of Kuungana Technology but wanted to bring on a Kenyan co-founder because she knew it was important to the success of her vision.

Ken and I both understand the importance of hiring a diverse workforce and plan on making sure that we do. I know that is super general but in all honesty I believe that is where it starts, both leaders agreeing on the importance of having men and women and different tribes represented in our workforce. When it comes to gender identity in Kenya it is something that we cannot ask due to the current laws here but it is something that we won't discriminate against.

When users download KUUZA they are greeted with their first two months free (this is to build trust) after that we have a foundation model that is 268 ksh/mo that allows business owners to manage:

+ 3 locations

+3 employees

+ 4 admin

+ 200 products (think of this as SKUs)

After that business owners can add more of any of the above based on their needs at an additional montly cost

+1 extra location =

+1 extra employee =

+1 extra admin=

+200 extra products=

Our additional features also come at an affordable monthly cost, right now the feature we tested this out on is:

+manage customers who buy on credit = 30 ksh

It is our aim to have users paying between 1500-5500 ksh/mo as they build their own operational tool that fits to their needs.

We don't charge in January due to the constraints a lot of small business owners feel in that month. We don't want to disrupt our business or theirs when we know January is a hard month. We also understand the importance of showing appreciation to our market and consider this a thank you for trusting us with their operations.

We decided to take this approach as we know our market needs flexibility and for us to capture the small product based market we need to match that flexibility with our product and pricing.

We are focused on our unit economic, distribution partnerships and learning from businesses who came before us to allow us to reach out goal of becoming the first Impact SaaS Unicorn.

This will require us to raise money from aligned investors, receive grants and truly focus on our features and value additions to get us to a path of profitability efficiently as possible.