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I have always wondered how founders, who start out while at university build startups from scratch. At that stage, the majority of founders have neither the experience nor the resources to even cater for the basics of building. But what these founders have in abundance is sheer grit and perseverance. So when I heard of a founder who has managed to successfully build while still in school, I quickly scheduled a call with him.
After a few near reschedules, we finally got down to it. The conversation began with the usual startup camaraderie, but as soon as he started to speak, I realized that was where the fun stopped. John Viannie Wasswa had seen it all in his young life.
“I was pursuing my medical degree in 2018, but I was really inspired by how much CEOs were making. I Googled the likes of Meg Whitman and their salaries were shocking to me.” Viannie tells me as we kick off our conversation. “I wanted to find a way to make similar money. I just wanted to make enough to change my life forever. At this point, I didn’t even know what entrepreneurship or a startup was”
Viannie went down a rabbit hole. He decided to write to the big companies in the USA to open up their franchises here in Uganda. “I sent proposals to many companies like Apple, eBay, and Walmart among others. After two months, no company replied except Walmart”.
Having failed to secure a franchise, prompted Viannie to build something of his own. “My father is a mechanical engineer, so my first startup was to build an e-commerce site for people to order spare parts. “
While trying to convince a developer to build the site for him, he learnt a valuable lesson. “The developer told me that to build a tech solution, it should solve a problem. I thought people just build anything and customers like it. I didn’t even know the likes of Facebook or WhatsApp were companies.” It was time to shelve that idea.
Building Cyanase.
Viannie was approached by a friend who wanted to share an idea about a network marketing website. But he wasn’t so bullish about that idea and wanted to find a way to restructure it.
“I spent the entire night thinking about how to make the idea better, and I ended up sending my friend a message in the middle of the night about an improvement to his original idea. However, I wanted to become a co-founder with just 10% in his startup. My friend never got back to me, and I concluded he wasn’t that interested. I decided to pursue it myself”
The idea in question was to build an investment platform that parents would use to make savings and investments for their children. “My logic was a parent should save maybe shs 50,000 every month from the point the child is born, until graduation. So on graduation day, you get your transcript and maybe a couple of millions to properly kick start adulthood”.
But at this point, Viannie had run out of resources. His mum used to support him but she wasn’t doing well financially and his laptop had crashed down. All he had was a phone. He needed to build at least an MVP, so he took matters into his own hands.
“I didn’t know how to write code, and I couldn’t pay for a developer. I didn’t even have a laptop, but I was so obsessed with executing this idea so I learnt how to code on my phone taking advantage of the public Mak-Air wifi in Makerere. After learning, I developed the early version of Cyanase within a month”.
But after building the early version, He needed to market it. As his story goes, he didn’t have the funds to market it, but he got creative. “I followed every single Ugandan celebrity and big accounts on Facebook. I made sure that anytime there was a post, I would be the first to comment. Then I would include a link to Cyanase telling people they could make investments. Using this marketing hack, I was able to get my first 1000 signups”.
However, people were not using the website even after signing up. On engaging the users, he was told the website looked like a scam, and users would trust it more if he developed an app. So, he taught himself how to build an app, built the first app of Cyanase using his small LG smartphone, but lacked the funds to deploy it in the Google Play store. He turned to a familiar story in the startup world.
“I was so inspired by Jack Ma’s founding story where he got 18 friends into his apartment and convinced them to build what became Alibaba with him. So, I got my classmates and took them under a big tree to try to convince them to invest in Cyanase. All of them expressed interest, but along the way, they left. But at that moment, we crowdfunded and raised about $1000. This was enough to pay for the Google Play store.”
Breakthrough.
People started depositing money on Cyanase for investments. “We had deposits of over shs 15m, but had one investment class of buying and reselling land. It was profitable “. With this traction, Viannie hit the road to raise funding.
“I had no idea about funding. And usually, we pick the wrong benchmarks because we have no information that fits our local context. For example, I wanted to raise $600k, because Zuckerberg had raised $500k to build Facebook back in the day. But looking back at this, it was an uneducated gamble because I pulled that number from thin air.”
But Cyanase was able to raise $35,000 from Kenneth Legesi’s Ortus Capital in 2021. That investment has served the startup well. They have since facilitated over $450,000 in investments and we have over 2,000 users. They have evolved from just being an investment platform catering to parents, their children and students.
“The vision now is to aggregate different investment classes from any country into a single platform so that any Fintech, bank or digital platform can just tap into the tech. We see great potential in this. Twitter launched investments, and our first thought was, we could be their provider in these parts of the world. People are investing more now than ever before due to increased financial literacy.”
But apart from the API and the B2C platform, Cyanase also built the fund managers portal which helps investment companies like Sanlam, Britam or UAP to list their investment classes.
In the future, Viannie is dreaming big. “We are in talks with MTN and Airtel so that users can just dial a USSD code and make investments powered by Cyanase. We are also in talks with big fintechs like Flutterwave and Chipper Cash to use our API “
Biggest Lessons Learnt.
Building a startup while young is extremely hard because you don’t have the funds or experience or even the network. But being young makes one fearless because there isn’t much to lose. “For me, I learnt that I didn’t need permission from anyone to build. I just went ahead and did it. One time I walked to the State House without an appointment demanding to see the president because I was frustrated by my fundraising efforts. Of course, the soldiers chased me away.”
“Also, the power of networking is important. On my journey, I have been a recipient of help from other founders like David Gonahasa of Tripesa, Nik Milanovic the General Partner at the Fintech Fund and Kenneth Legesi of Ortus Africa Capital. You don’t know what you don’t know, but people who know are always willing to share.” Viannie concludes.