After my bachelors at campus , I was determined not to get a job , in fact I initiated an idea to my close friends on if we should start a company, good enough everyone was up for the idea , so we opened an IT company. But I still thought we lacked the skill , then luckily I went for a training in Kenya , on mobile applications development which included business training.

To be honest this was the most informative time in my academic life , I even wondered what I was learning in university anyway learning here was different from university , more practical and real.

So in kenya I learnt alot about business and I couldn’t wait to go back to Rwanda to start a company , more determined this time .

After the training I came back in Rwanda more determined than ever ,I called for a meeting with my business partners and friends, from the skills I had gotten from the training we developed the idea of the IT company , so we developed our services and we were good to go, we even opened up office.

Things got really hard , reality is entrepreneurship is not easy as people have painted it to be “quit your job and be an entrepreneur” lets leave that statement for another day , Respect to all entrepreneurs its not an easy way to go.

We started the company 5 people , we all had a background of IT , we were all running the company, this was the first mistake , we started a company we did not start a product this was the second mistake.

The first mistake we started the company 5 people all with a background of IT, when we started the company we didn’t know the challenge ahead , we didn’t know that we would need someone to market our services, we didn’t know we needed a sales manager, we didn’t know we needed someone to do the finance , maybe we did , so we thought we could handle it , “well those are simple things we can handle them” , this is the biggest myth among “techies”, they form startups without considering this, if you did a simple research of the tech start ups available in Rwanda today you will find most of them never consider this. You find 4, 3 or even 6 people all with an IT background registering a start up.

Well what I learnt is before you start a company around an idea and you don’t want to go in alone , you want business partners , when choosing a business partner think of what value that person is bringing to the company . If you have an IT background maybe you need someone to do marketing, you need an investor, I don’t think you need another IT person , if you don’t have a skill that person has maybe you need to employ them not to make them a business partner, because after that he will add no value to the company.

If we young entrepreneurs can change our mindset , such that if we are to start a start up and need partners we first see what value each partner is supposed to bring on board maybe we would have more successful start-ups.

The second mistake is starting a company without a product , yes like us many young entrepreneurs have started companies but without products , this can work out especially if you are to go for government tenders , but it’s not a good idea to start a company without a product. Its better to develop a company around a product , a company with a product is easy to market.

Some young entrepreneurs think they can form a company then look for a product , yes it works out sometimes but it is hard life. The best way is to have a product then start a company around that product.

That was my first company, I made my mistakes , if you read this don’t make my mistakes learn from them.

Written by: Robert Ssebudandi
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