The value of "front-line DNA"

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At Kapu, the company I work at, we have this value called “front-line-DNA”.

It’s the idea that every week you need to go to the market and talk to our agents and customers. Sometimes it’s to answer specific questions you have, but sometimes it’s just to experience what things are really like, and notice potential issues.

There are three main benefits of front-line DNA:

  1. It allows you to test specific ideas quickly: “Can we give you a sign to display prices?” “No, I don’t have time to update the sign.” Ok, we’ll move onto the next idea.

  2. It lets you understand the problems people face better: For example, certain parts of our app flow take a long time to load on agent’s phones which are way slower than mine

  3. It builds your instincts about how things work in our business. Two I’ve built are “everything has to be 10x simpler than I initially think it should be” and “agents do not read text messages - unless they are about their commissions”

This has changed how I approach problem-solving outside of this particular job. Some examples:

  • Last weekend, my girlfriend and I had an idea for a business doing importing of goods from China to sell to petty traders. Instead of thinking about it in the abstract for too long, we just went downtown and talked to 6 traders and realized most of them already had quite efficient supply chains. Scrap that idea.

  • If I move into an administrative role later in my career, I will be sure to make time each week to talk directly with the end beneficiaries (e.g., customers)

  • If I were to start a charity working in a particular country, I would move to that country (sounds obvious but not everybody does this)

It’s not a universal golden rule though. For example:

  • The more similar your product is to other things already on the market, the less important front-line DNA is

  • Sometimes testing your product with one set of users might be enough to be sure it works with another set.

    • For example Meta has hundreds of millions of users in Africa (especially WhatsApp), but does not do any UX testing on the continent. Maybe they would have a better product if they did user testing in Africa, but they seem to have done alright basing decisions on input from users in other countries.

On balance, “spend a lot of time with the people whose problems you’re trying to solve” seems like super obvious advice, but I think it is still underrated in the worlds of “development”, philanthropy, consulting, and Effective Altruism.

I’ve been working at Kapu for the past 10 months!

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For the past 10 months I've been working at Kapu. It was in “stealth mode” until December last year, so I couldn’t tell people much about it.

I’m excited to tell everyone about it now! Here are the basics of how Kapu works:

An example Kapu order - lots of greens! Foot for scale

Example of the neighbourhood shops our customers usually buy from

  • How do we make money? Kapu is a group-buying e-commerce company. We sell things people use every day at home, mostly food but also things like soap and diapers.

  • Who do we sell to? Our customers are poor Kenyans who usually spend 50% of their money on the types of products we sell - so they are extremely price sensitive. These customers place orders with agents, and we deliver to the agents the next day (saving last mile delivery costs because one agent might order for 10 customers, and we only have to make one delivery to that agent for all 10 customers).

  • How are we competitive? Our customers are extremely price-sensitive. For some products, they will buy from us if we are only 2 cents (2 Kenyan shillings) cheaper than their neighbourhood shops. We can be cheaper than these shops because we cut out a bunch of middle-men.

  • Kapu is 1 year old, and right now we are only active in Nairobi, Kenya. Hopefully we will grow to new cities soon

To chart my thinking a little bit as to why I decided to work at Kapu:

  • I want extreme poverty to end within my lifetime (from a post I wrote 2 years ago)

  • I think I have the strongest chance to have impact in on people living in extreme poverty by working for a company that is sustainably creating jobs, decreasing prices, and driving economic growth (from a post I wrote a year ago)

So when I decided to leave BCG, I started looking for great startups. I decided on Kapu because:

  • Kapu makes people’s lives better in a very straightforward way: It saves them money day-to-day. A lot of companies I looked had a lot more complicated theories of change, which made me less confident they would be as impactful as they claimed

  • The team at Kapu is super strong and experienced - meaning I’ve had lots more coaching and mentorship than is typical at a first-year startup

  • Kapu has strong funding - $8M seed round

  • The day-to-day work sounded like fun - and it has been. My role has shifted every few months, but the most consistently fun thing has been going to neighbourhoods in Nairobi I normally wouldn’t and understanding how I can help solve people’s problems.

I’m planning to be with Kapu in Nairobi for the foreseeable future. When we grow out of this city, and maybe eventually this country, I may move out of Nairobi to help grow Kapu elsewhere. But for now I’m focused on making Kapu in Nairobi as successful as possible.

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If you want to learn more about Kapu, startups in Nairobi, or anything, shoot me a message or an email at ljeure@gmail.com. If you’re reading this and are curious, then I’d love to talk!