New twirra handle; the story of the new soap; the shoe-merchant

Omg! I am so scared!!

Heh! Dunford ametubamba ile mbaya hapa @ihub. Kenyan are good on land, and even inside some big, wet and warm pool.

But that is not the story for today. Ohh no! Not at all!

NTV and CNN are there for that. Hii blog ni ya content u can’t find anywhere else.

Ndio maanake buda. Juu mimi ni Salim. Idd Salim.

My new twitter handle

Well, In a country of conformism and a culture of ‘impress the mighty and they will smileth unto you’, it has become really hard for FreeThinkers to be themselves. I have been checking my twirra follower list as a habit-gauge and it is a sine-wave. There are those who have accepted Salim as he is and follow no matter what, and there are the fickle ones that unfollow-follow-retweet-unfollow-block-unblock-follow.

Such are the sad and pathetic souls. Amua moja! Dogi.

So, I have been advised by many. Open ONE handle for business and one for hii maneno ya madame, nipples na ball. A load of crap to which I say, go phurk a tree. In equal measure, I have been advised to open another blog. Ati iddsalim.com contains alot of cursing and ‘unholy talk’. I got this advise while with a friend at F1. Unholy my left-rounder nut.

Yeah. HypocriteVille. That’s where we live in. Do as I say, while I do as I advise against. TL-pretenders. Tweeting everyday about technologies they cannot describe, offline, and about other people’s success stories.

So, I have opened a new twirra handle to impress them. Since hao ndio wako na doo na nikiwajamisha na tweets about vitu evil kama madem na ball na nikiendelea kusema sipendi mashoga, hawata-invest in my mSumeno system.

The account is: @salimbilaballz. Follow!!!

The story of the new soap

Well, on Sunday evening, I was honored to attend an event organized by @theMumbi called #CreativezMeetup. Ofcourse, it was at @iHub. I mean, where else do you get a concentration of techies and creatives? Ok, apart from Linet’s bashes? Ahem!

So, one of the speakers was Buni Tv’s Julian Macharia. He gave us a story of the new soap, that was very moving. Here goes:

There once was a company (call it SabuniCus Inc) that wanted to introduce a new soap to the market with 3 established soap producers. So they sent 3 market-researchers to study the competitors.

Researcher 1 came back with his report: Company X has the cheapest soap in the market. People buy it because it is very affordable and does ONLY what a soap does. Cleaning. We simply cannot be sustainable if we created something cheaper.

Researcher 2 came back with her report: Company Y has the most long-lasting soap in the market. One bar lasts a family of 5 for 6 months. People LOVE it because the but it ONCE, and forget about soaps till November. We cannot create something that will outlast them.

Researcher 3 came back with her report: Company Z has the dream product. Their soap has the BEST medical value. It kills 92% of all germs known to man and 95% of all known to woman. Parents and sportsmen LOVE it. We cannot create something that will beat that.

So, the company lead strategist called a decision meeting with his plan. And it went like this:

None of the soaps above have what we want to sell. A ‘Nice smelling soap’. But, being new entrants, we cannot just create out own ‘nice-smelling-soap-lovers’ group. We need to bite into what the people ALREADY have and already USE.

We will create 4 variants of our soap:

SabuniCus Original – Best smelling soap in the market, SabuniCus GermzBeGone – Best smelling soap in the market with Anti-germs, SabuniCus Forever – Best smelling soap in the market that lasts long and SabuniCus Enonimialis – Best smelling soap in the market that is pocket friendly.

As a FMCG, we will cater for the whole market.

This story covered alot of things we talk about everyday as/to coders:

• Market Research
• Segmented product
• Unique selling proposition

This augurs well with a Story @sirben7 told me while in Uganda about the shoe merchant. Here goes:

A shoe-merchant wanted to start a branch of his shoe-selling business in a new town. So he sent 4 of his most trusted messengers to the markets to see what type of shoes were best-sellers there. They all came back with very saddening news.

“Good Sir”, they all answered, “There are no shoes shops in this town. In fact, NO ONE in the town wears shoes. Shoes are just never been heard of here. This business will, surely, fail.”, they advised.

He fired all of them.

Tafakari hayo.

Back to code.

Wazi.