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Unbiased Opinions

#Unbiased Opinions

“The first step is to come to the community and talk to the people. This is why stuff never happens in the slums”
-Octopizzo

Kenyan rapper and entrepreneur Octopizzo has seen countless NGOs, aid organizations, government programs, and businesses come into Kibera, the slum where he grew up. They will come to the slum with, for example, a plan to pave the roads because the people running it have decided this is what the people of Kibera need most of all. But these plans too often fail because they don’t address what people truly need. That failure begins with a failure to search for unbiased opinions, rather than opinions that reinforce a misguided goal.

##How to Look for Customer Input

“Almost everything is an unknown unknown, the brilliance of being an entrepreneur is that you think you know everything.”
-Philip Walton

The irony here is that believing in your idea is at the core of being an entrepreneur. So how do you balance these things? This is a question Philip Walton faced with his company BRCK. Both Philip and Octopizzo know that passion for your work isn’t the problem, but they learned that in different ways.

For Philip it was about being serious about going out to spend time with his customers, talk to him, and watch how they interacted with his products. His company schedules motorcycle trips out to the farthest villages to combine team-building with product testing and customer feedback.

He and his team walked in their customers shoes. They discovered that their customers’ needs were different than what he had anticipated.

“The more we moved out the more we learned about how users would interact with the system… We eliminated a lot of things we thought were cool but weren’t useful and added new things”
-Philip Walton

The unbiased opinions Philip and BRCK sought were sometimes from customers and sometimes from nature itself. They exposed their devices to sandstorms near the Kenyan Ethiopian border only to watch it fail. This necessitated a total redesign. As Philip put it, “it’s horrifying to realize it doesn’t work the way we wanted.”

For Octopizzo, the difficulty in getting unbiased opinions was different. His target community is his own community, a place he understands well. However, this could still lead him to make assumptions without properly validating them. He recommends using Community Based Organizations (CBOs) which work closely with locals. Even his own personal experiences pale in comparison to what they learn by being on the ground every day.

“The CBOs do more work here than the NGOs.”
-Octopizzo

By combining his own insights with those gained from discussions with CBOs, Octopizzo has developed a clean water program designed from the ground up for the unique challenges of the slum. In doing so, he has community backing and respect for the way the program has been designed and is hopefully about its future success. For him, this stands in stark contrast to the failed development programs he’s watched come and go throughout his life.

Success started from the people’s needs and went from there.


Can you relate to the stories we told here? How is your experience different? We’d love to hear from you. Your questions and comments are what will help us make better lessons in the future.