The 10 Month Cycle

As an entrepreneur, it is of paramount importance to understand your rhythm. It is easier to pace yourself if you can identify your own entrepreneurial cycle. I believe everyone has their own cycle as it depends on your chosen industry, market, business model and your own training and stamina. Knowing your rhythm allows you to not get distracted when you hear fairy tales or bad stories.

I believe we are on a 10-month cycle. Also the boundaries between different cycles are blurred. In other words, there is no clean end and beginning of each cycle and you can be ending one and starting another simultaneously. 

Cycle I: Creating the Concept

Early on we knew we wanted to do something about tackling poverty. But What? How? Where? When? were just some of the questions. We talked to many people, gained initial support from some very good people. Getting the business plan done was a process of discovery, setting up the company, building the prototype and getting the seed. We knew that this was going to be an epic battle against poverty. And most importantly we love the concept of "Solve Missions; Collect Credits; Get Gifts". Its on the cross-section of micro-finance, crowdsourcing and social good.

Cycle II: Developing the Platform

There are two ways of building a platform. You do it yourself when you are a designer/developer or you do it with a team of designers/developers when you are a business person. Being business people meant we had to gather a strong and diverse team that understood us as we tried to articulate the vision and translate all the conceptual ideas into mock ups, blueprints through regular calls, changing things, managing emotions, keeping an eye on the budget and most of all getting things done. 

Cycle III: Building a Customer Base

We are now in the process of launching a Multi-wave marketing campaign (we try something, learn and try again) starting today for 3 months. The marketing plan has three parts:

A. The Good Needs Friends: Here we are requesting people to invite their friends on majamba and we will reward them credits and gifts (the gift packages are very, very attractive).

B. Invest majamba credits in Good Companies: We are investing 5,100 to 51,000 majamba credits in companies so they can create their own missions.

C. Majambassadors: We are recruiting students on different campuses around the world to be brand ambassadors of majamba and identify new start-ups to support as well as coach other students to leverage the platform.

During the beginning of each cycle, the target looks daunting and it's like rubbing rocks to get a fire going! You have to learn and try again, and again...I can see some sparks...