Eric Asuma is the founder and CEO of The Kenyan Wall Street, a digital media platform that provides credible financial news across Africa.
He was recently interviewed in the Business Hour Podcast by Jimmy Mbogo.
This is his journey as told by WoK:
How did you transition from being a stockbroker to a CEO?
Around 2014, I was an intern at the Nairobi Securities Exchange. While working there, I noticed that droves of people walked into the Exchange building asking questions such as: How do I buy shares? How do I invest? What assets do I invest in?
I also noted that most of the information at the NSE was not automated. For instance, let’s assume that company A had released information that could affect its share price, such as appointing a new CEO.
The typical way that the NSE worked at the time was that the company would submit a hard copy of the news to the NSE secretary, who would then send the information to the trading room for dissipation to the media.
Sometimes the information would be delayed for hours. I saw the need to cut these delays and dissipate the information to the public in real-time. That was how the idea of Kenyan Wall Street came about.
Kenyan Wall Street began as a Twitter handle. I thought of the name while in a matatu and approved it after consultation with my friends.
How did you convert your idea into making Kenyan Wall Street a credible source of financial news?
Initially, I started the idea as a trial and error. With time, I started receiving queries from institutional foreign investors who had interests in the Kenyan market. These would be your typical fund manager from say Canada, who for example were interested in the banking industry.
They would request me to research specific information on what was happening in the market and offer to pay for it. That was what I did, even after I stopped working at the NSE.
I pursued a Bachelor of Commerce degree in campus, but I was lucky because my parents ran businesses and made sure I was involved since my childhood.
So your business acumen comes from the lessons you picked up from your parents’ businesses?
Yeah. My father, despite being a civil servant, had a fleet of matatus, so even when I was in high school, I would help him manage that. But most of my business experience came from helping my mother run her businesses.
At what point did you make your Kenyan Wall Street Twitter account a Full Business?
That point came in 2015 December. After I left the NSE I was employed by a South African brewery. I used to run the social media account of Kenyan Wall Street as a hobby. I got someone to help me run the account when I was employed.
In late 2015, I felt the need to quit my job and start my own business. I started a business that supplied tenders to the government, but that didn’t work. By the time I quit my job at the brewery, I had saved some cash. I used the savings to start a bar.
During the day time, I would work on my Kenyan Wall Street project and shift to the bar in the evening. I did this for 5 months until my dad advised me to quit the bar business. I come from a Christian family, so there was also the element of morality.
He asked me what I wanted to do, and I told him my plans for Kenyan Wall Street and how I wanted to make it a digital media company. He took a loan of ksh 100 000 and gave it to me as my first initial capital. I used part of the money to build the first Kenyan Wall Street website.
How did you convince your father to invest in your idea?
I consider myself a lucky person. I explained to him my plans and vision for Kenyan Wall Street, and although he did not fully understand my idea, he approved it. He asked me how much savings I had, and added ksh 100 000 from a sacco loan.
As I said earlier, I used part of the cash to build a website. The thing that helped us grow fast was that we already had a social media presence. So, it was easier to drive traffic from our socials to our website. After the first month, I hired a few people to help me with content creation.
Within the first six months, global media houses like CNBC were referencing our content and republishing it on their websites.
At what point did you get investors?
They came naturally. After a year, an NSE-listed company researched and realized that Kenyan Wall Street was behind much of the online conversation about them. They reached out and requested to work with us.
They gave us a brief of what they wanted us to do, and one of the conditions was that we had to register Kenyan Wall Street as a company. So we registered it in 2016.
After How long did your business Break Even?
We started getting regular income after one year. After our first contract, our client referred other clients, and business really picked up in 2017. By 2018, we had a team of 18 people.
Looking back, what are the things you wish you had known when you were starting?
I have learned quite a few things, one of them being about structures. Even if your business is small, it is important to separate your business accounts from your personal ones.
This means getting a proper accountant or someone to manage the business finances. I wish I had thought of that from day one.
The reason for this is that much later, we ran into problems with tax authorities and we had to spend a lot of money to clear tax arrears that we did not even know existed.
