Startups in Kenya will be able to achieve much more if the government gives them tax breaks, produces better procurement policies and includes them in tendering processes, according to Davyee Ngugi, Peach CRM chief software architect.
Ngugi, whose startup won two awards in the just concluded CIO 100 Awards held last Friday in Rwanda, added the perennial problem of long processes associated with registering companies in Kenya should also be addressed to give the companies a good head start.
“It is one of the things that helped Silicon Valley, it will go a long way into helping companies establish themselves. They can reduce the tax obligations to 7 per cent or 8 per cent,” Ngugi told HumanIPO.
Ngugi’s company develops the Peach Customer Relations Management software that is dedicated to accelerating the way companies relate to their customers from the acquisition stage to the maintenance stage.
CRM was developed after a market research revealed that customer management was an area that had not been covered well in the Kenyan and the wider African market.
The existing CRM software at the time had been designed with large western companies in mind and could just not fit in the African market hence the need to come up with one that was designed with Africa in mind.
This led to the development of Peach CRM which has been in operation for four months.
So far Peach CRM is picking up well and the concept is the first in Africa, leading it to be recognised in the CIO 100 Awards where it was placed in the 74 and 80 positions.
“The awards are a good thing. They show that we are doing something right. If we follow in a similar path we can get bigger,” said Ngugi.
Among the most impressive qualities of Peach CRM are scalability, accessibility since it can be used everywhere, and good infrastructure given that it operates on the cloud concept.
There has been some challenges the company has had to meet, among them the reluctance of companies to give their data such as quick books for the programme. Ngugi blames the sensitive way that people view finances.
Given that this is a new concept, getting people to understand it and why they need it has been fairly difficult which leads to the next challenge which has been recruiting quality partners for the programme.
Given the success with Peach CRM, the company has embarked on other projects and is promising more software in the fields of agriculture, finance and management.
