Hidden Treasure In Tech

I want to tell you about the night I sat in a Nairobi bedsitter, eating cold ugali, with exactly Ksh 847 in my Mpesa and a laptop held together by faith and a strip of masking tape.

That was 2019.

By 2023, I had invoiced a client in San Francisco more money in one month than my father earned in three years of teaching.

This is not a flex. This is a map.

Chapter 1: The Embarrassing Beginning

My first tech "product" was a WhatsApp group where I charged people Ksh 200 to receive business tips I had googled twenty minutes earlier.

Forty-three people paid.

I made Ksh 8,600 in a weekend without leaving my room.

It wasn't scalable. It wasn't sophisticated. But something cracked open in my brain that weekend — a dangerous, electric thought:

People will pay for value delivered digitally. And digital products cost almost nothing to duplicate.

A chapati, you make once and sell once. An idea, packaged well, you make once and sell forever.

That asymmetry changed everything.

Lesson 1: You don't need a perfect product. You need a first product. Start ugly.

Chapter 2: The Skill That Became a Gold Mine

I spent three months learning one thing obsessively — copywriting. The art of writing words that make people act.

Not essays. Not poems. Words that sell.

I watched YouTube tutorials at midnight. I practiced by rewriting ads I saw on billboards. I studied why certain WhatsApp messages from businesses made me click and others made me scroll.

Then I offered to write email campaigns for small Kenyan businesses for free. Just to practice.

One of them — a skincare brand in Westlands — saw their online sales jump 40% after my email sequence.

She referred me to two friends. Those friends referred me to three more.

Within six months, I was charging Ksh 45,000 per project.

I hadn't invented anything. I hadn't coded anything. I had simply learned one skill the market desperately needed, and I had proof it worked.

Lesson 2:...