Episode 49 — transcript

How a Sheng Word for Money Became East Africa's Biggest Ticketing Platform George Gachui, MOOKH 🎙️49

This transcript is generated automatically by YouTube and has not been checked by a person. It misspells names and mishears words, particularly around Kenyan English and company names, so read it as a guide to the conversation rather than a quotable record. Each timestamp opens the video at that moment.

0:05 Greetings uh ladies and gentlemen and welcome to episode 49 of the African Do podcast. Happy New Year to you all and welcome to 2026. We look forward to a year of great conversations around excellent Africans executing excellently. Today we're very privileged to have uh George Gashui aka Poi
of MOO Africa. Uh, MOO Africa is a ticketing business and um, things related around ticketing. We'll learn more about it as we discuss. George, welcome to the African Do podcast.
Thank you so much, Leonard. I am super honored to be guest number one of 2026.
Excellent.
Yeah, man.
Good. So, so George, ticketing
is not a thing in the sense that
when when when we are in school and we're thinking about careers, you know this,

0:59
you don't find some guys saying that to be a guy who's running a ticket. I sell tickets for a living. It does. So maybe we can just start um about you your earlier days uh school and how do you find yourself in a space where you start a ticketing business?
M man. Um so I I mean I won't take you as far back as primary and those but
um in university I went to USIU and I was studying finance.
Yes.
Um and information systems. And so my plan was to go and become an investment banker. Okay. [clears throat]
Um and while I was doing it and I'd call myself an average student, you know, I went to class, I I participated, I passed.
Um but I built a very strong social side while I was there. Um I discovered the power of people and community.

1:57
Um and the community I had around there was people who liked to party while we were in university, right? Um, and I had never been a popular kid, right? But now I was in a circle where we kind of all knew each other and we related and it was a time where
as a university, I don't know if it was a good or a bad reputation, but people knew us as like we used to get banned at hotels and at village market because it was like this people partied.
Um, and for me that was kind of my first exposure to this social side. You're midi DJs and already in entertainment they had a restaurant. So when we'd go on Sundays to the restaurant, we'd be in the DJ booth playing and that
and um they had taken that path just as a hobby but become really good at it. and uh they were becoming super popular and they were on radio and they were doing parties and so as the social guy in school you also then now plug that connection to be like even outside of the uni circle if we went to one of these popular gigs I'd know people [snorts]

3:09
and by the time we were getting towards the last part of uni I went to pitch an idea to DJ Styles then who was running Code Red.
Yes. and he was going through uh let me call it a breakup with some of his team right and creative turmoil and those things
and me now from a I've studied business administration I have these ideas blah but I've also started to understand something about community
so I went and told him man I have an idea because you guys have all these parties that are hot but can we try and do uh an SMSdriven party so you're the hottest guys
but as opposed to the format where we go and tell the world on radio and they were at the upper echelon of radio at that time as opposed to the throw out in the mass and hope people come.

3:57
Yeah,
let me bring people.
Okay,
you we just create an experience.
Sounded a little crazy. All I wanted was air time to send the SMSs.
They sent me that and we threw a monster party at this place called Radley's down the road that later became Nairobi International School.
Okay. Same lady who runs Nairobi International School, Ren Brad Radley's, Mrs. Lee.
Yes.
And from that first experience, I ended up moving into talent management and working with this DJs. Okay.
So, I finish uni and as opposed to going the bank direction, I decide to stick with these guys and kind of figure out a path around talent and what we can do to generate revenue. that party that we did at Radley's out of all the sales that were made and what I was given a commission of 10,000 Bob

4:45
10,000 yes
I was like my guy I'm never going to work I'm never going now at that time when you started and I had good connections to get into the bank
and the starting salary was 175
yes
and so I was like 175 and I did one gig there and they gave me 10k if I do two of those I've made a month's money right [snorts]
so I decided me I want to I think now get now they call it gapia and I told my folks let's hold on the banking thing
let me do this kidogo right
and and my dad was super worried cuz it's like you are following you know you're following the talent you're following people who have something to fall back on
yes
um but I also realized that talent needed structure and there was a way I thought about how to execute what they did that them as the talent didn't think

5:34
and so I got into entertainment like that. I started managing the DJs, moved into managing artists, started to discover the more corporate side of it. So, sponsorship, um, record labels, you know, the the business of entertainment, which was super green here. Everybody was doing it. There was a lot of talent trying things, but there was no business structure around it.
True. And over time, one of the things I came to realize is that the only way people were making money was through these audiences. So whether it was shows we were going to or what, like the audience is where the money was. [snorts]
And it was a chaotic thing. I remember a time um the brothers used to do reggae concerts. Yes.

6:19
And the way they used to So Dennis would go to a club in Paris. He'd meet one of these reggae artists. He'd pay them their money out cash and the artist would just be told, "Go to Kenya. my brothers will take care of it. It was so chaotic. All their family used to be at the gate. They'd be at Splash and they'd be there literally collecting the money themselves because the second you left somebody else there,
all the money you're relying on making vamoose, right? So the door was such a critical point at all these events, but there was really no structure. People were selling paper tickets. They were being duplicated. I remember you know even events as poss blankets and wine used to tell us go to Java if you want to buy your ticket in advance or something you know

7:02
and so we started trying to think now my my information systems and finance background was there and so I was like
what's a way that we can be able to change this scene now when we were developing MOO we weren't developing it to sell tickets
y
we were actually solving an entirely different problem
which was Not. [clears throat] So I had done I had done this talent management thing and I had reached a place where I had that aha moment that what my dad was telling me you're not the talent.
So one day you know the talent will decide they don't need this guy. you've taken them as far and then [clears throat] you've done as much as we needed from you Koheri and nobody will remember you know Michael Jackson's manager or what you just remember the talent

7:49
and so um I had done that and when I was now exiting the talent side of business and I was like I think I want to do something else um I met this guy called Eric Thimba and Eric Thimba was working for a company then called instant grass that then became the grass company
with Jojo with with Oh,
yes. Gerald Gerald. Okay.
So, Gerald owned his company. Timber was their GM and he had been with them. He'd come back from the states and was working with them. And at that time, Instant Grass had the business to do trend analysis and research for Safariccom, for Coca-Cola, for all these people. So, they were in universities across the country. They were on ground discovering what is happening. Um, and along there they were finding some insights that really spoke to how young

8:38 our generation was moving, the power of entertainment and things like those. So me and Thima started to kind of soft collaborate around there's some insights we've seen. We're trying to think of what that would look like as an execution cuz then I had been on the on ground side and so we started trying to think of how insights meet execution. Um, we did that for about a year. Then he decided actually I'm ready to also leave the employment side and follow some of these insights. Um and so we set up a company called the ideas company and we used to basically take insight. So me and Eric now are now business partners and we're going in to do now. So we pitch to corporates. We'd go to DTObby and say you're launching a car now. The way launches should be done today should be like this versus like that.

9:25
And we did a lot of that which was nice. It brought us good money but it was very seasonal. Yes. And so we were looking for a cash. Now cash flow is a major we had learned when you're in corporate you know you get paid on one day then now you need to balance your tunes. But there's a guy who runs a kiosk and has a,000 bob every day and that's every day changes the game.
So we had this too much chunks of business but we needed an everyday business and we kept every day we'd see to strategize. it would be about what's a nice cash direction to go. Um, so Thima went down some rabbit hole and ended up importing um a product, a women's product for period pains and blah blah blah.
And as we were doing marketing online, so I was then helping him push this product. It was actually doing quite well. We're in the supermarkets. That was the uchi days. So we were in the supermarkets in the chemist, but it was gangster. Today your product is here. Then tomorrow you come you find Nivea came and work at this thing a gondola and now you your product is at the back of the shelf. So you literally had to be

10:32 in the supermarket every day pushing. The other thing was people were seeing our product on Facebook and then they ask how can I buy it now you start to do I send you to the chemist in town? Do I send you do I the process to close the sale was too long.
So we wanted a way to close this sale on Facebook.
Okay. We were [clears throat] like, when someone sees the promo we do on Facebook, can we close that deal there? And we thought it would be easy. It was Empessa is here, blah. Then there's Shopify, you know, the internet. Facebook is
Where are we from a timeline perspective? Year
2013. 2013.
This is 2013. Okay.
So, we're like, man, let's get a guy. So, we find a developer around here. We're not techy people, but we ask a developer, what would it take to put a shop on our Facebook?

11:15
And the guy goes, he tells us, you can try Shopify. we put but it has to use a card.
Yes.
And the card needs to go into a US account which we don't have.
So we're like no I need Empessa but I don't want uh 07 then send me the message. We weren't trying to build that kind of a pipeline of business. We wanted automation for
kind of like an e-commerce Kenyan e-commerce pioneer. [clears throat]
Well no there were people who are doing it right but
we were trying to figure out now as a small business. So e-commerce then was thought of as glo junior you know it was big but you as a guy selling one product what was the way to e-commerce one product just on your social media
and surprisingly even in 2013 the hardest part was the payments

12:02
so every day we'd meet and and those days we used to call money mukanja
yes
so when we'd meet we'd say have you figured out how to collect the mukana cuz that's the place we are stuck
and then now mukanja became hey yo muk now are we ever going to be collect the moo or not collect the moo collect the moo. So for 2 years we struggled to collect the moo
and our entire focus that's when we realized the problem here is not the e-commerce side it's the ability to collect the money on that e-commerce just one rail [clears throat]
which is the most important because if I go to the big guy
the big guy is doing the hotels he's doing the airline so he tells me I can give you a channel but I'll pay you every 14 days. M

12:44
that's not the cash flow I'm looking for me I'm looking for daily cash 700 I want to have 700
and so we spend it took us almost 2 years to crack the payment line and this was remember Thimba had been doing work with Safariccom so we even had access into like we'd sit with senior managers and be like this is what we're trying to do how can we get the empessa to do x y and zed then if the message doesn't come to your phone which is why every business had the little phone.
If the message didn't come to your phone, there was no other way for Safari to confirm for you that a payment has gone through.
And so the first version of MOO we ever built was literally a system that took these messages from this phone and pushed them to a computer to complete that payment automatically so we could sell this heat patch.

13:33
Okay.
But by the time we were ready with that, the heat patch business was dead.
Okay? We [clears throat] had no more heat patches to sell because had died. Su who had died. We realized that's not the path for us.
And so we sat to say who else on Facebook
needs
needs to monetize the audience they've already put together and can benefit from the payments. And then we did a list. So we literally just went and researched who are the people corporates individuals in Kenya with the highest Facebook following. There was the girls selling makeup and hair products. There was the safariccom Samsung's who and who. And then there was musicians and events, right? They've accumulated people and people on their Facebook page.

14:16
So [snorts] we went to Modoni. Modi was someone we had been in school with of blankets and wine. We'd been in school with her.
So we already knew her and we went and said,
"Is there an opportunity where you can try something different?" So she had been starting to try to move people to digital. Um and she was working with the one ticketing platform that exists at the time. Yeah,
but then the audience belonged to the ticketing platform. So you gave the ticketing platform,
the customer came, they created an account on the ticketing platform and then they purchased your ticket. Okay,
it was a long process. Many people were still buying their tickets at the door and that. So we said, let's do it. Coincidentally, she was starting a new brand, right? And it was called African Nouvo and it was to target a younger audience. So there was a blankets audience that she wanted to experiment with a newer audience. So we're like, let's do that one.

15:11
Okay.
And that was literally
the smaller one, the new one
the one that you're testing with. Let's test the tickets on your Facebook.
And that was our first event ever. It was September 2015. um out of maybe 3,000 people who attended that weekend's event, maybe only 700 were able to successfully buy tickets on this thing we had created because it was us and one developer saying
create an option to select blah blah blah and that when we finished number one the people who came to the door were super impressed I don't have to print my ticket I don't have to hey this thing was so simple how did you have to print what do they have to do show you
they literally the the message came with a QR code and it said, "Show us your QR code at the door on your phone." Right.

15:58
Now, the other thing that was tripping people out is they had gone to the Facebook, you put your details, you put your number and then your phone would pop a message that just asked you to put your pin. It was something people had never seen before. You guys are able to enter our Empessa and all I do is put my pin after the Facebook and I complete the transactions. Now today, you call it SDK portion. Everybody uses it. It did not exist, right?
And so we started working with Safariccom. How do you improve this process? How do you make this? That time they used to use a thing called Bonga pin. So you'd put your pin and it shows you the n the actual numbers. It's not a secret.
And we're like that will affect our trust because people are like how come this thing is not entering like a pin and that and so we started a journey of we take feedback from the event organizer. We tweak, we tweak, and then another event comes and says, "I'd like to use your system."

16:51
But [clears throat] 700 of, if we can just look at that first event.
700 of how many attended the
maybe like 3,000 over two days.
That's not a bad percentage for for event number one. You know, you're talking about what [laughter] that's over over 20% of the event.
Yes. Yes. Yes. And and remember something that had never been used. We didn't know about how you build tech better testing. There was none of that. They these 700 were the test market.
Okay.
So for us even when we were trying to figure out all this, so Eric and I were the guys at the door that day. We were the guys now. You come, we try to figure, oh, you sent a message and you didn't get the thing. Let's check on our computer.

17:30
And we literally like built this machine from there, from the ground up. It's you give us feedback, we tweak, we tweak, we tweak. And within about 3 years, we had experimented a few things. We had experimented events being able to sell artists being able to sell music directly from their Facebook. We had uh experimented uh products. So Kenyan made products were able to upload their things and it included delivery even from Sandy to the consumer. Right? So we tested that and we tested crowdfunding. So collecting for homes and charities and that and by 2018 we quickly realized that the place that you can collect the most money out of the four was the events and so we shifted a focus to just selling tickets.

18:18
Yeah. Yeah.
Wow. Um I think before we even now go into the nuts and bolts of MOO maybe I think one of the interesting things that has come up from what you've seen is is the power of data and insights. M
you know when you talk about how you are you are working with ins with instant grass
and I think um maybe because it's not you people don't see data and insights at the front
but I find them to be such a powerful tool
you know what's the data behind the numbers saying you know and what are trends I like the word you use when you say that Instant Grass was doing trend analysis
so maybe We can just go down that rabbit hole around trend analysis and data and insights because you've now settled and MO has come mainstream into that whole data analysis space [clears throat] and speak to the evolution as you have seen it

19:16
of the whole data insights trends analysis space in Kenya because it's such a real part
of entrepreneuring and doing business in in in Kenya and in Africa today.
Correct.
Yeah. When we say data, I know it's it's a big gray area. You know, people think data is this big thing in a warehouse, you know, or this thing that you're supposed to sell, you know, it's how you make your business makes money by selling the data. But data is everywhere. You know, data is everything. What time do people reach? How do they reach? How are they feeling? There's so much data. Now, when you move online, data collection becomes 10x for example. Now, one of the big things I learned from the instant grass uh interactions was that the power of the data wasn't for today. They weren't analyzing the trend to figure out what to do today. They were analyzing the trend with the senior team about what we're going to do 5 years from now

20:17
because of what we're seeing. because of what we are seeing today.
If we go to the university today and the kids are saying they're able to transact and trust this SMS of money, what do we do with them for the next 5 years so that 5 years from now we have X. Okay. So data there's the data you use to say here is an opportunity and when you don't know how to read data, you look at data and then you answer the thing that looks the shiniest.
This is where people are going so let me do that. And that's actually how a lot of people start what they call their entrepreneurial journey. You read an article in the paper that says, "Man, adoption of X is moving up so quickly." So you say, "Let me open a a podcast. Let me do this because these things are shakering." But you don't understand where we're going with this thing. So for us, data became a when you see the

21:09 data today, what do you do and where is the data telling you things are going to go for 10 years? Okay. When we started MOO and we we went into the Facebook space as the payment space, the first thing that was very clear to us that we are we were responding to was something that they were calling a youth bulge.
Okay.
All the data in that 2016 2017 population data, research data was saying there's a thing coming over there in front called a youth bulge. This is when more than 20% of any population is below 35.
Yeah. And they were saying the way the Kenya numbers are looking that bulge is going to be crazy and that bulge is going to exist for a long time which means you will have a very young population. So then we told ourselves if that's where we're going leave this guy everybody we were sitting with in corporates their profile you know though you you have those decks that corporates do and they always have a who is our who

22:09 is our customer. They all 27. They have a stable income. They're looking to take a loan. That's who we think is the consumer.
But the data is telling us you have more of these other guys
are coming
than these guys.
And nobody's looking at these guys. So as I said, build a brand that speaks to 19 year olds. Our target audience is 19. But 19 year olds are in uni. They don't have money to buy tickets. But that's who needs to know me. That's who needs to like my brand.
That's who I need to build the culture with as opposed to trying to change Leonard's behavior that he's been doing for 20 years and is comfortable with. I could take a little money out of your pocket, but I can't make entertainment your priority. You have family. You have, you know, other things you're doing.

22:58
This kid here for 10 years before he starts his family, I could be the priority spending item on his list. And so we started to build and we started to build around that.
Now if I was to fast forward extremely fast forward to today,
yes,
everything you're seeing happening today, what we call the Gen Z movement, what we call the brands now being overtaken by Tik Tockers and what
is that thing,
it's that bulge,
that youth bulge. It bulged, right? And the craziest thing that happened is it bulged during the pandemic when we couldn't see. We were all seated in our house. Yes. But when we came out, the people who came out were very different from the guys we went in as right.

23:41
And now those kids are running the entire show.
They're running a mock, man.
They are going crazy. And we are only at the beginning.
Agreed.
Okay. Currently our average age in the country is 19. It's the guy I've been speaking to for 10 years. Okay. I know how to speak to that guy.
That's answering data, right? And then now I have the power over 10 years. We've now been doing MO for 10 years. So over 10 years I can also tell you how has this 19year-old behaved because I've also served the 27y old that you think is the customer. I've served the 36 years old. I've even served
and your first 19year-old is now 29.
He's now 29. Okay. He's now the guy you've hired as the lead creative for your brand. And the guy he trusts the most as a voice in culture is this guy called Moo who's been speaking to me for 10 years and plugging me to all the right places and doing all these things. And so data is for me a competitive advantage, right? So many people think data is how you sell. We've never sold a piece of data in our business even once.

24:49 But for me the data is how the event organizer is able to make more money next time.
Nice.
Right. It's how uh the audience is able to discover other gigs like what they like to go to. Those are all things that data is able to do for us. And now in the age of AI goes even crazier. You've said something that I want us to to to touch on
because it's a pet peeve for me.
Um I'm in hospitality. That's my stocking trade. M
and um I once got a a great piece of advice
from a landlord.
Mhm. [clears throat]
So uh I was in the restaurant trade and I used to deal with landlords across the country
and uh one of the malls I won't mention them on air but one of the the the most successful malls in Nairobi.

25:39
I was sitting down with with the owners and they run a brilliant outfit
and I asked them you guys how do you do it? Most of the time tenants are at loggerheads with their with their landlords and they're fighting and and the guy says one thing and he says
you know being a landlord is not as difficult as most people think.
Then he says what we have come to understand is as a landlord our obligation is one overarchingly. There are many other small ones but there's one big one
and that big obligation is to make sure that we create an environment where our tenants make money. M
it sounds so simple.
Yeah. So it's not to charge more rent but we create an environment where our tenants make more money

26:26
and very few people think about things from that perspective. Now you said something about your ticketing which I want you to just expound on a bit
where you're saying we were using the insights that we garner from our ticketing
to keep looking for ways how we can get the event managers to make more money.
[clears throat]
What does that look like from a ticketing perspective? [cough]
From a ticketing perspective, one, it's understanding who your audience is and how to get to them quickly. Okay? You and every other brand in this country are competing for the audience and the ear of Leonard. Okay? So once you have Leonard in your pocket, he's bought the ticket once, you have his phone number, you have his email, you and the other brands shouldn't be making noise in the same space because now you have direct

27:17 access to your customer, which that guy doesn't have. When Omo is sold in the supermarket, they don't know you bought it. They know NASA or whoever the supermarket is bought it, but they don't know this last guy. What's his name? What's his email? What's his number? Where do I find him? Has he been here before? Right. So number one, um the [clears throat] biggest thing we did from the beginning of the platform was the data handshake we gave to the event organizer. You looked at the previous guy and you said on the previous end, the organizer doesn't know whether their promotion is working or not cuz I don't have access to the back end. I I ask you for a report. But the organizer, especially in a digital age, needs to be able to know, man, I've been pushing this ad for a week. Nothing is moving. Maybe I tweak. Maybe I create a promo. Maybe I have a flash sale.

28:11
Or maybe I do a couple's ticket because I see there's more people coming as tools and if you give them a small discount, they'll it's the pricing mathematics. That insight doesn't come to a creative naturally. M
so when we then set up the platform we say it's completely self-service but I have a support team and the support team are people you're able to call and say our event doesn't seem to be moving what do you think we should do
or uh for an event like this are we priced correctly right and some of those things we've already seen now over time what we've done is move some of those insights directly into the system can the system tell you you know for an event like this, the kind of price point you're looking for for events at this venue, you know, is this price too high or too low, right? Are you undervaluing yourself? That's number one. Number two,

29:09 uh data and numbers is what you sell to brands. If you're looking for sponsorship as an event person
and you do not have numbers that look sweet or numbers that you can actually put forward to guys and say this is what we did and this is our growth.
It becomes very difficult to just sell you know there were many guys what does that mean? Are they male or female? How much are they paying? Is there a record of this? Right? And this is not only along the sponsorship line, but if you think of one of the biggest challenges for event organizers is financing to grow, right? So I have a good idea. I've put it in the market. We've proved a concept. People are coming. Now I need some money to scale this thing up. There's no bank you can go to. There's no uh lenders. You'll go to now Shillock to give you money. But how can the data make financing possible for an event organizer? Okay. Right. So now us that's the way we think and I I really like that analogy of the the mall right of the landlord because for us since 2019

30:17
our biggest focus has been figuring out how we fix that financing problem for events because we were seeing what the cycle was doing. after 3 years other than people like
Modoni
there's not very many people with that tough skin to be able to endure six seven years of you're just trying today it works tomorrow it doesn't you're paying out to people 8 million and and you you're not making anything you you're being fuzzled from your house
they don't have that staying power
and it's just because they they need that runway and it's difficult to come come by so from 2019 we started to pilot we go to financing organizations. We tell them me I have X number of event organizers and this is the data I have on them. It's a sure bet. If Modon is doing a gig, she's going to sell 2 million. Let's give her half a million

31:09
to be able to start and to market, pay the artist the deposit so we can put a billboard.
But it's also because I know once the billboard is up, this thing will have hit a million by next week in just ticket sales. So, how do we catalyze that? And that over the last six years has evolved significantly to us now not just solving the financing problem but also solving the founders to be willing.
Yes.
Okay. There are few and who are these traditional it's a tough nut to crack.
It's a tough nut to crack. You have in six years I've probably had men more than 50 conversations on this. Currently as we speak we have about 60 million Kenya shillings available for event organizers to borrow collateral free on the system

31:55
based on your data.
Based on the data on the system as long as you've transacted on our system for more than three events we use that to create a score for you
and you have access to the money in 2 days.
Let me just get this right. As long as you have transacted with MOO,
yes,
selling tickets uh through something
more than three times,
you can uh access that data
to access financing.
We can use we can use the data of three
to do your trend analysis and to be able to say this is how much you'd be good for and if you had this I know I can always get it back. The higher you make the more your threshold increases. Okay.
The big problem has been cost of money. Money is expensive right now globally and it's only getting more expensive.

32:42
So, as of a few weeks ago, we've just signed a contract that now switches our financing to a capped interest rate for the year, which is 9%. It's the lowest interest you can get in the region.
9% a year maximum.
So that it's not uh exploitative. If I take more than 20% of your revenue, I've I've taken everything, right? As an event organizer, you're making nothing. So, how do we reduce how much money we're taking just for providing the financing?
And your financing partners uh traditional banks or who are they?
There's one traditional bank that has jumped on um but they are jumping on backing they're riding on the the word of another financer. Okay, let me tell you, you have come and come to my pet peeve.

33:35
Me. just think that our financing particularly our traditional banks
are lazy
in the sense that and I [laughter] know I'm being a bit harsh and a lot of them are my friends
but we have these debates time and time again because here
is the data
and the data is telling you a certain story
but you choose to ignore
chances are they you go there and they ask you for a plot even when the data is more more robust than than the plot.
I've had conversations with your traditional bank and they said, "We're happy to do it. The thing you're doing is great, but as MOK,
put a guarantee of 10 million in our account so that then we provide 10 million back to your people." Now, I think I wouldn't call them lazy. What I'll say is that they're in denial.

34:25
In denial
and they refusing to admit what time we are.
Now, for me, that's not a problem. It's an opportunity.
Okay? Because like that
in 10 years
they won't be the traditional banks
the idea of traditional bank will not be the names that we speak of today
and we can spend time trying to bring them on board the wagon or you can let them do what they are doing
and just let them find out
because the guys I speak to the 19year-old how many of them have accounts in any of these traditional banks
agreed
and if you're not speaking to them today you're waiting for them to reach 27 by the time they're reaching 27
they'll have found other solutions that make their money work for them better than any traditional bank today can.

35:09
So, so let's let's go down another rabbit hole and and and talk about
we have talked about what the data tells.
Yeah.
But one of my favorite data stories
is what the data doesn't tell.
Yeah. M um feliza is a wellknown product safar product but if you study the story of feliza and how it [clears throat] came about
it came about
as a result of failed transactions
not successful ones
like oh guys go into a shop they're trying to buy something and they don't have enough
and so I think it was if I was not wrong it was a 30 or 35% a failed transaction rate as a as a result of not having money
and it was that period of time between when the transaction failed someone would rush top up their empa and then come and complete the transaction.

36:08
So guys like this guy is good for it. Yeah. And they actually build a a a product based on that. Have you do you have any examples for us in your journey of ticketing
of the story that wasn't told by the data or the the the opportunity that was showcased
by you know either oh if we were to do this like this we could sell more tickets because we saw that this didn't happen
yeah [snorts] [sighs]
I think the the the bigger thing that the data didn't tell us so everybody looks at this business and says there's money right you look at events you look at the day they say it creative economy worth how many billion dollars great
I think the things they don't tell you is that um a lot of that money doesn't pass here for example right so we are all being asked to subscribe to all these platforms none of that is local economy money

37:06
true
and so I think for us the biggest thing that we saw that was not the insight but it was from the problem was that payment rail the idea that if you're going to get long-term into a business like this, if you don't sort out your payment rail, okay, so I'll tell you one of the things that makes me not wary at all of what is looked at as competition in the ticketing business.
Yeah.
If you launch a ticketing platform today and I come and test your system and you're using a third party payment collector,
you're finished. way we're not going down the same road because somewhere down here first you'll try and compete with me on price so you'll keep reducing but someone's already taking two and a half or 3% of your money right so if the most we can charge is eight or six

37:57
and you've given someone three
the real owner of this business is the the guy who's running your payment
so for us in the struggles we had to just get someone to process payments for us we decided to begin building our own payment rail. It sounds crazy because see there's Empessa, see there's the banks, see there's who and who and who who even have they've been bought, they've grown, they've gotten investors. Why would you start another line of payments? But that when we went into the pandemic and ticketing died, it was other people like us who needed payment rails that kept us alive because we now had a payment rail that wasn't selling any tickets. But uh there's a church that was still going online and needed a way to collect money and us the online collection people.

38:48
There was podcasts that were now figuring out how to monetize and needed a way that their fans could contribute and we had the payment lines. So building that payment line was not in our business plan. It was not even a business we were looking to get into. But it is the thing that has kept us for 10 years in the business.
Interesting.
Yeah.
It's so interesting that you use that example because I'll tell you that are pro a problem in the restaurant space that still hasn't been solved for. M
so prior [clears throat] to the pandemic um restaurants were running maybe between Kenyan restaurants between maybe two and 4% maybe the the bigger one 6% delivery takeaway
and so all the major chains no one was in investing in their own portal

39:37
in the sense that the customer came to the restaurant but they paid and they eat and it was largely empa credit cards those are the big ones come the pandemic and you can't sit guys in a restaurant and delivery and takeaway is the only one
and the the the buzz we see or the growth we see of delivery and takeaway third party panel
Uber Eats Junior Food which which closed but
Glo and the rest are a result of the restaurant businesses
not having built their own portals
um to to to develop. So you can see how a heavy price
and the interesting thing is even when we started MOO um that 10 years ago
then the campaign was always about digital adoption and digital migration and build a digital presence. It was literally a campaign. Everything we're telling people was you have a shop this is great but you should have a digital presence right and everywhere we went that was the preaching. It's like, I know you already have your audience, but can you create this online as well? Then the pandemic came and it was like, if

40:48 you had listened to us, you're one kilometer into the highway. If you hadn't listened to us, now you're at that jam for etc for trying to to get into the expressway where it's like,
man, why is everybody now trying to go online and how do you do it? So, there's a lot of people who've made money because people did not see the thing early enough and start to build it. Right now you've seen the flip where there's restaurants like Ando who are 100% delivery.
Right. I have no restaurant. I have four outlets. All of them are made for delivery.
That switch and and it's the same thing I'm saying about the banks. There are certain things that if you don't see and respond to early, you leave the space for other people now, entrepreneurs and innovators, the real ones to come and take. So let's now speak about um maybe where MOO is today. Yeah. And let's let's speak a bit about the nuts and bolts of your business.

41:47
Um you deal with youth, you deal with the youth bulge, you deal with data.
I think that would put you in a position where you have lots of suitors,
you know, who want to either give you money or take equity stakes from you,
but to the best of my knowledge, you haven't gone down that route. M
maybe tell us about your experiences in that whole capitalization game, your challenges and what your general thoughts are around that.
If there's any space in this uh East African market or even Africa that is completely misrepresented, it is that capitalization investment space. Remember us guys I told you as we were just trying to solve problems we didn't understand the the era we were getting into

42:36
we created a business and almost two years in we met a bunch of people so that time they were suitors you know we were starting at the same time with Sandy and people like those and we were sitting around people who were saying this is brilliant build a deck that looks like this let's go pitch at this conference or at this investment thing and thingy when we entered there and we pitched and we did well They liked our pictures but they were always on some like very strange you know the school you went to who is speaking to the thing you know and we we were like there's an insight here we are following
this is what we see
this is what we're seeing and what we are doing crowd now you you want me to make my thing look like this other thing that you know explain it like it's a Shopify mess but it's not that right

43:24
and we did this for almost two years right now we learned a few things. Number one, that fundraising game econ has its own people and it's almost now in today's if I if I can use hindsight
what we call wash today
is the game that has been called fundraising in the startup business. There's a guy somewhere who sees an opportunity to earn money, not to fix a problem. You create a product and you find somebody to put the first million. Okay? And those guys never want to talk about us guys when we'd sit with them,
we tell them, I need $100,000. I only need 10 million shillings to do. And they say, no, that's too small. You haven't thought about you haven't. And I'm like, you want me to take a million? You know, I don't need a million. But then they don't want those games cuz I can't wash a 100,000. May I want to give you a million? And then in three years I come with another guy who has five. So [clears throat] that me my millionaire

44:26 is worth two. Yes.
And I'm ready to start removing. I can even remove it now. I can remove it
and leave a small piece. But I can go because I've done my bashara. Then the guy who put five his work for the next two years is to find the guy who will come and put 10.
Agreed.
Okay. And then after four years that bhashara is closed.
Yeah.
Nobody's using that platform. People around the country are no longer trading on these things. G the shops are no longer branded. How? But there are guys in there who've made $2 million. Yeah.
Not solved any problem.
Agreed.
So we realized here we are the dumb guys trying to solve problems and actually trying to put money in people's pockets.

45:08
So in 2019 we had a major realization. 2018 2019 after 2 years of just it's very demeaning sitting with these guys and just being told no no no no.
So we were like actually and and it's a lady called um Anabinga who we sat with.
Yes.
And Anabinga told us guys don't believe the hype.
If you're building a business go and build a business go and find customers let those customers pay for the thing. If your business can't run itself, those investors are not the people who are going to change your thing.
100%.
So, as we shifted focus, people who tell us come for an investment thing, we say no,
we're not available. Send us a deck. Send us your data room. We have none of those things. As we acquiring customers, I went to Uganda. I had done some business in Uganda as an entertainment manager. Started to pitch events in Uganda to start moving online. Uganda was 98% cash economy at that time. Let's move online. Let's move online. Let's move online. Let's move online. Went to Rwanda. Set up a business. It takes 2

46:15 hours. We set up a business. Guys, let's start going online. Let's start going. Where can we find customers? That became the shift. Since that day, we've never sat in an investor meeting until story.
You know what? What what what I like about what you're saying, and it's something that we don't speak about enough. You know, you speak about Sandy, speak about things like Copia.
Those were actually decent businesses.
Yeah.
But they got caught up in a game that's not theirs. You know, this fundraising game,
scale beyond, you know, one can even argue Twigger, you know, foods. Yeah. um were decent businesses that but when I like the analogy that you've h used when they shifted from uh fixing a problem which is what and acquiring the customer those two things you're fixing the problem you're acquiring the customer they then caught up get caught up in this fundraising game of round to round

47:13
the business is actually called building shareholder value that becomes the new business that I don't look at this many people down here I look at these guys up here my four guys who give me money%
how do me and them make more money that's the entire focus
now let's speak to where Muk is now because we we saw and experienced you
MOO with Chan you know we were there in [laughter] the middle of the night when the tickets would come
so first of all let's speak to one how did you get the ch business
that's a big piece of business which I'm A lot of global guys must have been chasing. Yeah. But you guys MO Africa managed to secure this business. So tell us a bit about that journey of pitching to CF and getting into that whole ecosystem

48:05
and then uh you became the ticketing agent
and um maybe at the end tell us whether you are the ticketing agent for for 2027
Africa Cup of Nations if we are all looking. Yeah.
Um man, you know, we call that on our baptism by fire. Okay.
We've managed to operate under the radar for 10 years and then in one month we moved from nobody's looking for you to most searched.
Okay. Um it was quite an interesting thing and how it came about is remember I told you in 2018 I went to Uganda to get entertainment business when the pandemic hit and um Uganda if anybody understands that market entertainment is up there in their list right it's a number one social economic activity across generations it has nothing to do with young or old um [clears throat] then pandemic hit and these guys did not go

49:05 out for two is okay. So the day they were going to open, it was actually a national discussion. Like we were getting calls from senior government people who were then trying to figure out what a digital Uganda looks like. And some of the people who had already created some footprint there were some boys called MOO. And so we get called back to Uganda. This is 2022 April. And my business partner says, "I'll go. let me go check it out. He went April 2022. He's never come back. Okay. It became a whirlwind of we need to go back. There's business to do. There's things to do. We then ended up in a meeting which got us into partnership with MTN which is one of their bigger telos in the market. And MTN needed to respond to an insight around young people. And that's a market we understand. We've actually been responding to the same insight in another market for about

50:11 seven years now. Okay. So, let us help you. And so, we got into this partnership and began to build a ticketing engine under MTN's ecosystem that's called Momo Ticketing. Okay. MTN sponsors 250 events a year. And it became when we sponsor your event, your events go through this platform. So we launched this thing tail end of 2020 22 right no actually 2022 was the discussion tail end of 2023 launched this
so 2024 last year was the first full operational year of that platform
as we speak it is the number one platform in Uganda okay for ticketing
now that same platform has done a partnership with the football federation of Uganda Okay, because just like here, football is a huge um you know, entertainment thing for a lot of your community and population. So, the federation in Uganda in preparation for this co-hosting that we're about to do started to figure out what it is to move their people to digital. They understood that this is something we need to do early. They had built their stadium.

51:24 Their stadium was ready. It was called Nambol. And so we began to work around how to support them on access control for Nambbo Stadium. Okay.
Support the marketing of how to get people to come because there's a lot. It's not just selling a ticket. There's a lot with a stadium is 30 40,000 people who you need to get into a place within an hour. So there's one thing to sell them the tickets. There's another thing to get them into the stadium safely and get them out. Okay. And so we worked with Nambol for about 6 months.
[clears throat]
And at the tail end of it was a chaotic 6 months. It was like what we were experiencing here in the first two weeks of chan
where you're trying to introduce a system. There's friction with the consumer. The consumer wants to do what they used to which is I come with my 200 bob on the day but you're telling them there's no ticket available.

52:16
And so that friction we dealt with in Uganda for about 6 months. And the day that we finally got it right, the day that the military was involved and we managed to cord on, we had put barriers, everybody was aligned. So now we used to sit in like coordination meetings national level to get people into a stadium. The day we had things, you know, your smoothest run ever is the day CF came to do the inspection of how they'd like Chan to work.
Okay?
And they saw this system that they did not expect in an African country. remember they do football everywhere. They saw a system that was so smooth and that got people in that they were like this is our partner for sure for Uganda and can we work with you across the region?

53:00
Unfortunately, the way the region works, which is one of the things that's our downfall as Africa right now is we're too separated.
So yes, we've created this collaboration, but the collaboration is theoretical.
In principle, there's no one company that can do anything in the three countries. It's not the same currency. It's not the same spending power. It's not the same stadiums.
Nothing is the same. So then an MTN only has presence out of the three countries in Uganda, right?
And so somewhere in that meeting, they come and they come to Kenya and they witness some chaos at our football games, which is what we're used to. And they decide they don't want to do that chaos because they've seen a format that works. And in digging around they discover the same guys who build the MTN system and run it are actually in Kenya.

53:50
And so they approach us. They initially actually wanted us to try to do all three. But um Kenya and Tanzania has been going through some
sensitive some emotional relationship problems
and so our relationship problems did not allow us to do Tanzania. But we then did manage to secure the contract to do the Chan ticketing in both Uganda and Kenya. And for us, it was a super masterass. Nobody has done something like that. We're talking about selling between the two countries more than 300,000 tickets in one month. Okay? We traditionally will sell 100,000 tickets a year.
Okay?
So to sell three times that volume in 30 days is crazy. And then you have to get these people in. So the harder part of this work was not the open the system to sell. And what we we underestimate because we do not understand the current bulge. People were not understanding how tickets can sell out in 4 hours because you think 30,000 tickets is a lot right when you think 30,000 you think is I'm a feature. Why would I hide? It's a system. The

55:02 system is given to KF to run. Here is the ticket setup. How many do you want available? Go. If you look at just if you go on Facebook and open Kenya Arsenal fans, there's like a million people on that page, right? So even if you said our universe of potential attendees is 100,000 people, it means if all those 100,000 want a ticket, only one in three can buy. By the time Chan was reaching the middle where now people are like I must go to watch Harambe Stars, you are talking about something like 400,000 people trying to buy 27,000 tickets. Wow. We were forced to invent a queuing system. We've never had a virtual queue in our life. Now, you had to line up on the internet to buy your ticket the way you would at a ticketing booth because they had to be a way to control how people enter this thing. And we wanted to go as deep as allocating you a seat. Right? If you bought your first Chan

56:03 ticket, your ticket came down to a seat number.
Agreed.
Something that the federations and them here say it's not something we normally do because all we do is chaos, right? But if you bring structure, structure can go all the way to the end. Um, safe to say our client was happy. We built a lot of, you know, there's a lot of guys who are angry over here. There's issues about how they communicate and what they communicate, which is not, you know, anything in our perview. We had never been in the football business before that. The thing we were brought in to do is to provide structure, to provide access control, and to make sure the money for the client is collected. Those three things, those three things

56:46
tick, tick, tick.
By the time the reviews were happening and all the drama, one of the agencies that the calf team were praising and hype about was the ability to work with Moo. They couldn't believe these were Kenyans. There were many situations we'd sit in those security crisis meetings and they'd say, "But this case for MOO have Kenyans. It's not like they've brought people from another country to do the work. So, how come all the rest of the machine can't work like these guys?
Wow. [clears throat]
Okay. So, will we do AFCON?
Let's wait and see. But if I was a betting man, I'll [laughter] put my money on you.
You'd invest a little bit in my money on you. But, but but George, what a fabulous fabulous story and I love it from so many angles

57:31
because you speak to so much that we are about on this podcast. First of all, I think when we discuss the the the capital issue and the fundraising game, I think one of the things that I feel is very poorly valued in this market is what I call local context.
Yeah.
And why the market and I guess it's because of who's giving out the money will not give the same value and credence to a local doing the same thing because I find that to be a bit of a fast in a game. Yeah. So it's really good to see you rise above that gave you priceless you know and I wish more people would actually take it up.
So what a fabulous fabulous episode I I'd just like to give you you a chance
to speak to the audience and tell them where can they find MOO Africa maybe other corporates will hear other markets which are interested in ticketing solution. It's great that you've gone into football

58:29
cuz Africa really is huge on a football owner and you now are tried and tested on that on that space.
So if corporates want to find you, where do they fund you? What are your handles and how they can they interact with you?
All right. So because we are a digital platform, everything that we do is on www.mmoo.com. Um, it's where you'd come as an event organizer if you want to sell your tickets, if you want to get access to the entire ecosystem that we have around funding and um, access control support. All that happens through the site. Can also find us on our socials on Instagram on on X and everywhere else. It's MOO.affrica. That is the name of the business. Right now, if you have money to put in entertainment, we have a fund we call ASF, the Africa Creative Elevation Fund. Okay. Um, interestingly, what we have from the data is I have capacity or demand for about 130 million eligibility worth of funds to lend. I only have 60. And the more we make noise about it, I think we need about 200 million available, right? because of the sheer volume and size of events we are moving to in the next two years.

59:47
And so if there is an opportunity right now um put money it goes into a pool that you'll have access full visibility to that supports multiple event organizers to be able to grow what they're doing. Number two, the audience is shifting. Okay. Um MOO serves young people. We support discovery of creatives and and all the things happening around us. If you're trying to speak to young people, just go and have a look at what's happening there. It'll give you an indication of how you should speak, the kind of things people are doing, how they look. Um, and we're always open to have discussions around how to continue to create more impact, especially around the events industry, which is powerful. And the events industry right now when you look at the larger events you're finding them employing I mean and and I hope I'm not g out too much of people's informations but some a event like blankets and wine

1:00:44 will have almost 2,000 people working at the event
vendors crew setup people clean up electricians toilets the number of people that a single event is able to employ even the government needs to take events more seriously right The problems we're trying to solve around job creation, unemployment, poverty, they can solve themselves if we created more space for these ecosystems. All these stadiums that we're building, how do we make them multi-purpose so that they are not used once a month? Can we have activity in them three, four times a week? So, I think there's a lot of opportunities that are time pressed. Right now is the time to create that infrastructure around how these young people can do what they want to do and that thing they want to do is going to generate a lot of money.

1:01:38
Excellent.
Wow. Ladies and gentlemen, that was George Gashui MOO Africa. Check them out. And this ASF thing is even more interesting. I think you should also look that up. Um, this is a perfect example of excellent Africans executing excellently, building things that have strong local context, local relevance and serve the needs of our local population. We thank you very much for tuning in to episode 49 of the African DO podcast and look forward to having you in many more episodes, interesting conversations in 2026. Happy New Year, and thank you for joining us in this episode, Asantana. Goodbye.