Malewa

After a calendar month of having the website up and taking orders.
We have seen an increase of orders and we are planning of adding more African cuisines added in the coming weeks.

After adding up all the sales, we have made a total of 405$ worth of sales.
Although we didn't make any profit because we paid the cooks full amount.

We are planning on trying a new model with the cooks and this will be making a bit of profit.

Launch event: 30th November 2019
We are also planning an official launch event to bring more people and create awareness.
This event will be a food tasting, giving people a chance to try the different African cuisines.

The first week, we had about 16 orders, 3 of those were from my co-founder and i.
And we sold about 70$ of food to be delivered the following week.

Now it was time to buy packaging and arrange deliveries.
I decided I was going to do pickups and deliveries as I could adjust my work schedule to get off early and do them.

After collecting more than ± 30 email addresses and 15 email addresses from friends and acquittances, I decided I needed to act fast and have a MVP to do one last validation.

I had planned out all the different pages to have: home, about, contact, account profile, order history, and payment pages.
I started building the different pages.

2 Weeks into building the MVP, I woke up and decided that was crazy, I was actually building the full software instead of building an MVP.

Decided I needed to simplify my idea of an MVP.
The new MVP was:

• Landing page
• Menu page to display weekly menu
• Add Live Chat to take orders and answer different questions.
  And this could be done in a short time as I was already pass my deadline of 31 September 2019

The MVP took me 3 days to build.
Contacted 2 Women I previously talked to, to give me 5 menu items each so that I can put on the website for the weekly menu.

On Sunday 6th October 2019, everything was ready, the website was up, the menu uploaded and now I just needed to send emails to Mailchimp subscribers

Almost a year has passed since I have been thinking, planning about the idea.
And one of my 2019 goals was to launch at least 2 products.

A reminder of time ticking and the year almost being over kicked me out of my bed and then

I started by designing a landing page to collect interested users.
That was quite difficult, How do I design something as simple but elegant.
I started browsing templates and landing pages on behance, themeforest and finally came across a restaurant landing page that I liked.

A one page that gave as much info, was simple and elegant at the same time was built for the next 3 days.
I had to setup Mailchimp for mail collection, facebook page.

Background:
Im originally from Congo and spent 17 years there, I moved to South Africa in 2010 to pursue my studies where I studied Computer engineering for 4,5 years.
Started working as s Mobile developer (iOS) in 2014 and since I have been doing mobile and Backend work with PHP, C# and Java.

How the Idea came:
After being away for all these years, I miss a lot of meals, flavours and home cooking.
So I decided I was going to ask other Congolese women to cook for me some of the food I miss, and some of them (who are close) decided they will do it for free, and the good guy in me felt like I was taking advantage and ask if I could pay them for their services.

The light bulb went on at that point and I started thinking and validating the idea with other foreign friends living in South Africa and other countries.