Yesterday was launch day. Finally! Long time coming.

Let me explain.

A couple of years ago Tony Maina got in touch regarding his startup ZOOMPesa.

Tony and his co-founder Jesse Gitonga Mukundi have a strong belief in “doing good by doing well” as do I.

One conversation led to another and the short version is that I became deeply involved in crafting ZOOMPesa’s social aspect and other parts of their branding, which included developing the content for our crowdfunding campaign on indiegogo.com. (indiegogo was chosen because, while Tony and Jesse are Kenyan, they live in Canada.)

Along with being an active participant, I was also invited to serve on the formal advisory board.

Rather than paraphrasing, here is a brief excerpt from the campaign to explain ZOOMPesa.

ZOOMPesa was born of our frustration when sending money home to our families Kenya.
Frustration because the wiring companies charged so much that there was less for our families and because it was so inconvenient for everybody.
So we put our heads together and figured out the kind of service we wanted.

• An ultra-convenient service that allowed international money transfers using any kind of dumb or smart mobile phone or a computer online that was instantly credited to a mobile money account, AND
• charge 20-50% less than other services depending on the amount of money sent AND
• let that one low fee cover transfers to 2 or even 3 different people.

Then we started thinking about how Tom’s Shoes and Warby Parker give a pair of shoes or glasses for every one that’s bought and we wanted to do something like that, too.
Giving our service free didn’t make sense, but giving a percentage of each fee to a group, like a clinic or school, that’s local to the sender did make sense. And with your help that’s exactly what we’re going to do.
ZOOMPesa will make sending money home convenient and inexpensive and let us all GIVE BACK at the same time.
That’s why we call ZOOMPesa the money transfer service with a heart.

Please visit our campaign to learn more.

And donate because an affordable money transfer service is badly needed as is the social good that comes with its use; plus we have some cool rewards.

On a personal level I want ZOOMPesa to succeed for many reasons, not the least of which is proving that a financial services company can be profitable and succeed without sky high fees and lousy customer service.

(Contact me for help with your crowdfunding content.)

Image credit: ZOOMPesa

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 17th, 2013 at 1:15 am and is filed under Entrepreneurs, Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Tags: crowdfunding, doing good by doing well, zoompesa
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