BLACK AMPHI

My name is Theresa Ann Carpenter ep. Sondjo.

I live in Cotonou, Benin. My husband and I run People Online (http://www.ongpeopleonline.org/ ), a web development and IT consulting shop.

Business woman. As an entrepreneur, you either learn how to make money, or you fail and get a job working for someone else.

I work on an Ubuntu box. I’m not committed to F/OSS as an ideology, but running a Linux box has a lot of advantages: low cost, less problems with viruses, easier to lock down individual machines, etc. We use Google Apps because it makes business sense. We work with our freelancers and interns online, and it’s a lot easier to manage schedules and share documents using Google than by emailing Microsoft files back and forth.

The non-programming side of the office uses Windows. Everybody’s got WAMP (or LAMP) stacks installed, because everybody’s got to get their hands dirty once in a while.

You can follow me on Twitter: @theresac.

I’ve been in Africa for almost 5 years. People Online has been active for about 3.

Recently, we’ve been pusing to get Beninese newspapers online as cheaply as possible. We provide cheap hosting and customize WordPress themes for the journals, then train them to update their sites themselves.

L’Evenement Precis (http://levementprecis.com)

Le Pays Emergent (http://lepaysemergent.com)

La Presse du Jour (http://lapressedujour.net)

Le Municipal (http://lemunicipal.org)

Lately, we’ve been doing a lot more IT consulting type projets: trainings, intranets, SMS, etc. although obviously they don’t have public URLs.

We started out as a strictly web shop, but recently our customers have been coming back asking for more. Who are we to refuse? As I said in my last answer, we’ve been designing and implementing intranets for local businesses too. This week, actually, we soft-launched a micro-finance system to track loans and investments.

Intranets, SMS products, consultancy … it call comes with the terrotiry. You can’t stay a market leader if you’re not willing to take risks and try new things.

Quicken. It’s the only reason my computer dual-boots to Vista. I’ve yet to find something better for Linux (GNUCash is a crazy-insane-unusable nightmare).

Email, Google Spreadsheets and Calendar, and big pieces of paper taped up on my office wall. We’ve tried everything else, but there are two problems:

1)   We work on dozens of projects at once, in a dozens of different states of completion. Migration is a time consuming hassle.

2)   Bandwidth in Cotonou sucks. If my team can’t login to a project management app, it’s worthless to us.

We pay attention to details, and we’re willing to fix things when we make mistakes. Nothing more complicated than that.

Almost all of the projects that we started in 2009 were from client referrals. For 2010, 100% so far. It’s because our first priority is client satisfaction. Mostly, we don’t worry about the anyone else. Our competition is going to do what they’re going to do, no matter what. Far better to concetrate on making People Online the absolute best we can be. Strange as it might be to hear, we pioneered honesty and good customer service in our sector.

Hah. HAH! Taxes are high. Paperwork takes too long. Bureaucracies are bureauracracies.

If we wanted to raise funds, we could do it in a heartbeat from friends, families, and satisfied clients. We’re in an unusual position because we’ve worked very very hard to earn a reputation for quality and reliability. That said, we’re wary of accepting money from anyone. People Online is 100% bootstrapped, and that’s the way we like it. We’re beholden to no one but ourselves.

For younger, less experienced entrepeneurs, raising funds is almost impossible. Founders are afraid to share their idea with businessman because they’re afraid that the businessmen will just steal it. Businessmen are afraid to share their money with founders because they’re afraid that the founders will just steal it. There’s no working justice system here, and so no way to enforce contracts gone bad.

We see idea after idea fail because the founders can’t even find enough money to put a website together. We’re working on a project to do something about that, especially as far as young technical entrepreneurs are concerned, but it’s slow going.

Can you code? Can you design? Are you reliable? Yes? Great. We don’t worry about anything else. Certificates and diplomas aren’t worth the ink it took to print them in this business.

Do you have any research to back this up? Because I’m not convinced it’s true. Quality people are always looking for new, interesting, better paying projects. That’s normal, and it’s not limited to Africa. I see a lot of technicians quit jobs where they’re treated poorly to start their own business, but a lot of medicore IT professionals find a gig that pays the bills, and spend 10 years in the same place, stagnating. Again, not limited to Africa. Treat your quality workers like gold, and they won’t leave you.

We pay our freelancers well and we treat them with respect. I was suprised to find that the latter is relatively unusual in Benin. We also recently launched an internship program to train college graduates  because we were having trouble finding the specific we need. That said, I’m always on the look out for fresh talent. Send CVs, rates, and links to sites you’ve worked on to jobs@ongpeopleonline.org. Right now, I’m specifically looking for Flash/ActionScript, and Python (bonus for Django and/or RapidSMS experience), but designers, PHP gurus, WordPress experts, and others are always welcome.

Do not care. Do not care. Do not care. Let me repeat that one more time. I DO NOT CARE ABOUT YOUR EDUCATION IF YOU CAN CODE.

First, I’m not a businessman, I’m a businesswoman. Sexism and even misogeny are both a real problem for me. Also, I’m foreign, which can make financial transactions delicate. Luckily, my partner is Beninese and male, so we balance each other out.

For People Online, the lack of cheap bandwidth is a real challenge, as is how hard it is to find people who can really code.

Cheap bandwidth is coming. Slowly. Very slowly. We have multiple connections at the house (WiMax and GSM), so when one conks out, we switch to the other one. We also do a lot of work between midnight and 8am. With regards to quality technicians and designers, it’s really a question of training. Progammers need to learn real skills in school, not just theory. How can someone spend three years getting a diploma, and not produce a single working application?

But we’re not sitting around waiting for anyone to get rid of these challenges. We knew that operating a business in Benin would be hard. Our job is not to see challenges, but rather to look for new and better ways to make money.

It’s worth every moment of blood, sweat, and tears. If you put out a quality product and pay attention to customer service, you’ll come out on top eventually. Don’t take no for answer, adapt quickly, and pay attention to the market. It changes so fast here, you can miss amazing opportunities by blinking your eyes.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m on Twitter (@theresac) and I blog at SubjectVerbObject. Anyone can email me at theresac@gmail.com. And of course, People Online has a website: http://ongpeopleonline.org.