Kamau Ndung’u and his brother Kuria (right), founders of m-ledger application. Photo/Sandra Chao
By Sandra Chao, schao@ke.nationmedia.com
IN SUMMARY
Brothers’ creation can turn your phone into a financial journal, with details of all the transactions.
In January, Kuria Ndung’u did not have the faintest idea about java, the programming language used to create mobile applications on android systems.
Though he is a programmer, he always considered himself an old dog that had worked in the corporate world for more than a decade and never once imagined that he would be learning new tricks.
As fate would have it, Mr Ndung’u, 43, would spend six months teaching himself about the new code online to be able to bring to life an idea for a mobile and Web-based (m-ledger.com) application that he had thought up with his younger brother Kamau.
“I used to spend an average of 16 hours every day trying to teach myself how to write code to the level of professionals like those working at Google and at the same time try working on building the app,” he said.
Mr Kamau says that the idea to create m-ledger, a personal financial management app that keeps track of financial transactions that one has on the mobile money platform M-Pesa, came from the need to know how much they had been sending to individuals over a period of time.
“We were thinking of how we could tell how much we were spending instead of going over the messages, literally writing the amounts down and adding them up. Our search on the Google play store was not successful because we did not find one that really answered our questions,” Mr Kamau said.
Mr Ndung’u said they nearly gave up three weeks into his crash course, but was motivated by the desire to put food on the table since he had no stable source of income after leaving his job last year.
Rather than meet every day, the brothers employed their prowess in technology, chatting their way through the application on e-mail and Google hangouts especially at night when the younger one returned home from his web programming job.
Mr Kamau, who found himself in the same IT profession as his brother who is 10 years older, says with M-Pesa being a Kenyan platform, local developers are better-placed to create apps around it because they better understand how to use it.
“M-ledger allows users to have a dashboard of their transactions that analyses recent transactions and breaks them down to individuals and how much was sent daily, monthly or even yearly.
The application scans through M-Pesa messages and then uses that information to create a database through which people can actually make sense of their transactions.
“The web platform which I developed because of my expertise allows you to sync the information on your mobile phone and even export it to excel sheets.
“Initially when we created the application we did not know exactly what to do with it but whenever we explained to close friends and family what it could do, they always said they wanted it and that is where we saw a business opportunity,” said Mr Kamau.
Once it is downloaded from the Google play store, the application allows the user to explore the features for about 15 minutes during which he can check the compatibility with tour mobile device. The application locks itself and can only be unlocked when a user pays the one time off payment of Sh200.
To access the website platform, a user needs to log into his Google account and is able to use the premium features for a monthly fee of Sh100. “We wanted to monetise the application so we had to handle all the technical challenges that come with it.
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