My name is Eric Mutta. I am a 30 year old software engineer based in Dar-es-salaam, Tanzania. Computers have been my passion since 1995 when my father purchased an old PC for me and my siblings to play Prince of Persia. Today I develop and sell Minishop: a small business accounting and point-of-sale Windows application that was awarded $328,000 in June 2013.
In 1997, at age 14, I saved the princess in Prince of Persia and was left wondering what to do next. Looking around the iconic Windows 95 desktop, I stumbled across a blue window with the letters “QBASIC”. Wasn’t sure how to pronounce the word but I quickly discovered it was a programming language and that if you typed some magic words, you could make the computer beep uncontrollably. I was hooked.
While attending boarding school in Nakuru, Kenya the weekend movie one Saturday evening was called Hackers. Why stop at making computers beep when you could use them to turn all traffic lights green, as you drive by in the car you just bought with money you “borrowed” from millions of bank accounts?
The possibilities were endless and so began a 16 year journey in the world of computer programming. From QBASIC I would jump onto Visual Basic (VB) in 1999, after discovering a manual on Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) in my dad’s office drawer. I was hoping to find cash in instead!
VB changed everything. Buttons, text boxes, forms and a visual designer? Yes please! Some dangerous sounding “ActiveX” components? Sure, why not! I told my father about this VB thing and he took me to the University of Dar-es-salaam where we once again “borrowed” a CD labeled VB 4.0. That was 6pm.
By 6.30pm I had created my first GUI application and 8 hours later I was being dragged away from the computer to go sleep. My father owned a club and I was coding away in his office with loud music blasting in the background. I probably wrote more lines of code that night than the glasses of beer served, but it was closing time and I had to go.
My studies in Kenya came to an end so in September 2000, I was shipped off to the UK to study Computer Science, Physics and Mathematics. Much of my programming skill was tuned in the months leading to February 2002 when the .NET Framework was coming out. There was a shiny new version of VB called VB.NET and I felt no shame using college printers to get my hands on every tutorial available.
I saw the death of COM and the birth of Virtual Machines. The end of Ref Counting and the beginning of Garbage Collection. The demise of P-CODE and the rise of MSIL. It was a brave new world! I have been programming in VB.NET on every operating system since Windows XP, against every version of the framework since 1.0, using every version of Visual Studio since Beta 2.
By Jan 2006 I had returned to my native Tanzania and after being “too qualified” to get a job I finally landed one around July 2007. I worked a couple of months, then quit to start Problem Solved Ltd in 2008, when a little application I made in 12 days generated $300,000 for my employer after one month of use. It used OLE Automation to intercept emails via Outlook and validate attached Excel forms used for declaring the contents of containers arriving at Dar-es-salaam port.
My attempt to sell the product for $100,000 to all large organizations with forms-based process did not work. Undeterred, I pivoted into mobile social networks and built one using a Windows Mobile 5 phone that I turned into an SMS gateway using code on the .NET Compact Framework. This grew to over 10,000 members spread all over Tanzania. By December 2009 I had burned through all $5,000 of my startup capital, which also happened to be my life savings. My mother bailed me out of starvation with $30, and on December 24th, one day before X-Mas I found a job again, working as a programmer integrating mobile payment systems with banks, utility companies and digital TV providers.
Come July 2010, I had an idea: make a simple inventory control system for small shops. My friends with supermarket businesses had been struggling with outdated solutions and I figured I could do better as I fired up Visual Studio 2008 and began working on Minishop. By December 2010, just six months after development began, Minishop found its first customer. Version 1 wasn’t even ready!
This Minishop thing became too successful to ignore and after selling more copies, I quit my job again in September 2011. It was a smooth transition: I left the office at 5pm and got another customer by 7pm that same day!
Shortly afterwards I would hear about the Apps4Africa (http://apps4africa.org) 2011 Climate Challenge. I entered the competition and eventually won $15,000 taking first place in East Africa. Minishop was proposed as part of a National Grain Supply Chain Monitoring System. The US Department of State loved it and by early 2012 my bank account felt the power of the dollar.
With the small stash I moved out of my parent’s basement (African homes don’t have basements, but that’s the popular terminology), paying rent big enough to buy a small car. I bought a table and chair, a new Windows 7 laptop and got back to coding.
Minishop kept getting better with new releases. Built on .NET Framework 3.5 and SQL Server 2008, development was fast. In April 2012 an article in The Citizen would bring me to the attention of FSDT (Financial Sector Deepening Trust). After battling it out with 13 companies, I won $328,000 as part of the SME Finance Innovation Challenge. This time Minishop is helping small businesses produce financial statements for use in applying for loans. Using Minishop is 60% cheaper than traditional methods of paying an accountant.
Armed with the new funds and great advice and support from Paul Roy Owino (Developer Lead Microsoft) I have expanded my team to 7 people to help grow the market for Minishop. Interest for the software beyond Tanzania has come from Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Botswana, and even as far as Nigeria. Version 3.16 is coming out in a few days and we are excited about a version for Windows Phone 8 due out next year. Thanks to BizSpark I can now get my hands on Visual Studio 2012 at no cost and will continue cranking out award-winning code at lightning speed. Next up? $1,000,000.
Thank you Microsoft!