How many eggs can you fit in an Uber? A Nairobi egg dealer on overcoming micro-business challenges

The East Africa Business Podcast: African Start ups | Investing | Entrepreneurship | Interviews

One of the nice things about having a podcast is that it allows you to have conversations with people you wouldn't otherwise get around to.
In this episode I sit down with John, the man who I buy my eggs from in Kenya.
In Swahili, "mayai" means "eggs" and so his customers know him as John Mayai.
John works from an apartment building in Nairobi, and stores thousands of eggs in the car park to then sell to individuals and small businesses wanting to buy them in multiples of 30.
We talk about how he started the business buying and selling 5 trays of eggs, and is now up to 80, how cold weather affects the price of eggs, and the main challenges that come from expanding the business.
Now, the big limiting factor John mentioned was the ability to buy more eggs and transport them back to the car park to then sell to local businesses.
"There's always demand for eggs" as John put it, so it's just a case of increasing the supply.
Immediately after recording this episode I went for lunch my friend Raaj and we got chatting about how we could help out John to expand his business.
Long story short, the next day we were in a car with him driving up to a large egg market on the outskirts of Nairobi, returning a few hours later with nearly 5000 eggs.
I made some recordings from the trip, and so who knows, perhaps one day it'll get made into an episode.
Anyway for now, there's lots of interesting insights from John and I's conversation and so I hope you enjoy this episode.
John's business is representative of how a lot of people in Kenya work and live - buying and selling products and at a low margin in order to fund other areas of their life, such as school fees for the children.
I hope you find it enlightening.
READ MORE AT:
https://theeastafricabusinesspodcast.com/2019/09/26/how-many-eggs-can-you-fit-in-an-uber-overcoming-micro-business-challenges-with-john-a-nairobi-egg-dealer/