How I got into community building
From hosting rooms on Clubhouse to organizing founder meetups in Kigali
It's a Tuesday afternoon, Kigali is under lockdown and I'm in the middle of my ready workday. I make a cup of coffee, sit down at my desk, and open my laptop. I work till 10 pm, make dinner, go to sleep and I wake up at 8 am the next day to do it all again.
Being a founder during a pandemic has its challenges, mostly the loneliness that comes with working from home.
I remember a couple of months back, I was having my casual monthly coffee chat with one of my friends who’s a tech enthusiast talking about tech, books, productivity, and podcasts. He introduces me to this new App that is taking over the world called Clubhouse, at this point, it was still exclusive and accessible by invite only. How generous he was to give me one - thanks, bro. I didn't use the app for a couple of months until lockdown hit and I was bored out of my mind. I decided to give it a try and started attending rooms and quickly realized that there were many Rwandans on the app talking about dating, fitness, and music, which was fun at the beginning but got pretty boring later. I also noticed that not much conversation was going on around tech, business, and startups in Rwanda.
This was just the beginning for me; I started attending Clubhouse rooms more often and eventually started hosting my rooms - trust me, it took a lot of gut. The first couple of rooms were pretty random and spontaneous, I would cohost them with Caleb, my housemate at the time. It’s funny because we used to talk a lot about investment and building companies over dinner so one day we decided to have them on Clubhouse because we thought it would be cool to share our thoughts with others and hear other people’s views as well.
Over time, I started to see a pattern emerging; there was a growing interest in tech, startups, and entrepreneurship in Rwanda. In the past year, I've organized and hosted over 30 Clubhouse rooms on various topics related to tech, startups, entrepreneurship, investors, etc with Joshua and Brook. I've also connected with many other tech founders in Kigali who are doing amazing things. And at one point we hosted Minister Paula Ingabire, the minister of ICT and Innovation in Rwanda.
Months after Twitter introduced Spaces, I was hesitant to try it out, Because I felt like I had such a great audience on Clubhouse with an average of 100 listeners per room and a group of 1500+ people.
I also felt like it became quite hectic to manage it and run my startup at the same time, so I dropped it and put back my focus on my startup. But I always had this urge to come back to it because I felt like there was more I could do with it and not just podcasting but building a community of founders where we can learn together and collaborate.
Read this blog post on what it became.