Connecting rabbit farmers at the click of a button

Mr Derrick Muturi 25. Derrick is a 2016 Acumen Fellow and founder and CEO of a revolutionary online management system for rabbit farmers called Rabbit IQ. Rabbit IQ is a professional herd management system that targets commercial rabbit farmers. PHOTO | WILLIAM OERI

What you need to know:

  • At 25, Derrick is a 2016 Acumen Fellow and founder and CEO of a revolutionary online management system for rabbit farmers called Rabbit IQ. Rabbit IQ is a professional herd management system that targets commercial rabbit farmers.
  • Upon graduation in 2014, from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology with a degree in Business Information Technology, he decided Agribusiness was the way to go. He had always been drawn to farming as a lucrative way of making a living.
  • In September 2014, he attended the Agriculture Society of Kenya’s show in Nairobi and saw the Dairy cows he wanted, only for his dream to be quickly thwarted when he saw the Sh250, 000 price tag attached to one of the cows. 

The business bug hit Derrick Muturi at just 11 years. Today, he is one of Kenya’s young entrepreneurs at the junction of technology and agribusiness, reaping a bumper harvest while at it.

At 25, Derrick is a 2016 Acumen Fellow and founder and CEO of a revolutionary online management system for rabbit farmers called Rabbit IQ. Rabbit IQ is a professional herd management system that targets commercial rabbit farmers.

It serves 700 farmers from as far as the Dominican Republic in South America to Europe, North America, and Africa - farmers use the platform to maximise yields.

Derrick has only begun though; in May 2016, he launched an online livestock trading system, Herdy.co. This system connects farmers directly to consumers in need of meat, be it mutton, beef, chicken, fish, turkey, pork or rabbit meat. With this system, the meat is delivered to the consumer’s doorstep, freeing farmers from the dictates of middlemen.

“If you have a party at home and you want a goat, you simply place the order on the site, and we deliver a goat to your home, live or slaughtered, depending on how you like it,” he says.

In the last three months, this new trading platform has sold 800 rabbits to Uganda and Tanzania, earning Rabbit IQ over Sh600, 000.

“Technology is the tool, agriculture is the opportunity,” says Derrick.

He admits to being a very naughty child. He would organise unauthorised parties at home, “and in the end, there would be lots of broken furniture and utensils,” he laughs.

That earned him an early entry into boarding school far away from home in Nairobi, to Mt. Kenya Plainsview Academy in Embu County at just 11 years. 

EXPENSIVE COWS

“As much as I hated it at that time, I thank my dad for it today,” he says, explaining that boarding school built his business shrewdness.

He would spend his Sh500 pocket money to buy firecrackers, which he would sell to his classmates, making 200 to 300 per cent profit per cracker. Firecrackers were a novelty then and a great source of entertainment in school. As for the profits, Derrick would use them to buy clothes and toys over the school holidays.

Upon graduation in 2014, from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology with a degree in Business Information Technology, he decided Agribusiness was the way to go. He had always been drawn to farming as a lucrative way of making a living. In September 2014, he attended the Agriculture Society of Kenya’s show in Nairobi and saw the Dairy cows he wanted, only for his dream to be quickly thwarted when he saw the Sh250, 000 price tag attached to one of the cows. 

At the same event, he came across rabbit farmers.

“They gave me some roast rabbit meat to try out and it tasted like chicken - one farmer offered to sell me a rabbit for Sh5, 000. I took the offer.”

It was an exotic breed, a Flemish Giant; it gives birth six times a year to a litter of eight each time.

  “I signed a contract and bought 10 rabbits that day with the Sh50, 000 loan I got from my mother.”

Back home in Thome Estate, Nairobi, he built hatches, and soon, the 10 rabbits multiplied to 240 rabbits in just six months. The feeding costs grew, and so did the need for more hatches. He needed more money, and drafted an investment memorandum and sent it out to 20 people. No one replied.

Undeterred, he drafted another investment memorandum, requesting a minimum investment of Sh50, 000, and approached close friends and family to loan him the money. His brother-in-law and his best friend were the first to invest. Derrick’s sister, girlfriend and mother also invested, as well as a childhood friend. In four months he had raised Sh300, 000.

He soon realised that he had to find an efficient way of managing his growing rabbit flock since he kept missing the cycles, making huge losses in the process. To counter this, Derrick applied his knowledge in coding and solely created Rabbit IQ in three weeks to track the rabbits. The app would send him an SMS alert when he needed to prepare a rabbit’s hatch for birth, breeding and so on. In two months of setting it up, rabbit mortality dropped to three per cent.

Despite his growing business, Derrick felt he would run it better if he had some more experience in computer programming. In February 2015, he walked into Nailab to seek an internship position. Nailab is a Kenyan startup accelerator that offers a three-six month entrepreneurship program focused on growing innovative technology-driven ideas.

BUSINESS INCUBATION

The following Monday, he was invited for an interview that was conducted in an elevator by Sam Gichuru, CEO of Nailab.

“You know what an elevator pitch is? That was it -15 seconds and then I had a desk,” he chuckles.

While at Nailab, Derrick needed to keep track of his rabbits’ progress, to ensure that the worker on his farm honoured the schedules. He made Rabbit IQ an online platform and improved the application which generates a schedule of breeding, anticipated expenses, capital expenditure and overheads, to ensure that farmers get the profit they anticipate. When the farmer is ready, he simply clicks on the ‘sell’ tab which connects him to buyers through the Herdy.co web platform. 

Derrick interned at Nailab for three months and then was taken in on a full-time contract for three months, during which he was also offered business incubation. He resigned in August 2015 to run Rabbit IQ full time. It was then that he started advertising online, mostly to friends on Facebook and Twitter. He had a Sh201  weekly budget on Facebook to advertise his app.

“I also got TV interviews as well. That gave some traction and I got 168 farmers on board in a few months.” 

Derrick now employs seven people, one managing his 700 rabbits on the farm in Thome, and six who manage administration and mobile developments of his Rabbit IQ and Herdy.co, while he oversees overall product development and sales.

He encourages his peers to read widely about what interests them.

“This way, you get ideas that you can merge in a creative way. It is this coming together of ideas that creates an innovation,” he says.