Africa Side Hustle: Turning Passion for the Kitchen into Profit [5:01-10:06]

have to kind of find like a middle ground of producing things at home. I can't see another way that we're going to survive. Where do we start and how much? The best place is to start where you've got control home, right? Start cooking or baking. I can blow you away with some of the things we see, like entrepreneurs just selling scones. I can't tell you how big that as a business. I mean, we have a one lady who sells who makes and sells accha. She wakes up at 5 a.m. By 10 a.m, she's done. She works at a taxi rank selling the accha. She makes three and a half thousand rents in that five hours every day. Do you know that 45% of South Africa's mangoes end up as accha? So the point is there's so many amazing opportunities when you know, but what I find a little bit challenging is that then people all do the same thing. If I can tell you, if I see one more chili sauce, you know, offensive people are making chili sauces, but you know, instead of chili sauce, maybe make a chili oil. It goes a little bit north of centre. You know what I mean? Don't do what everybody else is doing, but the opportunities are definitely there and you can do them from home. Where do you get the funding? You know, you have to build the funding. There's not a lot of funding happening. I mean, the economy is tight. No one's giving money away. But I and I often have students talk to me about this, but I strongly suggest, you know, if you start with a hundred rent and you bake five loaves of bread, you need to be disciplined enough to put some of that towards growing the business, some of that towards paying for your next set of ingredients. So I think it's really important in terms of budgeting. Whether it's a hundred rent or a thousand rent you start with, it's just having the discipline to put things aside to make sure you can grow the business. It's actually a more financial thing than anything else. It's looking at, okay, I got two thousand rent out of that thousand rent that I put in today. Where am I going to put it to grow my business? And I mean, just to add on to that. Your best investor is your first customer. Yeah. Right? And it's often overlooked. And the trick to that is, man, you've got cousins, if you pull together something and commit to them that, listen, when this comes off, you're an equity partner, or I will pay you in. So you can pull resources, but the trick about that is just get version one going. A lot of people think, and they parallelize themselves from starting because they're already thinking too big. The best way I can put it, my mom says it based. She says, if you start on the side of the road, no one will stop to help you. If you start on the side of the road, you get out of the car and you start pushing your own car, you'll be surprised to see how many people will stop and help. People will only help you when they see demonstrable evidence that you've at least tried. When you help yourself. When you help yourself, yeah? Yeah. And also, Miles, I mean, like in the tarantial economy, there's a lot of informal businesses, and mostly they are also into the food market. So how do you sustain that business to be formal? So this is a subject I'm particularly passionate about because, as you know, about 2024, 23 kids died from eating food from spasas shops, right? And we work on a business model called Kualisa, where you buy food. It's a refillery model. You come with this cup of tea and you say, I want 135 of flour, we decanted. So we've always been super conscious about health and safety. So what I can tell anybody, even if you're cooking from home or you selling scones on the side of the road, health and safety is super important. So we've built a tool with a UNDP called Spazamisa, and it's on a cell phone. It's literally free. And you couldn't go around your kitchen or your spasas shop or your butter shop, and it will tell you if your shop meets the health and safety requirements using AI vision. It is so cool. But the point of it is that it costs you nothing, and then automatically you can create and make sure that your space at the very least is safe for your consumers to eat your food. How important is it to create employment within the business? I think the only way the economy comes right is through employment, right? The more unemployment we have, the worse things are going to get. But I also, I really like that kind of, we all have a cousin, you know. So maybe it's not employment, we need to start focusing on, and it is a small-term entrepreneurship when you start focusing on. If there's no jobs, there's no jobs at the moment, but there's nothing stopping you from starting something yourself. We need to stop waiting for those handouts of a job and someone to give us something. We need to get up and get on with it. So how important is social media, especially when coming to expanding and also the knowledge in terms of the food industry that you actually do? Sure, tough times are also an