Ziwani’s podcast series RISK explores the practical realities of taking bold steps in business – reframing the conversation around taking gospel-inspired risks while being grounded in professional responsibility. In this episode, host Doreen Zaki interviews Joram Mwinamo, founder of SNDBX, a business growth accelerator that began in Kenya in 2007 and has since expanded across Africa, as well as into the US and UK.
You can listen to the full episode here.
Expanding into new markets is generally seen as a great opportunity for growth, but what’s often less clear is how to do this well. For Joram Mwinamo, the key to success is how risk is understood and managed along the way.
Drawing on nearly two decades of building businesses, he shares his unique insights into scaling up from Africa to the rest of the world. How do you identify the right client? How do know when you have the right product? How do you build systems that enable rapid responses to new opportunities, while also protecting long-term growth?
Here are six practical lessons drawn from his journey.
Doreen opens the conversation by questioning Joram’s motto for business growth: “fail quickly at scale.”
He is quick to clarify that this is not an endorsement of recklessness. “You can never know exactly what you’re getting yourself into, because you’ve not done this before,” he explains. “A lot of the things you end up implementing may look clear in your mind, but when you get into the market, the feedback tells you whether you are right or not. And in many cases, you’ll be wrong.”
Rather than betting heavily on assumptions, SNDBX (pronounced ‘Sandbox’) treats ideas as hypotheses to be tested. Solutions are built quickly and exposed to real clients early. “We’ll create a solution, very roughly put together, present it to the client, and then they’ll tell us what works and what doesn’t.”
As a result, “failure is completely acceptable in our company,” Joram says. “I’d rather you step up and fail than sit and do nothing. But once you’ve learned the lesson, it’s not okay to repeat the mistake.”
Doreen then asks the obvious question: how do you balance ‘failing fast’ with the financial cost involved? How do you keep experimentation from becoming expensive chaos?
Joram explains: “We don’t take risks that exceed 10% of our capitalisation. So if it fails, it’s not taking us down. But if it succeeds, then we can put more resources behind it.” He acknowledges that remaining below this limit can become tricky when they have several ‘experiments’ running at the same time. “One of the things we talk about a lot internally is how to prioritise new projects so that they don’t overstretch our current capacity.”
This principle shapes how SNDBX enters new markets. Rather than launching physical infrastructure immediately, they begin virtually – testing demand, relationships, and execution capacity before committing capital. “Even then, we’ll do a soft launch on a small scale and let it grow from there.”
Again, listening intently to clients is a key part of the risk strategy – conducting interviews with potential clients before they launch a new product or service, and assuring existing clients that they value candid feedback.
“This can be a huge challenge in Africa, because people are so polite. They don’t want to hurt you by telling you the truth. Sometimes we even ask for anonymous feedback, so that people can be completely open. Because we really want to know what challenges people are experiencing with our products and services.”
One of the most counterintuitive lessons Joram shares is that broad market appeal can be misleading. Early traction often comes from a minority – and that minority deserves disproportionate attention.
“The market will give you clear signals,” he elaborates. “You’ll notice that of the ten people you’ve presented to, two really like your product and eight don’t really care.” The key question then becomes: “Are there more people out there like those two?” Instead of trying to persuade the eight, drill down on the two.
He gives the example of Twitch (now owned by Amazon) which emerged from the unlikely source of Justin.tv (a social experiment by Justin Kan, who broadcast his life 24/7 by wearing a webcam). After a few months, Justin and his co-founders “noticed that the largest homogeneous group that used to log in was gamers. It was only 3%. When they basically ignored the other 97% and honed in on that 3%, it become the largest gaming platform globally, worth billions of dollars.”
Doreen agrees: “A lot of entrepreneurs want everybody to say, yes, I’m so excited about your product or service. And when you don’t receive this type of response, it can be very discouraging. But you’re saying, recognise who’s actually responding to your product, and make sure you understand why.”
Once a business begins to gain traction, a new kind of risk emerges. It’s no longer about whether the market wants your offering, but whether the business is able to deliver consistently as demand increases.
“As a client base grows, it gets more complicated to maintain quality at scale,” Joram cautions. “Most people can do a very good job when the business is small, but when those clients grow to 100, it can become a nightmare. So you have to put systems in place that can drive the complexity down to something that can be done repeatably, and be done by other people.”
The challenge is that systems are costly, time-consuming, and often resisted – particularly by founders who are used to moving quickly and relying on intuition. But avoiding this work, Joram argues, is itself a serious risk. “A lot of people are hesitant to invest in those kinds of processes for scale, that’s why they end up stagnating.”
Doreen recalls working with a large East African retailer that expanded aggressively without putting those foundations in place. “They had built such a big business on such a poor foundation, that when it came crumbling down, it came crumbling down spectacularly.” Scale, their conversation makes clear, does not hide weaknesses. It magnifies them.
Not all risk during expansion is operational. Some of it is deeply personal.
“Sometimes the biggest danger to a business is the entrepreneur,” Joram says. Doreen agrees: “As an entrepreneur, you can be your weakest link.” Because as a business grows, the founder’s blind spots, unchecked assumptions, and unchallenged decisions “can take you down very quickly”.
SNDBX has therefore created a culture of robust conversations within their internal team, and at board-level. “I’d be very worried if we always agreed,” Joram admits. “The truth is, we argue a lot. We ask hard questions. Are we overextending ourselves? Is this the right investment right now?”
Based on her own experience as a Corporate Finance Advisor, Doreen affirms this as a marker of organisational health. “One of the greatest hindrances to growth is when a team cannot speak freely, especially to their bosses.” Joram elaborates: “Entrepreneurs that are a lot more self-aware, teachable, willing to learn and to take external input from others, tend to do better over time. That self-awareness would also extend to the fact that they will not hire yes men and yes women into their team.”
In their view, accountability is not bureaucracy or red tape. It is a key safeguard – against ego, against overconfidence, and against decisions that feel exciting in the moment but carry long-term consequences.
Perhaps the most distinctive element of Joram’s perspective is how explicitly integrity shapes his understanding of risk. “Particularly in East Africa, corruption is one of the biggest challenges,” he says. “We’ve had to walk away from very big deals.”
In the short term, integrity feels costly. But compromise, he argues, embeds structural risk into the business itself. “Companies that start with political patronage or corruption embedded into how they began find it very difficult to scale,” he explains. “Without those same connections in new markets, they cannot expand. And even in their own market, when the political regime changes or those connections go, the business collapses.”
By contrast, businesses built on real value creation travel well. “If you start with the mindset of solving real problems, of building amazing and unique products and services, your business will grow. It will grow because people want what you offer and are willing to pay for it.”
Over time, integrity becomes a signal that attracts the right partners, investors, and institutions. Integrity then is more than a moral imperative for Christian business leaders. It is long-term risk mitigation.
Joram’s journey proves that successful expansion is less about moving fast and more about paying attention. Paying attention to what clients are actually telling you. To when a product is ready, and when it isn’t. To the strain growth places on people, systems, and leadership.
That growth should be pursued step by step, with integrity shaping not just what is built, but how it is built – allowing both the business itself, and the people within it, to thrive.
