Founder Diaries Podcast

When we started the strengths test with the business coach we hosted in Seasons 1 & 2, the plan was to do it quickly and move on. It ended up shaping a lot of how I’m moving forward.The test led to a bigger realization: everyone is built differently. Some things come easier to me and some come harder, and knowing that changes how I work, how I lead, and how I decide where to put my energy.In this minisode, I share what that realization looked like in practice and why it matters for founders. Watch to the end to find out what my 5 strengths turned out to be.The takeaway: lean into your strengths and operate from that angle. Don’t force yourself against your own architecture.This episode is brought to you by:🔹 Beauty Square KE — Your go-to destination for premium, quality beauty essentials. Visit and patronize at beautysquareke.co PARTNER HIGHLIGHT 🤝We’re honored to have Sarova Hotels as our Season 3 partner. From creating beautiful spaces to curating unforgettable experiences, Sarova is the best fit for your staycation, business meeting or that special celebration. Visit their website to check out their facilities and services at www.sarovahotels.comOur other Season 3 partners are:🎥 Royal Reel — our audio-visual partners / royalreelph. .💄 Makeup City — on makeup / makeupcityy. .👗 HAWI Ready To Wear— on the wardrobe https://www.instagram.....Follow Founder Diaries on socials: Instagram / founderdiar. .Tiktok / founder.diari. .Spotifyhttps://open.spotify.c....Follow our host on socials:Instagram⁠ / yvonnekanyi. .TikTok⁠ / entrepreneurm. .

For our final full episode of the season, we sit down with Joan Ogutu, founder of Kids Street, a brand focused on premium baby care products in Kenya.Joan takes us through her journey from the start: her early experience working at Safaricom as an agent, and how her own pregnancy led to the idea for Kids Street when she couldn’t find premium baby care products in Kenya. She walks us through the real cost of setting up their first business location, and how the business grew from baby gear like car seats and strollers into consumables like diapers.We also get into the part of inventory businesses that rarely gets talked about: managing money well when your profit is tied up in stock, and what it means to show a profit on paper without having the cash in hand.This episode also has a deeply personal side. Joan shares, with openness and courage, the story of losing her son during a family vacation, how she has continued to run her business through grief, and how that loss has changed the way she works as a founder and the way she sees life. We’re grateful to her for trusting us with her story. This episode is brought to you by:🔹 Beauty Square KE — Your go-to destination for premium, quality beauty essentials. Visit and patronize at beautysquareke.co PARTNER SPOTLIGHT🔹 DigiTax — Simplifying tax and invoicing for businesses so you can focus on growth, not paperwork. Learn more: ⁠https://digitax.tech/⁠ | ⁠+254795279403 DigiTax — your tax assistant in your pocketPARTNER HIGHLIGHT 🤝We’re honored to have Sarova Hotels as our Season 3 partner. From creating beautiful spaces to curating unforgettable experiences, Sarova is the best fit for your staycation, business meeting or that special celebration. Visit their website to check out their facilities and services at www.sarovahotels.comOur other Season 3 partners are:🎥 Royal Reel — our audio-visual partners / royalreelph. .💄 Makeup City — on makeup / makeupcityy. .👗 HAWI Ready To Wear— on the wardrobe https://www.instagram.com/hawi_rtw?ig...Follow Founder Diaries on socials: Instagram / founderdiar. .Tiktok / founder.diari. .Spotifyhttps://open.spotify.com/show/1CBpdVj...Follow our host on socials:Instagram⁠ / yvonnekanyi. .TikTok⁠ / entrepreneurm. .

Many founders, especially Type A personalities and first-borns (first-born daughters in particular), share a trait that quietly shapes how they run their businesses: hyper-independence, the deeply ingrained belief that “I can do everything myself.”It can look like strength, but in a business, it can do real damage. In this minisode, we explore how hyper-independence shows up in founders and why it can quietly work against you and your team. It feels faster and safer in the moment, but over time it stops your team from learning, growing, and reaching their full potential — because you’re not coaching them, you’re replacing and doing the work for them.This episode is brought to you by:🔹 Beauty Square KE — Your go-to destination for premium, quality beauty essentials. Visit and patronize at beautysquareke.co PARTNER HIGHLIGHT 🤝We’re honored to have Sarova Hotels as our Season 3 partner. From creating beautiful spaces to curating unforgettable experiences, Sarova is the best fit for your staycation, business meeting or that special celebration. Visit their website to check out their facilities and services at www.sarovahotels.comOur other Season 3 partners are:🎥 Royal Reel — our audio-visual partners / royalreelph. .💄 Makeup City — on makeup / makeupcityy. .👗 HAWI Ready To Wear— on the wardrobe https://www.instagram.....Follow Founder Diaries on socials: Instagram / founderdiar. .Tiktok / founder.diari. .Spotifyhttps://open.spotify.c....Follow our host on socials:Instagram⁠ / yvonnekanyi. .

Today's minisode is a little different. We're pulling back the curtain and giving you a raw, unfiltered look at our production set — Yvonne, mid-makeup, answering some of the questions you've been dropping on our socials.No script, no polish — just real answers to the things you've actually been curious about. Grab a seat and enjoy the behind-the-scenes energy.This episode is brought to you by:🔹 Beauty Square KE — Your go-to destination for premium, quality beauty essentials. Visit and patronize at beautysquareke.co PARTNER HIGHLIGHT 🤝We’re honored to have Sarova Hotels as our Season 3 partner. From creating beautiful spaces to curating unforgettable experiences, Sarova is the best fit for your staycation, business meeting or that special celebration. Visit their website to check out their facilities and services at www.sarovahotels.comOur other Season 3 partners are:🎥 Royal Reel — our audio-visual partners / royalreelph. .💄 Makeup City — on makeup / makeupcityy. .👗 HAWI Ready To Wear— on the wardrobe https://www.instagram.....Follow Founder Diaries on socials: Instagram / founderdiar. .Tiktok / founder.diari. .Spotifyhttps://open.spotify.c....Follow our host on socials:Instagram⁠ / yvonnekanyi. .TikTok⁠ / entrepreneurm. .

Before Uzapoint, Abraham Mbuthia actually wanted to be a DJ. In this episode, he walks us through how that early dream led him into tech instead, and eventually into building Uzapoint from the ground up, starting with clients paying as little as KES 500, to a business now generating 7-figure revenue across multiple markets.He is the CEO and Co-Founder of Uzapoint, which he describes as the operating system for SMEs in Africa — a platform built to help small and medium businesses digitize their operations, access financial services, and use AI to make smarter, more informed decisions. In short: everything a business needs to sell smarter, operate efficiently, and grow with confidence, all in one intelligent platform.In this conversation, Abraham shares his full journey into entrepreneurship, how he thinks through building a distribution strategy that actually works as you scale into new markets, what's changed about how he runs the business as it's grown, and how his team is using Claude to build internal work dashboards that keep things efficient behind the scenes.SPONSOR HIGHLIGHTThis episode is sponsored by Faida Elimu Insurance Plan by Jubilee Life Insurance — a plan built to protect your child's education no matter what life brings. It gives you peace of mind knowing your child's education stays funded by Jubilee even if you're no longer around, with the flexibility to save monthly, quarterly, yearly, or as a lump sum, topped up whenever it suits you. Your named beneficiary is legally protected — no court, spouse, or divorce can override your choice and after 2 years, you can access up to 10% of your fund without closing the policy. Plus, in the event of a claim, your family receives instant relief with KES 100,000 in last expenses paid within 48 hours.Learn more about the Faida Elimu Insurance Plan: https://jubileeinsurance.com/ke/life-... Brought to you by:🔹 Beauty Square KE — Your go-to destination for premium, quality beauty essentials. Visit and patronize at beautysquareke.co PARTNER HIGHLIGHT 🤝We’re honored to have Sarova Hotels as our Season 3 partner. From creating beautiful spaces to curating unforgettable experiences, Sarova is the best fit for your staycation, business meeting or that special celebration. Visit their website to check out their facilities and services at www.sarovahotels.comOur other Season 3 partners are:🎥 Royal Reel — our audio-visual partners / royalreelph. .💄 Makeup City — on makeup / makeupcityy. .👗 HAWI Ready To Wear— on the wardrobe https://www.instagram.com/hawi_rtw?ig...Follow Founder Diaries on socials: Instagram / founderdiar. .Tiktok / founder.diari. .Spotifyhttps://open.spotify.com/show/1CBpdVj...Follow our host on socials:Instagram⁠ / yvonnekanyi. .TikTok⁠ / entrepreneurm. .