Today marks 3 years since I started ManyMangoes!

Considering 90% of startups fail, I wanted to share some insights that could help other startups survive the storm, ride the wave, and make it through to the other side.?

The funny thing is, I genuinely didn’t know what kind of business to start when I was making the leap to entrepreneurship.?I literally went on my LinkedIn profile and asked myself

The core endorsements, recommendations, and jobs I’ve excelled in were:

#Sales

#Marketing

#Strategy

#LeadGeneration

And to top it off, LinkedIn is the place where I tripled my salary when I was 20, trained ten’s of thousands of people on how to use the platform throughout my 20’s, and am finding myself consistently blown away by the platform’s growth and opportunities.?I decided to build a set of services around marketing solutions for salespeople. ?

It took exactly 4 weeks to land my first client and an additional 20 weeks to close a Fortune 100 company.?It’s safe to say we had built a service that was needed and that outperformed efforts made by companies of all shapes and sizes.

There were around 25 staff by the end of the first year and I had designed the programs to allow me to work for 1-2 hours per day while enjoying the rest of my time living in what I called my “semi-retirement” phase.?Traveling the world living an exceptionally self-indulgent lifestyle was very much what I needed after working 100 hours per week for the majority of my 20’s.

It wasn’t until COVID hit that we experienced our first struggle.?And it was a big struggle.?Honestly, there was a period of 2-3 weeks where I wasn’t sure if we were going to make it.?Every marketing budget around the world was frozen and I lost all but two clients.

I had a decision to make: rethink the entire strategy from the ground up or risk losing it all. ?

I reduced the team to a skeleton crew and began developing innovative software that could do the same activities but faster than how we had done previously been doing them, designed boatloads of value-adds throughout the customer cycle, and dropping the prices to a far more affordable ￡1,000/month - 3x the value for 60% less money.

We were back in the game.

The new Data, Marketing, and Sales packages were flying off the shelf. ?We secured business with a stream of billion-dollar companies and became more agile, valuable, and relevant than ever before. ?

100% of clients who signed up in 2021 have either renewed or grown their subscription.

My brother, Jimi Cohen, is the inspiration behind turning the company into a nonprofit 12 months ago.?He is the most caring, thoughtful, and giving person I’ve ever met - waking up early to do charity work, going door-to-door after lunch to help raise money for women without birth certificates, and going to music venues almost every evening to sell ear protection that donates all proceeds to water projects.?Such a great human.?

Today, all of our proceeds now go to water projects across Africa. We have invested in and begun building, not one, but two of the world’s largest, most cost-effective biosand filters. Our projects being analyzed by government officials, NGOs, and utility companies throughout Kenya, and at the same time, hundreds of Kenyans are volunteering to grow our projeects.?It's going than I had ever dreamed. ?

We are so happy and grateful for our amazing customers and new team members that are making incredible goals a reality on this journey.

Thank you to everyone who has made the past three years so meaningful.?Looking forward to continuing building the world’s best sales and marketing services for salespeople while co-creating a world where everyone has access to clean water and no one lives in extreme poverty.