Beginnings / Part 3 of 4
My first client outside school came from an exam hall
Event date / Last revised / 2 min read
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In mid-2021 I sat the TVET national examinations. The practical exams ran from 14 June to 3 July 2021 and the written exams from 20 to 30 July, at what was then IPRC Ngoma, now Rwanda Polytechnic Ngoma College.
At the exam centre I walked past a young man watching a web development tutorial on his laptop. I stopped and told him I knew that stuff.
He asked what I had done. I showed him RASMS, the school management system I had built for my own school, which had been my first client. He was impressed, and then he told me what he really needed: help with his university final-year project.
A house rental platform in under a month
His project was a house rental platform where tenants could book a house and pay rent online. He had done the analysis. I built the system based on it.
It included online payments through Flutterwave, so tenants could pay by mobile money or card, and SMS notifications. In less than a month it was live.
The referrals
After seeing it, he went back to campus and brought me a colleague. His project was an online shop. In two weeks it was working, with payments and support for multiple shops on one platform.
Then, as the deadline to defend their projects approached, a friend of theirs still had no one to help with hers. They brought her to me. Her final-year project was a follow-up system for people living with diabetes, built for her final-year defence. It was done in three days.
That was how 2021 ended. I hadn't advertised anything. Each client came because the one before was satisfied.
What I took from it
Have something to show. I had RASMS with me, so I wasn't asking a stranger to imagine what I could do.
Referrals are the strongest marketing. Three projects in a few weeks came from one happy client, without a website or a single advert.
Deadlines teach delivery. Building a working system in three days isn't about typing fast. It's about knowing what matters for the outcome and what can wait.
Payments raise the stakes. Integrating Flutterwave meant real money moving through code I wrote, which is a different level of responsibility from a school project.