u/Cache_Moolah

I came across two posts by Marie Lora-Mungai (co-founder of The XYZ Show) about why they eventually stopped production, and they confirmed something I've been thinking for a long time.

Quick math from her posts:

• XYZ Show cost $15,000 per episode to make. The broadcaster paid $3,000 per episode. Donors covered the rest, every season. link
• She then compared it to Les Guignols de l'Info, the near-identical French puppet satire on Canal+. Same concept, 9x the budget per minute. Their head writer made more in one monththan she made in six years running the Kenyan equivalent. link

Seeing it laid out in actual numbers made the parallel to our own industry impossible to ignore.

Kenyan devs ship the same quality code, on the same stacks, on the same deadlines as devs in the US, UK, or EU, but get paid a fraction for the same effort. This is genuinely frustrating. I think where we learn software engineering is partly to blame for why most Kenyan devs feel frustrated. Most of developers picked up or mastered software engineering from content made by developers in the US, Europe or India, and along with the skills, we absorbed their salary expectations. Very few people learn to code from a Kenyan dev, so almost nobody inherits local expectations. (Almost) Everyone benchmarks against a market they don't actually live in.

But local client budgets here don't come close to Western, Indian, or even Chinese markets. You could get 1M+ users on a SaaS product and still not make it. Another thing, people here are used to free or dirt cheap, and the moment you charge more, they just switch. You can take Netflix approach on the Kenyan market as a case study on this. Ad revenue isn't much better; ad rates per user are abysmally low compared to more mature markets.

I saw someone here a while back post about why Kenyan Software companies never IPO above a billion dollars or something like that. Safaricom, the most valuable company in Kenya, is currently worth about $10.8 billion (~KES 1.44 trillion). Our single biggest, most dominant company, the one that owns M-Pesa and 65%+ of the mobile market, tops out at a market cap that a mid-tier US SaaS company can match on a good quarter. Yet we all complain their bundles and transaction rates are exorbitant.

Zoom out further and it gets starker: the entire Nairobi Securities Exchange, every listed company combined, is worth around $27 billion. Figma, a single design tool, not even a market leader in enterprise software, and one that's already crashed over 80% from its IPO peak, is still worth roughly $9-11 billion on its own. A beaten-down, out-of-favor Western SaaS company, post-collapse, is still worth almost as much as Safaricom. There's no ceiling-breaking exit sitting at the end of the local road, because the road itself isn't built for that size of destination.

I've come to a conclusion: it's not about coding harder or negotiating better. Worth is partly market-defined, and our market is structurally smaller. Maybe we should stop measuring ourselves against a market we're not in, and make peace with the gap instead of chasing a number that was never built for here.

The hard truth is that building SaaS or software for the Kenyan market is close to worthless IMO. If you can land a remote job paid in foreign currency, take it. Right now that's the closest thing to escaping the ceiling. That said, if you're building for the local market specifically, go in with your eyes open. Price for what this market can actually bear, not what a tutorial told you your skills are worth.

Let me know your thoughts on this.

The title explains it all. I had several movies and series on my computer I just woke up and found that all have been deleted. This only happened to media files in the folder that I had allowed Jellyfin to scan. How do you prevent this and why did it even happen?

I am not trying to recover my media. I wasn't attached to them anyway.
My only concern is: is it a known issue? Has anyone encountered this before? How do you prevent it? Simple questions.

(edited)