I think a large portion of it came through my schooling which is interesting - I went to school where one of my friends was always the guy that wanted to run the tuck shop and do stuff with that. And so I caught a little bit of that entrepreneurial bug by being involved in some of the school initiatives. I was also around in the heyday of the internet or the internet precursor, likely, so I spent a bit of time on the internet and it was the sort of place where you could learn a lot about a lot of different things. And through that amalgamation of knowledge, I've always looked out for opportunities and always wanted to solve problems.

What actually ended up happening is, by accident, myself, my brother Ron and our friend Terrance were sitting at work one day and we wanted to get some products from overseas. And I think, as entrepreneurs do, you try to solve the problem.

How ParcelNinja came about is, we had our business importing products from America called Wantitall. We had just started doing work with the guys at Massmart, with Makro, helping them implement their e-commerce platform, which was quite interesting. So we'd decided to branch out and do some consulting work on the side because, well, if you ask anyone that's got an e-commerce experience, we just happened to be one of a handful of companies that have just been around for a while.

So my advice, from an e-commerce perspective, is don't do everything yourself. Outsource to the pros where you can. We're trying to be professionals from a logistics and supply chain perspective, which we found is the most challenging aspect of e-commerce. 

Happiness is largely expectation management. So expectation versus reality, the difference in that is happiness and I think that's a cool thing. You either have to make more or want less or do both. And if you don't want for more then you can do other things for other people and help them out in a selfish way. I think that's one of the ways we do things in our business actually or the way I do things.

In thinking of these things and how you change the status quo, you have to take the core away from it. What I mean by that is, if you take a circus, what's core to the circus? Animals. Tell you what, we're going to take the animals away. What does that look like now? It looks like Cirque du Soleil. In taking something away and by taking something core away, you have to build something new. I think that's the coolest story about it.

To give you some idea, an 8,000 square meter warehouse is pretty big. You have to find all these products on time, pick it, pack it, put it in the right box, make sure it doesn't get damaged and get it you with the courier or order method that you wanted on time. We make sure that your address is right and sort all of that out - it's a story.

There are a variety of components that need to be brought together in order to service the informal market, all the way from sales teams or sales reps, integration into fancy ERP systems, the fine picking of single items out of pallets is quite tricky. 

You've got to understand that, yes, there's profitability in niches and in the niches, there are opportunities but if your niche is so niche that there's no one there, you're going to be in a lot of niches. I think that e-commerce guys need to just stand on the shoulders of giants, I think that's something that's cool.

The first thing you've got to remember about shipping internationally from South Africa, from a supply chain perspective, is that South Africa is far away from everything. So if you're going to ship to the US or Europe, you must understand it's actually far away and expensive to get stuff there. So I think, starting with that, there's a geographic issue that you've got to deal with, which cannot change. So let's just accept that you're 8,000 kilometres away from your customer. With that in mind, it's going to be expensive to ship there. So then we need to take a different approach, is my view on this.