Day 1 With Zoho: A Kenyan Technologist Meets the Business OS

Today was my first real dive into the Zoho ecosystem — and I’ve got to admit, it’s like opening the door to an entire digital city. As someone who wears multiple hats — developer, designer, creative technologist — I’m always looking for platforms that don't just do things, but help build things. And Zoho might just be one of those power tools I never knew I needed.

I started by exploring Zoho One, which is basically the Swiss Army knife of business tools. It offers over 40 integrated apps: CRM for customer management, Books for accounting, People for HR, and Creator for building custom apps without starting from scratch.

The standout for me was Zoho Creator — a low-code platform where I can build functional apps using something called Deluge (Zoho’s scripting language). Coming from a Golang background, I found the logic behind Creator familiar enough to navigate, but simple enough to build quickly. It’s like combining Lego blocks with logic gates.
🧪 What I Did Today

✅ Created a Zoho account (smooth onboarding, clean UI)

✅ Explored the Zoho One dashboard (it’s massive but well organized)

✅ Watched intro videos on Zoho Creator (link here)

✅ Got my head around the types of apps I could build — internal HR tools, booking systems, inventory trackers, and even client-facing portals

What stood out to me was how practical it is for businesses in Kenya. You don’t need a huge dev team or an expensive SaaS stack. With just Creator and a bit of imagination, you can prototype and launch custom tools for your chama, creative agency, or even a fashion startup.
🔥 Why This Matters to Me

As a Creative Technologist, my goal has always been to empower Kenya’s creative industry with tech that works for us — not against us. Zoho gives me the flexibility to build solutions without writing 1,000 lines of code. That means I can focus more on solving the problem than getting lost in the syntax.

And as someone who’s building a future in ERP systems, Zoho is the perfect playground to understand how real businesses run in the cloud.
🚀 What’s Next

This was just Day 1. I plan to:

Build a small app on Zoho Creator by the end of the week

Compare Creator vs Odoo more deeply

Understand how Zoho integrates with design and marketing workflows (hello, Canva/Adobe-meets-ERP?)

Final Thought:
Zoho feels like what you'd get if Google Workspace and Airtable had a child raised by a business analyst. And today, I got my first chance to play with it. One day in, and I’m already seeing how this could be part of the future I’m building — for myself, and for Kenya’s tech-savvy creators.