Audrey Chanakira believes the best technology begins with listening
Zimbabwean software engineer Audrey Chanakira stumbled upon global success with her rabbit farming app, proving that listening to user needs, not hype, builds lasting tech.
A month after uploading BunnyNest Tracker to Apple’s App Store, Audrey Chanakira opened its dashboard expecting little more than confirmation that her brother had downloaded it. Instead, she found strangers. The rabbit farming app she had built in three days was attracting users in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. “I saw people downloading the application,” she recalls. “I wondered where the downloads were coming from.” BunnyNest Tracker was never intended to become a product. Her brother had asked her to recreate a printable PDF he had found online to help him keep track of breeding schedules and rabbit stock. Chanakira, a software engineer, thought software would do the job better. So she built him an iOS application in three days, uploaded it to Apple’s App Store so he could download it while he was abroad, and moved on.
