A business becomes real on the day somebody pays for what it sells.
Once the product is solid, getting customers is the next job, and it is the one most Nigerian founders treat as something that will sort itself out. They have built something that works, so they believe the hard part is behind them.
Take a Nigerian founder who spends two years building. The product works, the app is live, and the few people using it are happy. He has never run a campaign, never had anybody responsible for bringing customers in, and never set a target for the month. What he has is a good product and 200 users, and he has started telling people he is raising. Nothing in the business is set up to bring in the 201st user.
That belief takes two forms. The first is that a good product brings customers on its own. Nothing in Nigeria pushes a product towards the people who need it, and nobody is searching for a business they have never heard of. Somebody has to put the product in front of people deliberately, and that somebody is the business.
The second form is more expensive. The founder decides that getting customers properly needs money, so the plan becomes to raise first and grow after. He waits. Meanwhile, every paying customer he could have won is revenue he does not have to ask anybody for. A business with customers paying every month has its own money coming in, and it can set its own terms with any investor who shows up later.
The cost of waiting shows up slowly. The product keeps improving and the customer numbers stay where they are. The founder spends his savings, or he takes an investment on poor terms because he has no revenue to negotiate with, or he closes the business and says he could not raise funds. In each case, the business had a way to make money the whole time and never built it.
Getting customers has to be built like anything else in the business. It runs on set days, somebody is responsible for it, and it produces a number that gets checked at the end of the month. A business that has built that can say how many customers next month will bring. A business without it is guessing every month, and it is one bad guess away from closing.
Nigeria's digital economy is built by businesses that can bring in customers on their own. A business without a way of doing that is holding a product and waiting for somebody to rescue it, and in Nigeria, nobody is coming.
Founder & CEO of SAVA Global.
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