There is a version of "startup" that has taken hold in Nigeria that looks nothing like a real business. It has a logo, a social media page, a pitch deck, and sometimes a product. What it does not have, in most cases, is revenue, a paying customer base, a clear cost structure, or any system that would allow it to survive beyond the next three months without the founder's personal money keeping it alive. It calls itself a startup. It operates like a project.
The distinction matters because the label "startup" has become a shield. It protects the business from the questions a real business has to answer. How do you make money? How much does it cost to operate? What is your margin? When a business calls itself a startup, these questions get deferred. The assumption is that the business is in a phase where revenue is not yet the priority, where the focus is on building, where the numbers will come later. In Nigeria, later rarely arrives. The runway that a startup in a developed economy uses to find its footing does not exist here. There is no patient capital absorbing the cost of that search. There is the founder's savings, possibly some family money, and a market that does not wait.
The specific behaviours that separate a real business from a startup playing dress-up are visible. A real business knows what it costs to operate each month. A real business has customers who pay, not users who signed up. A real business can tell you, clearly, how it generates revenue and whether that revenue covers its costs. Most Nigerian startups cannot answer any of these questions with confidence, not because the answers are complicated but because the questions have never been seriously asked inside the business.
The culture around Nigerian tech has made this worse. Events celebrate launches, not revenue. Media covers funding rounds, not profitability. The founder who has a product with ten thousand sign-ups and no revenue gets more attention than the founder running a boring business that makes money every month. The incentives point toward visibility, not viability. The businesses following those incentives end up visible and broke.
A startup that does not act like a real business will not become one by accident. Revenue does not arrive because the product improved or the market matured. Revenue arrives because the business built a deliberate, repeatable way to generate it. Everything before that point is preparation. Everything after it is business. Most Nigerian startups have been in preparation for longer than the market will allow.
If it does not make money, it is not a business yet. Call it what it is.
Founder & CEO of SAVA Global.
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