Nigerian Businesses Are Building Products Nobody Asked For

The product took months to build. The features were thought through carefully. The design was iterated on. The launch was prepared. And when it went live, the market's response was silence. Not rejection exactly — nobody said the product was bad. They simply did not engage with it, did not buy it, and did not ask for it to exist. The founder spent months building something the customer was never waiting for.

This is one of the most consistent patterns in Nigerian business — a product built entirely on what the founder assumed the customer wanted, with no actual conversation with the customer at any point in the process. No research. No early conversations to test whether the problem being solved was real. No sample shown to the people who were supposed to buy it. The assumption was that understanding the market meant knowing what to build. It did not. Knowing what to build requires talking to the people who will buy it, and most Nigerian founders skip that step entirely.

The result is visible in what happens after launch. The features that took the longest to build are the features nobody uses. The problem the product was designed to solve turns out to be a problem the customer has already worked around, or does not experience the way the founder assumed they did, or does not consider important enough to pay for. The founder finds out after the product is live, the money is spent, and the team is already four months deep into building the next version of something nobody confirmed they wanted.

The market did not reject the product. It was never asked if it wanted it. These are different situations and the distinction matters. A market that rejects a product is telling you the execution was wrong. A market that ignores a product is telling you the assumption was wrong from the beginning. The second is harder to fix because it requires going back further — not to the product decisions but to the conversations that should have happened before any product decisions were made.

The businesses that consistently build products people buy do one thing differently. Before a single feature is decided, before a timeline is set, before any building begins — they talk to the customer. Not to validate what they have already decided to build, but to understand the problem the customer actually has. Those conversations are not a formality. They are the work. Everything built without them is a guess the market will eventually price honestly.

You cannot sell something to a customer you have never spoken to.