A business is carried by the customers who keep coming back, and most Nigerian founders cannot say how many of those they have.
Most of them have never decided what an active customer means for their own business. Without that decision, every customer looks the same, and the business cannot tell the ones carrying it from the ones who passed through once and left.
Take a Nigerian business with thirty thousand people who have bought something at some point. The founder calls that thirty thousand customers. He cannot say how many bought in the last ninety days, because the business never decided what counts as an active customer.
The definition belongs to the business and nobody outside it can set it. A food delivery business and a crypto exchange do not measure the same way. Somebody ordering food twice a week is a normal customer. Somebody trading twice a week is barely there. A business selling furniture may see its best customer once a year and that is still a good customer. So every founder has to answer one thing for his own business, which is how often somebody has to buy, and over what period, before the business can count on them.
Without the definition, the founder counts everybody who ever bought anything as an active customer. That total only goes up, so it always looks like progress. A business can lose half its active customers in one quarter while the total keeps climbing, and the founder only finds out when the revenue drops. A falling active customer number is the only warning a business gets before the revenue follows it down.
Setting the definition takes one afternoon. Look at the customers who have stayed longest and see how often they buy. How often they buy is the definition. Then count how many customers currently meet it, and that number is the business as it stands today.
Everything the business does afterwards gets easier. The founder knows which customers to protect, because those are the ones holding the business up. He knows what a good month looks like before the month is over. And when he spends money to bring in new customers, he can tell whether those customers became active or simply passed through.
Nigeria's digital economy is built by businesses with customers who keep transacting. A business that cannot say how many active customers it has cannot say whether it is growing, and a business that cannot measure its own growth has no way of staying alive.
Founder & CEO of SAVA Global.
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