Ask a Nigerian founder how his last ten customers arrived and most cannot answer properly. Somebody was referred. Somebody saw a post. Somebody knew somebody. The money came in, so the question of how it came in never got asked.
Any business in that position is hoping. It can work extremely hard while it hopes, and most of them do. Posting daily. Attending events. Answering every message within minutes. All of that is effort, and effort without a way of finding customers produces activity instead of customers. The founder feels busy and reads the busyness as progress, while the actual source of revenue is whoever happens to walk in that week.
A business running on the founder's personal network grows to the size of that network and holds there, because everybody in it has already been asked. A business running on referrals grows to whatever its customers volunteer, which is a number the founder does not control. One strong month of posting says nothing about the quiet month that follows. Growth stops, and the founder cannot say why, because nothing went wrong. He simply ran out of the people he knew how to reach.
The market calls this a marketing problem and treats it with money. The business starts running ads, the ads produce attention, and the attention produces almost nothing, because there was never a way of turning that attention into a transaction. The platform gets blamed. The marketing team gets blamed. The budget gets increased. The missing thing underneath goes unnamed for years.
A founder who cannot say where his customers come from cannot plan next month, cannot tell whether a strong month was earned or simply happened, and cannot repeat it either way. He hires against revenue he does not understand. He spends against revenue he cannot produce again. When the quiet month comes, and it always comes, he has nothing he can do about it.
A way of finding customers is four questions answered in writing. Who exactly is the customer? Where is that person already spending his attention? What brings him from there into a conversation with the business? What turns that conversation into money? A founder who can answer all four has something he can run again next month and the month after. A founder who cannot is hoping, and hope brings customers the same way it brings rain.
Nigeria's digital economy grows when Nigerian businesses reach the customers already sitting in the Nigerian market. Millions of people are transacting online in Nigeria every day. The businesses that built a way to stand in front of them are taking that money, and the ones still hoping are watching it go somewhere else.
Founder & CEO of SAVA Global.
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