Building Startups in Nigeria

There are two dishonest ways to write about building startups in Nigeria. One is the hype version: a young ecosystem, a billion-person market, unicorns everywhere you look. The other is the despair version: no power, no funding, no hope. Both get shared a lot. Neither helps a founder decide anything.

Here's the version I'd want to read.

What's genuinely hard

You build your own utilities. Power, internet redundancy, sometimes even logistics: costs and complexity that a founder in London never budgets for. Your burn rate carries infrastructure that other ecosystems get for free.

Trust is expensive to establish. Decades of scams and abandoned projects mean every new product starts below zero on trust. You don't launch and grow; you launch and prove, one customer at a time.

Capital is thin and cautious. Local capital mostly wants collateral and short horizons. Foreign capital wants patterns it recognizes from other markets, which your market may not produce. The honest consequence: revenue is your most reliable investor.

Talent gets pulled abroad. The best engineers you train are one remote offer away from tripling their salary in dollars. You can't out-pay that; you can only out-mission it, and that has limits.

What's secretly an advantage

The problems are real. Nowhere I've worked offers a deeper supply of unsolved, painful, paying problems. Elsewhere, startups fight for scraps of attention in saturated markets. Here, entire industries still run on paper.

Customers tell you the truth. Nigerian customers do not politely churn. They tell you exactly what's wrong, loudly, immediately. As a product builder this is a gift: feedback loops here are brutally fast and brutally honest.

Constraints produce better products. Building for expensive data, unstable power, and low-end devices forces an efficiency that fat-market products never learn. Software that survives Lagos works anywhere.

Less competition for the hard things. The businesses that require showing up in person, earning trust slowly, and integrating with messy local reality (schools, clinics, agriculture) are exactly the ones global competitors can't easily enter. The moat is the difficulty.

What I tell new founders

• Charge from day one. Free pilots signal low value here and select for customers who'll never pay. A real price finds real customers.
• Build for offline first. Whatever your product, some critical moment will happen without connectivity. Decide early what still works.
• Respect the informal layer. WhatsApp, cash, the trusted middleman: don't fight these; integrate with them, then gradually earn the right to replace them.
• Pick a problem you can visit. Software alone rarely wins here. Software plus presence does.

Why build here anyway

Because the equation, honestly weighed, still favors building. The hard parts are operational (power, trust, capital), and operations can be engineered around. The good parts are structural: enormous unmet need, honest feedback, defensible difficulty, and a generation of builders who understand problems the rest of the world's founders can't even see.

I'm building Oponeko in Nigeria not despite the conditions but because of what the conditions mean: the most important problems are still open, and the people best positioned to solve them are the ones who grew up inside them.