Why Bus, Oya, OgaDriva and the rest of them haven’t thought of breaking this Uber guys yet? Uber is killing our own startups! Remodel or merge together to stay strong in the market.
“Our customers read Chinese, not English or Spanish, so they want to use a Chinese app to get access to other travel markets.” This statement was made by Jean Liu, Didi Kuadi’s President while answering a question about Uber’s entrance into the Chinese market.
But in Africa, it’s a different thing entirely: ‘Na oyinbo things be ogbonge’. But then, I think it’s high time we rise up for our young entrepreneurs in this genre.
You think there are not coming fully to focus on long distance travels? Just wait until this BlaBlaCar Guys enters Nigeria and then, it would be too late to cry.
Have you made a claim? yes. Have you given us enough reason to believe it? not quite. Wouldn’t you rather share ideas on how we could make our local travel startups compete with Uber and BlaBlaCar?
Ive been saying this for the longest time. It has something to do with inferiority complex. I think we trust people who don’t look like us, which is funny and interesting.
I said it elsewhere, internet market is terrible because multinationals have taken all the lucrative niches. Locals are left with crumbs. As long as governments all over the world allow this to happen, you will never build a “local Silicon Valley.” The only way for countries to take full advantage of the tech revolution is to follow China’s protectionist example
The startups listed above aren’t even running the same service as Uber, so the comparison feels odd. If we’re talking of similar products, I think Eazy Taxi is one.
And while I know it’s the Nigerian thing to blame others for our failures, I’m pretty sure I’d heard about Bus long before Uber came to Nigeria. Other similar bus-chartering services I’d heard of died long before Uber got here.
I feel instead of constantly complaining about foreigners, we should focus on making and funding ‘high-quality’ (the quality is important, a lot of people don’t get this) products that our people would want to use. We have the advantage of knowing the market, after all. Competition is good and will always exist, it should inspire us to do better. The truth is many local apps look or work terribly. I’m not going to use patriotism as a reason to put up with something bad when there are other options.
So lets say we do make the best product, how do we get their attention? How can we get them or if possible force them to use our products? Some countries block foreign apps/services and build themselves, how can we do the same thing?
To be sure there’s no misunderstanding, what you’re saying as an entrepreneur is, that you want government to stop your customers from having an alternative?
If that’s the case, did you embark on your startup journey to solve a need or to make money off the back of customers?
I know this is Africa and we love ‘contracts’, ‘tenders’, ‘bans’, ‘embargoes’ etc which in other words is that we love situations where we are allowed to make A LOT of money with little or minimal effort. But in the tech space, surely we can’t expect that a better alternative should be denied to others, simply because we want to make more money. Which is what it appears you’re proposing.
Just to expand on the ‘others’, let’s assume the OP is right and Uber has indeed ‘killed’ our startups. The way to think about it is, how many people are actually working in those startups affected? Say 500 max. Well, how many Nigerians have benefited from a better Uber service? Say 250k (random number). How many ADDITIONAL jobs have been added? Say 2k jobs (additional because the other startups also provided jobs). The point is a few people will experience loss as a result of Uber winning, versus a larger number of people who will actually gain.
I know and I understand your feelings, I would also love that government bans all my competitors (foreign and local to be honest), so I can make a lot of money…but for once let’s think with our head and not with our bank balance in mind (while wrapping it as patriotism).
P.S see how bans worked well in Paris and Berlin against Uber
What Im saying is I want the government to stop my customers from having FOREIGN alternatives or make the barrier to entry for FOREIGNERS APPS/SERVICES/STARTUPS very high/expensive. The West does it all the time. They limit products/services from certain foreign countries and for those that do enter, they impose high taxes on them and other fees. Look at all the top apps/services/startups in America, does it come as a surprise that most if not all of them were created/made in America? They make it hard for foreigners to take over because they know that the money needs to circulate within the country and their citizens need to survive.
Also I think that your take on apps/services/startups like Uber taking over another country is kind of myopic. Internet empires/startups of today are like the kingdoms of old days and robber barons of the 19th century. Look at Bush, Rockefeller, Mellon, Vanderbilt, Rothschild, they made their money back in the days like centuries ago and yet up till this day, their descendants are on top. Look at Bill Gates he is still the richest. Although you are a bit correct its not just about the jobs. Its about the data, pride and culture. Many people do certain things because of their role models. I believe that if Africa/Nigeria had many success stories, many more people will believe that they can do it as well and non-technical won’t look down on technical people as all yahoo yahoo boys or criminals. Imagine if we could just get about 10 billion dollar apps/services/startups/unicorns in the next 5 years, that will give Nigeria a better/clean image.
This statement is so incorrect on so many levels that there’s no need to come back on this
But when you say ‘citizens need to survive’, who are these ‘citizens’? Are they the startup founders and stakeholders or are the rest of the population?
I agree with you on the blame game thing. But would like to know whether Uber started with the same quality they have today? And when you talk about funding, recently, Uber raised over $100m. Who will give a local startup a quarter of that?
Mind you, Uber startup locality cherishes SMEs, here we talk about them and do nothing.
In regards to America top apps, you’re making an absurd assumption that correlation equals causation. So your point is simply that there is some sort of protectionism going on and that’s why all the top apps are American. I can tell you for free, that’s not true. However, let’s leave that discussion for another thread.
Not to deviate from the ‘citizens’ question, I feel it’s important to get to bottom of who will be the real beneficiaries of a government ban on foreign apps/services.
Again let’s not ignore that we’re taking of technology, a government ban must be fair and all encompassing.
Mind you I don’t trivialise your points as we’ve all heard different versions of it. But it’s not enough to say government should make some tech millionaires as a reason to ban foreign firms.
That’s a very thin line to walk on, my friend… especially as we depend on foreign companies for our hardware and software needs. Ban Dropbox because a Nigerian has built an equivalent? The files end up sitting on servers outside the country run by foreign cloud hosting companies.
On the other hand, if a quality service is created (think, Israel’s Waze), people will definitely use it, not just in your country, but beyond. There are other factors involved that aren’t really related to this thread but expecting people to use a local version of a global product in this day and age is a literal pipe dream.
To say something about the set of links you dropped to prove that the United States makes it hard for foreigners to come over, the opposite is actually true. There are even specific VISAs for the purpose of allowing aliens of extraordinary ability work/create businesses in the United States.
You can’t force anyone to do anything. Life sucks that way: Success is not guaranteed even if you’re the best. For many of the big startups out today, it’s 75% luck that they ended up being at the top. Sometimes, niche isn’t what people want. For instance, for a while, people were producing Facebook and Twitter clones in Nigeria. I like having access to international personalities on both these platforms; why would I use one only for Nigerians? What do I gain? The truth is there are still a lot of local services that haven’t been served by foreign startups, and honestly, Nigeria isn’t even there yet in terms of smartphone/internet penetration where moving most of said local services to an app would lead to SV-type numbers.
Well yes, but then again, Uber is a 6 year old company. It didn’t start making money overnight. It started small with a decent app, got bigger, got an audience got the confidence of investors and users, then got funding.
My point is, a Nigerian startup isn’t entitled to funding, it needs to go through the same process. We need to build better, useful apps. Even in the US, there are tons of great but smaller startups that never get much publicity or funding. Many even fold up. We also don’t have the same Silicon Valley-esque environment where there are tons of investors searching for a startup to put their money into. Our market is just different.
I find all the talk here to be hypothetical because I haven’t come across many local apps worthy of this hand-wringing.
No one knows the actual amount of Nigerians that use the internet… I don’t think more than 3 million Nigerians use it… even 3M is too much…
Internet is very expensive…
Most Nigerians wait for your product to be popular before they use it…
Most Nigerians don’t encourage local products as can be seen in comments on this topic
There are very few programmers
Nigeria is not a trusted country on the internet.
the government doesn’t encourage local products…
internet knowledge is still very low.
the list is endless
But uber is in one niche… there are niches that can be explored…
