@davidsmith8900 So he thinks differently because you have some experience trying to duplicate SV success and failed but he’s refraining to respond to your request for his resume? The way you jump into conclusions says a lot about every point you have tried to make on this and many other threads on this forum.
Do you think that maybe it is an inferiority complex thing? Like most Africans (or Nigerians) don’t really believe in their own product?
Yes I see you peddling that all over the place. Like someone said to me offline earlier this afternoon, you make it seem like people open websites, go to the about us page, see a bunch of Nigerian names (or a Nigerian address), and then decide to not use the service.
Anecdotes below (and this isn’t because of some lame resume call out, but to provide counter arguments)
In 2007, a group of friends and I came up with the idea of creating a service to make it easy to buy recharge cards online. I mean, at the time it was rather interesting… plus only two other people provided such a service - rechargenigeria.com and one other whose name eludes me right now. Anyway, we tried to differentiate by offering this wallet of a thing where you could put funds in to buy recharge cards via SMS or by flashing a number because we assumed that more often than not when you run out of credit and need it the most, you probably don’t have internet access. I mean, it was 2007 - most people were connected only while at work. This (reloadng.com) worked out quite well, and in less than 3 months, we already had over 10,000 subscribers that had spent money on the platform with at least 1000 regularly using the flash service. A few months down the line, we were doing over a million in transactions per week. Unfortunately, this took a toll on us. MTN was everyone’s favourite network and they were literally the only ones who didn’t deem it worthy to provide us with their vouchers in softcopy. We had to buy cards in bulk, scratch them, and feed into the database. Profits were meagre even at that scale and didn’t justify the effort being put into keeping the service running. The purse was spurn out into its own payment gateway (softpurse.com) with APIs and all so subscribers could spend their money on other websites that cared to integrate it and the recharge service was shutdown a few months after. Turns out people only funded their accounts primarily to buy recharge cards (obviously) and weren’t really interested in conducting other transactions online. We kept it alive anyway for the next couple of months - till early 2010, I think.
A couple of random enterprise projects for corporate clients after, I decided to take a stab at something public facing again. Armed with lessons learnt from Softpurse, we created a more simplistic payment gateway without a purse but let merchants accept payments from cardholders without having to integrate Interswitch/Etranzact/Unified payments themselves and called it Eyowo. This fared pretty well via word of mouth only and in the time it ran for, I am not sure of the specific numbers right now, it processed over 30m in transactions and was used by sites like Gigalayer, etc. I had a fallout with my partners and quit before joining Jobberman some months after. Eyowo died a natural death, as it was only run by a team of three - @leslie on the frontend and @Tolu on customer success and helping with integrations, both of whom quit shortly after I did with no one else from the company equipped to support or improve the product.
These are my successes and eventual failures. They highlight the fact that we found a need, provided a solution, and milked it because people used our products. Also, the failures had nothing to do with any foreigner playing on our turf. Eyowo could have still been alive today were it not for greed and other random shit I would rather not put out here. Those are totally local factors.
There is a reason why I sometimes come off as harsh when I criticize products that are posted here - differentiation, and execution. It’s cool to want to build the next social network or the next e-commerce website. What isn’t cool is to think your naive approach to the ‘problem’ is going to impress anyone and draw users. A lot of developers I have met have this idea of “if you build it, they will come” and forget about the legwork side of things. Like, oh… let’s build a service that will connect everyday people with artisans. Who signs the artisans up on the site? Who acts as the actual broker between the artisans and their clients? Everybody is a techie and wants to write code at the expense of the real dirty work involved. Some foreign backed company comes along with a real plan and eats your lunch, and then you cry “Uber killed my startup”.
Come on, let’s get real please.
@MistaMajani No. Those “small niche apps” you see on my profile are just random personal projects from back when I created that page - 2008, I think. I am not scavenging for scraps. Some of us just like to hack at stuff and don’t delude ourselves into thinking we have created a product. 
Edit: My longest post on Radar so far and I didn’t use the word “fuck”. Proud of myself maybe. 
PS: Payments is still a real and interesting problem to solve in Nigeria today and I am definitely interested in getting on board with anyone looking to do so, pro bono. A couple of friends over at Paystack are on to something interesting and are worth keeping an eye out for.