Maybe its only me, but I feel the more than common phrase - “The X of Africa” - undermines creativity. As we know humans are creative in order to solve problems. Now if you are constantly looking to established ideas that have worked in Asia, America or Europe, you defeat the purpose of creativity (this doesn’t demean overseas inspiration). You are essentially solving problems that are majorly foreign or that only serve people of a particular income bracket/culture.
Summary:
A lot of African startups fail from lack of adoption because of the little consideration people give to the purchasing power and needs/wants of the targeted demographic. Tradeoffs should be made for pragmatism over fanciness and “the X of Africa”.
Pretty sure at some point Alibaba was called the “Amazon of China”. That didn’t undermine how they were able to target their market and expand internationally in their own way.
Alibaba is as different from Amazon as could be. They didn’t start off selling goods, it was just a platform for traders to sell to each other on one huge web market. In fact they do not have any inventory of goods.[1]
So they were probably the “ebay of China”.
There are very few problems that are restricted or can be found in just one environment. If I notice a problem in my environment I want to solve, should I stop because some other people in some other place, that happened on the problem in their location before I did are already solving theirs? Maybe wait for them to expand globally and one day get to my environment. Hopefully i’d still be alive by then.
Most times it’s American media dumbing things down for their audience. It hardly ever explains much (see https://twitter.com/stigwue/status/590144014164299776) as the solutions described thus are most times very different from the “X”.
Well, Jason refers to IrokoTV as the Netflix of Africa which captures the general idea but doesn’t stop execution from being different. Or is he doing it for the American media?
More or less in my opinion. From what I hear the primary users of Iroko are Africans abroad. So the whole “Netflix” thing may just be some sort of sensationalism to buy some user confidence in the product.
And my actual point is that there are too many copies/close-copies of western startups. Truth be told Nigeria has many unique problems that need some tech solutions.
I agree with you and to be honest in the cases you are referring to, copy would actually be an overstatement as the execution is often worse off. This may actually be the fact that the real problem wasn’t even understood in the first place. Like claiming to build a “next generation” HR software without having an actual HR consultant (with a solid experience in that problem space) on the team.
Yes! Finally someone said it.
I fully agree that most startups we see are simply emulating tech companies abroad.
These companies were mostly formed because they were solving a problem in their environs.
I think the best approach is to solve the problems that your people have i.e. Nigerians have. Better to even solve a problem you have.
For example, the other day i saw a startup for ready made geles (damn it, they beat me to it lol). But it’s just an example of how someone can make money from something unique to nigerians.
Pretty sure at some point Alibaba was called the “Amazon of China”. That didn’t undermine how they were able to target their market and expand internationally in their own way.
If this were the case - which to a large extent isn’t - it would still be fitting. China’s a country suitable as a candidate to act as the next superpower. Products don’t exist in vacuums, but instead as the need for them arises, voids are hence filled, and after a time, people find themselves becoming one with them.
Economies (let’s assume as a statistic of GDP based on PPP valuation) usually have similar tendencies when grouped to suffer the same sorts of voids. Original thought in one, may create duplicate ideology in another, filling voids, feeding off of each other; albeit in ways fit for the environment tailored for it.
Nigeria doesn’t suffer from these voids.
The X of Africa, (or rather X made by a Nigerian, which does the same thing as Y, but for an audience exclusive to Nigeria, like “the iPad of Africa”) is a sort of re-incarnation of Greenspun’s tenth rule, in environments where the voids that do exist in Nigeria/Africa are yet to be considered, much less solved.
Original ideas are lacking, and bringing up China (a nation famous for its imitation skills which is now adding “innovation” to its portfolio) is a weak argument, at best, to serve the interests of creating “cool” things in place of original ones.
I’m all for everything you just said - see my subsequent replies to the topic. I was on mobile, hence the succinctness of the post you quoted. I’m sorry I passed the wrong message across.
A lot of it is for Western media - which is what partners and investors read. He doesn’t refer to it that way much in local media because there’s no context. It’s the same way startups say “Uber for X”. Context, quick understanding etc.