Do we really know our market? Nigerians pretend to know a lot of things but many of us don’t have as much knowledge as we tout. We typically push single stories instead of data driven perspectives to the market and it badly hurts our execution. Also until we learn to collaborate to build behemoths and we can learn to answer the question of what is the single technical insight that drives the businesses we create, foreign entities with better teams and more data driven perspectives of the market will continue to dominate.
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@iaboyeji typically, we are not data driven not because of cultural inferiority but because digestible local data isn’t readily available.
You can never be armed with too much advantage, this is true anytime of the day. Data that provides real insight would be prioritized if there were readily available to local entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs are not unwittingly choosing studied business instincts over market sourced data. The latter just isn’t available.
A look at how unpopular our statistical vendors are even at state level, would further knock points off your perspective.
I had no idea there was a government parastatal, that accumulates data mined from national and state wide research and curation programs, until I attempted to start an aggregation program for a set of data supposedly existent.
In the US, for instance, the number of registered properties and their local appraisal value (with myriads of other rich data) is not just available but you can practically do a digital dump of the data into a personal repo if you’ve got the server.
But in Nigeria our local housing data hasn’t gotten my house address right yet. Only until recently did street naming get proper attention (majorly in Lagos, though) and even that must have had the aid of foreign interests.
We are the gen to build lively systems to curate these data, and this will be long before we start making profitable sense out of 'em.
I couldn’t agree more with this. insightful
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ignorant post based on no data.
the data is out there on how many nigerians are connected.
its around 80 million
i dont even see the correlation between uber and bus startups
I think that you have to consider how smart your readers are before you push out any article.
I think research is so important and is not encouraged enough here. But it still comes back to the thing I was implying above, about the lack of self-awareness. I see, even here on Radar, apps/sites launched and my question is mainly, ‘who asked for this’ or ‘oh, another of that’. You ask what they’re bring to the table and they can’t tell you. These are not the products that will be competing with the Ubers and Facebooks of the world any time soon.
How is research not encouraged enough here?
There is still a large number of Nigerians that haven’t come online or don’t use apps regularly. Marketing your product to those people will give you an advantage over foreign companies.
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Regular internet users are not more than 10 million, at best.
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By here, I meant Nigeria in general. Also I said encouraged enough. If it is, not enough people are doing it.
I’ll call this a bla bla car post
And u basing ur response on what data? Even parents use WhatsApp and facebook nowadays
Any one who is arguing for foreign start-ups availability has not read history books.
Let me explain to you something: the biggest reason Third World countries are Third World countries is because they missed the industrial revolution. Whoever missed the industrial revolution put a massive yoke on themselves because now it meant that most infrastructural material had to be imported, which results in major capital flight out of the country, and major over reliance on others, to the point of the financial slave-master relationship we have now between Africa and the West.
That was in the 19th century. The next great technological revolution is the software revolution. Software is the most lucrative job creator of our time, and the most efficient place to invest capital at the moment. Any government with any sort of vision to see ahead would know that they can’t afford to let such an opportunity slip from their citizens, and should do whatever it takes to make sure that locals get preference over foreign. Asian countries were visionary in this regard. Now see how many billion dollar Asian companies have sprung up that are simply local clones of US start-ups. Some might see “unfair” practice in such a situation, but I see a responsible government that knows not to let a major shift in the world economy pass them by, putting measures that allow the locals to catch up to admittedly more mature Silicon Valley start-ups. Protectionism is a legitimate strategy for growing am infant industry and it has been done time and again by First World countries to gain footing in crucial areas(check how Asians forced their way into the car and hardware markets).
If governments in Africa don’t see this, then woe unto us, we will be Third World for another hundred years. Already Africa has exported billions of dollars to Google, Facebook, we
b hosting companies, and now Uber next. In turn, they hire probably less than 500 Africans in total and give them nominal jobs. Meanwhile techies on techcabal struggle to raise or make 20,000 dollars chasing the smaller niches in software. If any government in Africa had vision, by now they would have a local billion dollar web hosting company, search engine, social network and cab app, each employing thousands of locals and creating billions in local wealth. But alas, we don’t have visionaries in Africa. All we have is the likes of @onyeka and her disciples who champion the rights of Silicon Valley to snatch this golden opportunity while they themselves are struggling to create some app for delivering toilet paper to schools so that they can make at least 100 dollars a month.
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Wish I could give double Likes to this.
@MistaMajani I think everyone on radar would agree with your sentiments. Onyeka included.
No need to call anyone out!
Keep sharing.
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You know what’s funny? Even on ycombinator.com the elite guys from Silicon Valley are wondering how on earth other countries have never thought to just kick them out. See for yourself:
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Thank you. The covert disdain for African startups isn’t missed on this forum by people that feel ‘smart’.
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Actually I don’t agree with you @MistaMajani and I speak for myself. Crucially, I’ve read my history books as wells and do understand my ‘story’ and ‘roots’. But thanks for the recap.
But let’s go back to the crux of your argument which is; ‘responsible government’ should implement ‘protectionism’. We do have hope for Africa, but we can all agree that ‘responsible government’ is hard to find on the continent. That’s why where we have practiced ‘protectionism’, all we always managed to do is enrich a few to the detriment of the wider community. Zillions of examples all over the continent but just look at Nigeria and see how the ‘richest black man’ is celebrated and yet will are rewarded with the most expensive cement prices in the world. That’s what you get with ‘responsible government’ policies. Or maybe the SA crony capitalism is working better for the people…
But returning to the original OP’s point, did all those startups that he mentioned Uber ‘killed’, actually die because of Uber? The OP didn’t mention but here’s what I think
Did anyone of them close shop before Uber came to Nigeria? I believe so.
Did any of them die because of the myriad of reasons startups die (funding, founders fighting, operational issues etc)? I believe so
Did any of them die specifically because f Uber’s arrival? I believe so as well.
Now here’s the question, if we ban Uber is it because of that last set of startsup? I.e. Are we banning Uber for a specific company/companies or the greater good of the people?
Because I know if this is case, then it’s not farfetched to know how ‘startups’ in Africa will eventually evolve.
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You’re picking one aspect of @MistaMajani 's argument. He is speaking in broad terms about how opening our markets doesn’t drive local creativity. The most successful online ventures in Nigeria are the ones free of foreign competition, think sport betting and Nigerian entertainment blogs. No matter how hard people try, they just cannot fight a multinational silicon valley company that can throw $50 million into the Nigerian market while our domestic banks can’t even give loans of more than $100,000 to SMEs.
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Creativity also comes from operating in a challenged environment like Nigeria. Protectionism is not the answer. One of my challenges with some of the local products are that they are not really solving problems, and I mean the critical ones. Yes, I like the app that tells me about the traffic in Lagos, but is it really a problem that I want solved? The guys who created Uber and Airbnb solved their problems and it so happened that their solution was exportable. Let’s solve problems in Nigeria that can be exportable to other similarly challenged environments like Nigeria and lets have their communities complain that Nigerian made apps are dominating their tech sector.
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I understand his points very well. And to be candid, I have ‘skin in the game’ as I run a startup, so I’m very much interested in his POV and even agree with some of them.
But let’s follow the logic of banning through to logical conclusion, assuming we ALL agree that foreign tech firms should be banned. Then the real question which should be answered is ‘for who’s benefit’?
Once ‘who’s benefit’ is answered, only then can we start looking at the modality of banning. Some ways they can do this are as follows:
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Strategically important sectors as designated by government eg transportation (Uber), Communications (Whatsapp, Facebook) etc
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Cultural and Heritage Factors eg Movies (Netflix), Food (Soylent) etc
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Hardware and Hosting eg mobile phones (iPhones), servers (AWS)
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Country of residence or affinity- so Nigerian can’t own a Kenyan startup
You could go on and on, but the point I’m making is to show how slippery the slope will be once you actually agree that a ban must be done!
So my next question is ‘how do you want a ban to work’?
Although very hypothetical but if a ban was in place for #2 reasons, then we wouldn’t have Netflix flexing its muscles in Africa. So who’s this competition good for? I’m sure some of the home grown players in the industry which some of us are rooting for, would prefer that they’re not here. But for who’s benefit?
And I understand this is the internet, people don’t have to back up anything (eg the OP just blindly saying ‘Uber killed our Startups’ with non-valid examples) but technology empowers the very people who need it most and to take that away, we need to be sure we know what we’re doing.
A good example that comes to mind is the Syrian crises, it turns out most refugees are depending on their smartphone, Whatsapp and Facebook to make the perilous journey. What if a ‘responsible government’ had banned it…
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