#let me tell you something the fact that these celebs will pay the equivalent of a mortgage to look BORING should be a criminal offense

[artigas]

let me tell you something, as a bitch who went viral for her cunty post about the met gala back in 2018: i will always, always, always tolerate ugliness so long as it’s undeniable that a choice was made. when it comes to celebrities paying through the nose to wear costumes and stunt, i want audacity. i want gull and i want gumption. lil nas x looks like the silver surfer got his hands on some nerds rope. pedrito has got his bare thighs out at the gig. doja is serving animorphs realness and you know what? i respect it. in fact, i adore it. because do you want to know what’s exponentially worse than being a lil ugly? being that rich and being that spoiled for wardrobe options and nevertheless committing the unforgivable sin of being boring !!

[straplabs]

BUILDING AROUND FRICTION

For entrepreneurs in Nigeria, the search for opportunities that are profitable, durable and meaningful is as elusive as the Holy Grail. In my years of observing and participating in the landscape, it always seem like you can never have it all. A lot of constraints — mostly of broader economic forces beyond your control — will conspire to screw you.

The contretemps about how exactly to build a business has divided entrepreneurs into an equivalence of political tribes. With strong opinions — fairly borne of experiences — on all sides. Do you optimize for profits from people’s habits or build something that elicits a positive change of bad habits? Do I simply put my goods up for sale in traffic jams (where there is a “market”) or does my business model imagine a near future where there are no traffic jams? These are examples of important questions with no easy answers.

UNDERSTANDING CONSTRAINTS

There are two related problems entrepreneurs face when dealing with constraints. Dealing with incomplete information, and dealing with known and understood limitations that are just out of your control. Learning to distinguish between the two is a skill you must learn quickly in the early cycles of your business.

For example, many entrepreneurs take products to the market simply by looking at headline demographics like populations, number of internet users and the like. I once spoke to a CEO of an online auction site who was puzzled why they could only sell to less than 10% of their daily clicks. And friends tell me some eCommerce platforms faced this problem but realized quite late. Sometimes you just have to look beneath the numbers and try to find enduring patterns.

There are other times when the constraints are just out of your control. They leave you very little wiggle room. You do not control interest rates, the Central Bank of Nigeria does. You do not have any power over trade policy, the Federal Government does. You need to understand the acceptable risks to take when dealing with constraints you cannot control.

DEALING WITH CONSTRAINTS

A good way of understanding both kinds of constraints I have described here is to think of them as friction. Engineers, dealing with all kinds of physical systems, understand the physics of friction. They also understand that friction may be a “limiting force”, but it’s also an intrinsic part of any physical system — and hence must be regularly confronted and overcome.

Building a business in a high friction environment can be nerve-wracking. That’s why your job is similar to the engineer’s. Sometimes a high friction material or system needs to be engineered to a high degree of precision to get what you want from it. The business of building a business is more complex than engineering, but there are useful conventions you can adopt.

1. EMBRACE LEVELS OF DEPLOYMENT

No one builds a global business or a popular product overnight. It can be very safe to start local and super-niched. One advantage of this approach is that feedback will be fast, consistent and coherent. If you release a product to a small (-ish) target market and with limited use cases, then the information from the use can be easily analyzable and well-defined.

Amazon had to start with books to learn all it can about supply chains before becoming “the everything store”. You may be driving in Lagos traffic and think there is a “market” for e-scooters. Who wouldn’t like to escape the hell of Lagos traffic?

But putting your scooters on sidewalks all over Lagos may bankrupt you before you even start. Reports on theft, area boys harassment, accidents, police permits and other things you did not consider will come faster than your head can spin.

It is not merely enough that you are providing a solution to a well-defined problem. You need to ask “what category is my solution for what category of the problem”?

Scooters are not at the same categories of solution in both Somolu and Lekki. This is not denigrating any neighborhood or demography. Business is not about impassioned, biased and incorrect decisions. It’s about engineering a precise solution.

You can focus on things that are barriers or you can focus on scaling the wall or redefining the problem. — Tim Cook

2. DON’T BUILD AGAINST FRICTION

Some entrepreneurs may be swimming in funding, a position where you think the solution to every six inch nail is ten pound hammer. This can be quite risky. I worked with a client who wanted to add home delivery to her growing furniture retail business.

Her solution was simple: buy delivery trucks and charge customers for the convenience. She was in a strong financial position to do this. But once we looked at the economics of the solution, it looked different in different situations. Delivering to different parts of the city from her location certainly attracted differential costs and different logistical challenges.

Thinking through this is not unlike the first point above. She found out from experimenting that delivering to some customers while letting others do their pickups is a useful entry point. In fact it was cheaper for some customers to do their pickups than her delivery charges. She would have lost their business. While she could also charge premiums for the deliveries she made at very low cost.

Trying to punch or smash your way through a wall will tire you out and is the wrong approach to frictions and obstacles. Sometimes you just have to scale the fence or smash the ceiling instead.

3. BUILD TO SCALE

This is such an obvious point, and — in my experience — very often missed. It is sad to see entrepreneurs brave the odds to start businesses and make products, only to expose themselves to the rot of static friction from their decisions. I know guys who kill the growth prospects of their products and services because of excessive control and lack of sensitivity to the importance of choices.

One of my favorite example here is Glo. It needed to enter a market with two established players and with high costs and high frictions (electricity being a major one). Even in a market where you can only be the smallest player, you need to grow fast or you quickly die. Per second billing gave the company a route to quickly reach critical mass and hopefully stay in the game to compete.

If you do not build your company to enable you grow fast — i.e. scale — frictions will quickly grind you to a halt before you can get the tiniest room to breathe.

4. BUILD ON TRUST

If I order “fresh-squeezed” orange juice from your website, and you delivered purple-colored zobo. It absolutely does not matter to me that you let me “pay on delivery”. You have violated my trust and possibly lost my business. Some entrepreneurs get trust backwards. Trust is misunderstood as a costless transaction. But a garbage service that costs me nothing is still garbage. Trust is being able to deliver on a promise.

This was certainly a problem in the early days of eCommerce. Payment represented a huge friction, and trust was defined as “paying when we get to your doorsteps”. But some of the platforms forgot their basic trust function: “get the orders right”.

It is always a worthwhile lesson for running a business of any stripe or size. Do not promise what you cannot deliver. It may be costing your customers nothing, but you are wasting their time and attention. The cost to you will be huge down the road.

In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence — Ben Horowitz

5. TRY TO SURVIVE, BUT YOU MAY NOT CHANGE THE WORLD

This is certainly hard to accept. Every entrepreneur wants to change the world. But working in a high friction environment gets in the way and you feel the need to “abandon ship”. Some entrepreneurs see friction as the excuse not to do anything challenging or innovative. I once interloped on a twitter debate where a celeb entrepreneur dismissed certain kinds of innovation in the Nigerian tech space. The point may be valid, but it is often oversold.

If your dream is to build Nigeria’s Space X, go for it. Don’t build a payment solution instead because that’s the safe and profitable thing to do. Just remind yourself that it’s risky, there are huge frictions ahead and don’t be stupid.

More importantly, try to survive. You may not change the world. But if you stay in the game long enough, you may watch the world change.