The quality of output you get from platforms like ChatGPT and Claude depends on the kind of AI prompts you use. There’s a lot you can do when you know how to prompt these systems. And that includes learning tips for building a successful business in Nigeria.
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Figuring out how to get the best answers from AI is a good thing. But as a busy entrepreneur, you may not have the time to learn the ropes right now. We recognise this. So we’ve come up with 10 questions you could pose to your preferred AI platform, if you want help from it with planning your venture. Here they are:
Generate Business Idea Generation
Prompt: Suggest 5 profitable small business ideas in Nigeria for 2025, considering low startup capital, growing digital trends, and high youth unemployment.
This prompt is great because it asks for an up-to-date answer, and also specifies that the answer should be relevant to the realities of Nigeria’s economy. This all but guarantees that the response you get will be suitable for the present time, and that it will not ignore the difficulties around setting up a business in this country.
Note that you can tweak the conditions part of the prompt to include facts about your personal preferences, health, temperament, target audience, and so on.
Do Market Research
Prompt: Conduct a basic market analysis for starting a logistics business in Lagos, including competitors, customer pain points, and growth potential.
This demands that the AI platform does a simple but insightful review of the market you intend to sell to. The response will probably define your ideal target market, list your biggest competitors, discuss the problems your potential customers have, and tell you what kind of growth you can hope to achieve.
Again, you can edit this prompt to include other items that you would want in an analysis of your market.
Find Funding Sources
Prompt: List 7 realistic ways a Nigerian entrepreneur can raise funds for a startup in 2025 without relying on bank loans.
Many would-be entrepreneurs shy away from bank loans because they may come with unfavourable conditions. And that’s if they’re able to get an offer from the banks in the first place.
The prompt above, therefore, excludes banks when asking for possible funding sources. Note that it also requires the answers to be realistic. These sorts of qualifications will enable you to collect decent output from ChatGPT and others.
Create a Business Plan
Prompt: Help me create a business plan for a food delivery business operating in Abuja, including market needs, pricing, and cost estimates.
Generative AI can produce a business plan for you in less than a minute. The more specific your prompt for it is, the more comprehensive the plan generated is likely to be. That’s a lot of costs saved in business development.
However, there’s a catch. You still need to edit whatever your AI system puts out. Revise the plan so that it actually reads in your own style. Check for inaccuracies. And add detail and contexts you think it may have missed.
Craft a Digital Marketing Strategy
Prompt: Create a business marketing strategy for a new fashion brand in Nigeria targeting Gen Z on Instagram and TikTok.
Your prompt could follow the format above (replace the business type and demographic if you need to). The results it yields will cover ways to reach the specified audience on the social media platforms they use the most.
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Define Your Brand Identity
Prompt: Help me name my agro processing business in Nigeria and develop a slogan that reflects trust, innovation, and community impact.
If you’re having a difficult time naming your new business, you can ask your favourite AI platform for help. You can even go beyond that to demand mission and vision statement ideas, as well as slogans that the business will become known for.
But you’re better off using the results as a template or guide, rather than adopting them wholesale. In many ways, the human mind is still better at fashioning statements that appeal to other humans.
Learn about Business Regulations
Prompt: What are the key legal and regulatory steps I need to take to register and operate a tech startup in Nigeria?
It’s easier for your business to stay on the right side of the law if you know what laws apply to it and what those laws say. But sifting large documents and wrestling with “legalese” are not real options for most entrepreneurs.
Instead, you can ask your AI system to summarise the relevant rules. The responses might even be better if you note the specific kind of business you’re running (or want to run).
Strengthen Your Online Presence
Prompt: Generate content ideas for my Nigerian skincare brand’s website and Instagram page that will attract local and Diaspora customers.
Unless you are fairly familiar with content creation and you’re a creative person yourself, you may find it hard to plan content for your website and social media pages. How about getting AI to lay out a content calendar for you?
The quality of content ideas you find this way might surprise you. But the prompting has to be right.
Retain Customers
Prompt: Suggest ways to build loyalty and referrals for a small business selling handbags in Nigeria.
Customer attrition is the bane of many small businesses in Nigeria. Unfortunately, a lot of business owners don’t really know how to make customers stay.
With a prompt like the one above, you can collect suggestions for turning customers into loyal patrons and ambassadors for your brand.
Scale and Expand Your Business
Prompt: How can a small-scale fish farming business scale up sustainably within 2 years, considering common infrastructure challenges?
Like most entrepreneurs, you likely want your business to grow. However, you are aware that your growth plans may be hindered by various factors, including the limited availability of supporting infrastructure.
When faced with this challenge, you could ask a more experienced businessperson in your industry for advice. But you can also ask your AI platform for tips. It just might throw up interesting ideas.
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Final Words
For generative AI, prompting is (almost) everything. Millions of Nigerians are leaving money on the table because they don’t know how to find the best answers using Artificial Intelligence. This should not be the case. But it also means that you have a head start over those who don’t use the technology, if you put the AI prompts in this article to work.
Featured Image Source: Bernard Marr
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