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This article presents you with startup tips shared by some of Nigeria’s best-known founders and investors. Hopefully, you’ll glean insights from them that you’ll find useful.
Accelerate Your Execution
Tosin Eniolorunda, founder and CEO of Moniepoint, says that entrepreneurs need to take market risk seriously. This means tackling such things as market trends, competition, disruptive technologies, and regulation. Unless these things are addressed, they could imperil your business. He urges founders to deal with market risk by accelerating their execution. “Accelerate your execution, and don’t let the competition catch up with you,” Eniolorunda says.“If you choose to become one of the big players [in your space], the market will test you; regulators will test you; competition will test you. It’s easy to dream and strategize. The hardest thing is executing.”
Take a Long Term View
Shola Akinlade is co-founder of Paystack, one of Nigeria’s biggest payments companies. He would like entrepreneurs to think big from the start, and plan for the long term. He says that this was a lesson he wished he had learned earlier. “At the beginning of our journey, I didn’t think Paystack would be huge…so having that mindset affected my decision-making process on many things, including equity”, he explains. “In retrospect, I recommend startup founders take a very long-term view of their company, believe in themselves, and try to think big in terms of growth.”Prioritize Making an Impact
Odunayo Eweniyi is best known for being co-founder and Chief Operating Officer at PiggyVest, Nigeria’s biggest digital savings platform. She’s also set up other ventures, including First Check, a VC fund that invests in female-led tech startups in Africa. When asked about the values that have propelled her through her entrepreneurial journey, she quotes her father: “Aim very high, work very hard, and care very deeply.” She emphasizes the need for ambition but also insists that founders should care about making a positive impact with their work. ”I work very hard; I put in the work. However, while doing this, I care very much about the impact. How does what I’m working on end up being positive? It’s important that lives are being transformed by what I do.”Be Resilient
Omobola Johnson is a Senior Partner at TLcom Capital LLP, an Africa-focused VC firm with offices in Lagos, Nairobi, and London. She was previously Nigeria’s Minister for Communication Technology. Before assuming her ministerial role, she served as Country Managing Director for Nigeria at Accenture, a global IT services and management consulting company. Although Johnson has plenty of technical insight to offer (given her strong IT background), she stresses the need for resilience. She believes that anyone who wants to build a business in Nigeria must possess this quality. “You have got to be resilient,” Johnson says.“This is a tough market. If you’ve got a big vision, be sure that there are going to be many challenges along the way—whether it’s in terms of getting the right talent, or regulation, or securing capital. So you need that element of resilience inside of you as an entrepreneur in Nigeria.”
Startups Raising for the First time Should Consider “Lower Tier VCs”
Eghosa Omoigui is the founder and Managing General Partner at EchoVC, a venture capital firm that invests in startups operating in underserved markets. Before setting up EchoVC, he worked at Intel Capital for a decade. Omoigui says that startups will struggle to get the attention of venture capital firms—especially the more widely known ones. He suggests that first-time fundraisers should consider pitching to less famous but decent-quality VCs. “About 80 to 90 per cent of the time, if they (leading VCs) have not invested in you before, you’ll have a really hard time getting them on”, Omoigui warns.“So, you need to look for the tier-two or tier-three VCs. If they’re really excited [about your startup], they think ‘It’s always one deal that gets you to tier-one.’ So you’ll get that funded.”
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Listen to Your Investors, but Decide for Your Business
Sim Shagaya is a serial entrepreneur, known for founding Konga and U-Lesson. His latest project is Miva University, a fully online institution of higher learning. Among other things, Shagaya is an advocate of the entrepreneur taking charge of decision-making—even if their decisions sometimes clash with those of investors and other stakeholders. An example he gives is Konga managing inventory, just as investors wanted, instead of making the startup a “pure marketplace”.“My investors were saying ‘You can’t turn off inventory’,” he recalls. “As founders, your investors want you to do well. But you’re not perfectly aligned. There is a divergence. If you genuinely, selflessly believe that a path is right for your company, I think there’s a place for putting your foot down and saying ‘This is what I’m going to do.’”
When Deciding, Learn to Balance Gut Instinct and Stakeholder Views
Tayo Oviosu takes our previous point further with advice about balancing gut instinct and the (sometimes) information-backed recommendations of other stakeholders. He’s been doing this at Paga, the FinTech he founded in 2009. “You have to be comfortable about how you make decisions,” Oviosu says. “I really trust my gut feeling. That said, you can’t live just by gut instinct with a company all the time.“So I think the way to do it is to be very clear about your strategy. What I recommend to people is to lay out your three-to-five-year strategy, and let that be clear to everyone in the company. Any decision has to be in alignment with that. “
Commit to the Problem, Not Your Idea
Maya Horgan Famodu is the founder and Partner at Ingressive Capital, a VC firm that targets tech-enabled startups in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Egypt. She has a unique experience as a venture capitalist, having begun her journey into startup financing in her twenties. Famodu encourages startup founders to focus more on the problem they’re trying to solve, and less on their own idea. This way, she says, they’ll be better at making things that people will actually pay for. “Too many times I’ve come across founders who think they have the coolest app, product, or service, and want with all their might to sell me and potential users on the idea—without really understanding the problem they are trying to solve and also, for whom,” Famodu notes. “Start with the problem so you can detach your ego from customer feedback and really just create something people want, based on exactly what the problem is… [This] makes you more agile and able to pivot.”Don’t Make Profit Your Greatest Aim
Victor Asemota is a serial entrepreneur and investor and is well-known within and outside the tech ecosystem. He’s been a consultant to and sat on the boards of several organizations, and has mentored many founders. Asemota tells entrepreneurs to not be primarily profit-driven. His reasoning around this is that an obsession with profitability might result in a lack of real innovation. When everyone is more concerned with what has always worked, they are less likely to grow their ROI than someone who innovates their way to greater effectiveness. “I’ve found out that when people are not thinking about profits, they tend to be much more innovative,” says Asemota.“At for-profit accelerators, people tend to do things because they want more money. At not-for-profit accelerators, people do things because they want to solve real problems. Some of those real problems become real profit centres in the future.”
Assess Personality Types Before Hiring
Adegoke Olubusi is co-founder and CEO at Helium Health, the largest provider of full-service technology solutions for healthcare stakeholders in West Africa. Olubusi points out that people differ from each other, and it’s normal that some would not approach things as he does. He says that he earlier failed to take this into account while hiring, but has since corrected the mistake. In his opinion, persons who fill roles that fit with their personality are more likely to excel at them. “If you run a company and you haven’t done the personality type assessments on yourself and your team, you might be setting yourself up for trouble”, Olubusi warns. “You have to assess personality types. This way you can understand them better, accept them for who they are, and figure out how to best work with them. “This means you can have people in the right roles that fit into their personality so their experience is more natural.”Register to attend the CN Business Mixer
Final Words
In this article, we put together some of the best startup advice from Nigeria’s top entrepreneurs and investors. The tips they’ve given may be simple, but they’re certainly not easy to implement. Nevertheless, if you’re passionate about the problem you’re solving as a businessperson, you should be able to make the tips work for you.Did you find this article useful? Contact us: editor@connectnigeria.com
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