Almost none of the African startups that died in the last five years died because the product was bad. The graveyard is full of great products that died after they hit product-market fit. And nobody has a clear explanation, apart from blaming funding.
I have been sitting with this thought for years, and Chimoney is what finally made me write it down.
When Uchi Uchibeke announced Chimoney’s shutdown in May, he wrote a sentence I have not been able to put down:
“The product worked. It was distribution. I spent too much of my time building and not enough time making sure people knew what we built.”
Chimoney raised close to a million dollars. Payments across 41 currencies. A 4,500% jump in transaction value in a single quarter. Licenses in Canada. They had exact metrics accelerators teach founders to chase as PMF. He got them. He still shut down.
Chimoney is not alone. Okra raised $16 million. Gigbanc, which wound down this week, riased over $1m and had over 150,000 customers.
Every time one of these companies goes down, the ecosystem reaches for the same three-word autopsy. Funding dried up. We are not being honest with ourselves.
The stage nobody named
PMF was never the destination. PMF tells you the product can survive. It says nothing about whether the company can win.
There is a stage between the product working and the company winning that the ecosystem has never properly named. It sits inside the twelve to twenty-four months where a startup either builds a repeatable growth machine or discovers, one quarter at a time, that PMF was a survival check, not a finish line.
I call the discipline that lives inside this stage Distribution Engineering: the systematic design of every pathway through which value is discovered, trusted, adopted, paid for, and compounded in a market.
The milestone at the end of it is what African VCs should start diligencing for. Distribution-Market Fit. Plainly: we know our buyer, we can reach them repeatedly, unit economics improve as the number goes up, and the motion does not depend on the founder being personally awake.
Prof. Ndubuisi Ekekwe named the deeper mechanic in Growth Journey and Winning Markets: rapid growth without a strategic anchor is “akin to building a skyscraper on a foundation of sand.” Chimoney is exactly that skyscraper. Distribution Engineering is how you pour the foundation.
PMF says the product can survive.
DMF says the company can scale.
What to do next
If you accept that PMF is a survival check, the next question is where exactly am I bleeding, and what do I fix this quarter?.
I created The Post-PMF Handbook to help you figure out the answer. The handbook is the working companion to this 5-part series. In the next post, I will share the first of seven confusions between PMF and DMF: streaks vs systems, and the ninety-minute whiteboard test that tells you which one your last great quarter actually was.