If you produce a FREE digital product, AVOID growing by buying users. Ad-driven revenue generally grows slower than customer acquisition cost (CAC). Where you decide to be buying users, you would run out of money in Nigeria. The most important thing for a FREE product is to make something really exciting which people would like to use and tell others to use [free marketing]. Paid acquisition of users for a free product in Nigeria would not take you very far despite any ephemeral buzz.
If your customer lifetime value (LTV) is less than N500k, do not build a sales team. Rather, focus on blogs, SEO, ads, etc to attract users, but structure the growth to recover CAC within 6 months.
But if the LTV is about N2 million, sales team makes sense.
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So, if you look critically, it only makes sense to have sales team for enterprise products (consumer product is marginally a tougher call to make) in Nigeria. That does not mean you cannot build a sales team for a consumer product. Largely, the best model is to focus on having very great products which can sell themselves.
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