Good People, I am back on Twitter, after many attempts, and this time, it is permanent. Yes, Twitter has built the product which I have been asking for: give me enough space to build my logic as the 140-character thing was restrictive. This is my Twitter handle: @ndekekwe

In the Igbo Nation, the elders will remind everyone that “uwa bu ahia” which means the world is a marketplace, literally. The implication is that Twitter with hundreds of millions of people is one of the world’s largest “markets”. And just like every great market, if you want to play as a supplier, you need tools to create products and services.

Since Musk bought Twitter, he has built the Twitter I think works for me.  I am ready to pay for tools to deliver better products. And Musk has done well there through his subscription-anchored premium services.

Forget the noise that paying for the blue checkmark is bad. Nonsensical. I got back  to Twitter and paid about four days ago. They unlocked enough space. The checkmark is a marginal value; the real deal for me here is the extra space. My subscription – a business expense – has paid for itself;  five people joined Tekedia Capital Syndicate membership today from Twitter and that is $5,000, beating the $84 I paid for Twitter’s annual subscription. And for Tekedia Mini-MBA, registrations are up. 

I do not come here to entertain; this is a marketplace. Twitter right now may even deliver better conversion since Elon Musk has made it flat – you can compete on the strength of your ideas, not your heritage, job title, location, etc since most of those elements have been muted in the system.

Do not join the media people; they’re not an unaligned cohort. They have interests and those may not merge with yours. Focus on what works for you. I like how it works today and I hope they do not break it.

Uwa bu ahia – and Twitter like LinkedIn, Facebook, etc are some of the largest markets in the world, bigger than any “economy” in Africa. Define what works for you because like LinkedIn (the best of all), you can build a real business on them.

This is the age of AI and many startups are emerging. Over the last few weeks, I have been looking at ways how innovative AI companies are launching.  From America to China, here are the main three paths:

Partner with a company with a large user base. OpenAI’s ChatGPT partnered with Microsoft which has millions of users. Microsoft is providing the feedstuff (yes, the data) to advance ChatGPT at scale.

Spend a huge amount of money via promos and advertisements to get data which will improve your AI models as quickly as possible. This is the Temu path; Temu uses AI to power shopping in its ecosystem. It spent $5 million for a 30-second advert during America’s Superbowl game, the largest yearly sports event in the nation. Without the data, the mission will be limited. Sure, many will launch but without the data, scaling may be challenging.

Bake AI into existing in-house data. If you are lucky, and you have the data as Google does, you can launch your Bard equivalent once your code is ready. So, Google was able to launch. The same has happened in Baidu and Alibaba as those firms also have tons of data.

The successful AI companies are going to be those with access to data. This is typical because in the internet age, influencing and controlling demand offers more strategic positioning than influencing supply. Supply is the algorithm/model but without data, it offers limited value. If you are out there in Africa, planning to launch an AI business, you must have a clear view where the data will come. Yes, this goes beyond mathematics and coding!

If you plan to run an internet business, think about how you can control demand. You have already lost the power and capacity to control supply. Yes, anyone can use a credit card, irrespective of geography to buy anything online. The quantity you bring will not have material impact in the total pool in the market.

Nonetheless, you still need to find ways to create a separation. That could be by creating perception demand or simply by building massive data ecosystems which will give you access to be the digital kingmaker in a specialized sector since the ICT utilities like Google and Facebook, as I noted in a recent Harvard Business Review piece, have control of the broad internet.