Avoid the trap of paying to acquire customers at the early phase of your startup. It is a very bad idea because doing so introduces many fudge factors which will make it impossible to understand the product viability. 

As I have noted, do not pursue massive customer growth unless you are able to RETAIN customers. Why? You can spend all the money on marketing, and if you are unable to retain customers, once you stop paying those customers, they go. There is always the next app there!

Focus on what matters: make customers become FANS and that means loving your products because you offer value. Sure, you can spend money on initial launch to kickstart a business (physics supports that); it is one way of breaking customer inertia. But sustained paid-driven growth strategy will fail. 

Customer discovery and customer validation are critical phases in product development. There is a reason in that village that makes everyone want to buy palm wine from Mazi Nkwo. That market woman that sells food at the corner of the telephone mast in the market never takes food home because she finishes it. What is the secret? Empathy: seeing markets from the perspectives of your customers and creating products and services to fix their frictions.

In Oriendu Market in Ovim, I sold garri and yam for my grandmother. And in FUTO, I owned a magazine, FUTO Bubbles, and to this moment in our companies, I have this conclusion: if you cannot retain customers, you have no mission because customers are the best INVESTORS in business. So, I call you to stop chasing vanity metrics.

From Feb 6, I will be teaching new courses including “Navigating Growth phases” and “The NEP Framework – Discovering and Listening to Customers”. Come and co-learn with me at Tekedia Institute. 

Comment on Feed

Comment: Ndubuisi Prof in the phone app and online engagement space its called ‘paid user acquisition’ the opposite of which is known as ‘organic user acquisition’.
Generally in a pitch, VCs HATE to hear about a paid user acquisition strategy, and the moment it rears its ugly head they switch off.

You have released another article about how different new developments defined various decades in Nigeria…

I would say ‘paid user acquisition’ as a strategy had its day from roughly 1995-2005 globally – roughly the first decade of internet.

Now it seems more dated than a dial up modem, and exposes an entrepreneur as out of touch.

My Response:  paying for something does not mean transferring money. In my construct, it goes beyond “paid user acquisition’ . When you have an ecommerce website and you sell a shoe for $25 when it was bought for $30, that is the same thing even though you did not “pay” the buyer. In other words, here, mindless discounts are included. The model is always: pick that $5 tab and hope next time the customer can pay even $35. 

That paying can include contracts: move from Merchant A to B, and we will discount 30% of the first year. Those things can work when customers are not paying the full value and can take any average product. But check if they return when the full price is listed.

Comment 2: Cost of customer acquisition is on the rise globally
and will keep rising for the forseable future. Owned media should be the goal and customer retention strategies should be the ultimate skin in the game.

My Response: “Owned media should be the goal ” – I agree even though it takes time to develop it

Less than a year after terrorists attacked the Abuja-Kaduna bound train, killing and abducting scores of passengers, another train attack has taken place.

About 32 train passengers and staff of the Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC) were on Saturday, abducted by gunmen at the Igueben train sub-station in Edo State, in an attack confirmed by the Edo State Commissioner for Information and Orientation, Chris Nehikhare.

The Commissioner revealed during a media briefing on Sunday that efforts by a team of local vigilantes and the police resulted in the arrest of one the attackers, while one of the victims escaped.

“After 32 persons were kidnapped, the police, vigilante, and local hunters swung into action, combing the bushes around the vicinity. One of the kidnapped victims was able to escape.

“The Edo State Deputy Governor, Philip Shaibu, has visited the scene of the attack for on-the-spot assessment and was told that one of the suspects was arrested and he has been helping the police with investigation to arrest other fleeing members of the kidnapping gang.

“We congratulate the police and other security agencies for their swiftness in attending to the security brief. We appreciate the local hunters and members of the Edo State Security Network, as their collaboration assisted in this operation. This synergy led to the success recorded in a very short time,” he said in a statement.

Acknowledging the incident, the Edo State Police Command said on Sunday, in a statement signed by its spokesman, Chidi Nwabuzor, that the kidnappers were herdsmen armed with AK-47 rifles.

According to the police, the suspected herdsmen took their victims, including those who sustained bullet wounds, to the bush. But Nwabuzor assured that there is an ongoing rescue operation by the police that includes bush combing to arrest the attackers and rescue the victims.

“This is to inform the gentlemen of the press that on Saturday, 7th of January, 2023 at about 1600hrs, unspecified number of herdsmen armed with AK 47 rifles attacked the Tom Ikimi Train Station, at Igueben, Edo State, and kidnapped unspecified number of passengers, who were waiting to board the train to Warri.

“The kidnappers, who shot sporadically into the air before kidnapping some passengers, left some persons with bullet wounds. The Area Commander, Irrua, DPO Igueben Division, and men have visited the scene of crime with members of the Edo State Security Network, local vigilantes, and hunters with a view to protecting the lives and property of the remaining passengers,” the statement said.

The federal government, in its response to the kidnapping, described it as “despicable and utterly barbaric.”

Director, Press/Public Relations, Federal Ministry of Transportation, Henshaw Ogubike, reassured the public that the security agencies are making efforts to rescue the kidnapped train passengers.

“The government is saddened by this unpleasant development and assures its prompt response to the ugly situation. Further details will be communicated later,” he said.

However, while both the federal government and Edo State Police Command assure the public of unrelenting rescue efforts for the kidnapped passengers, the idea of using trains in the country is gradually getting diminished in the minds of many due to frequent terrorist attacks.

Nigeria has spent tens of billions of borrowed dollars on its rail project, hoping to begin to recoup the invested fund as soon as train transportation operation commences. However, the kickoff has been met by repeated gunmen attacks on train passengers, driving down the zeal of Nigerian commuters to choose the railway over road transport.

In March, an Abuja-Kaduna bound train was attacked by terrorists, who killed several passengers and kidnapped dozens of others, forcing the railway service to temporarily shut down operation. It took millions of naira in ransom payments, several months of negotiations between the government and the terrorists before all the abducted passengers were released.

Every decade, something unique happens in Nigeria. In the 1990s, it was the time for a New Banking Ordinance as new generation banks were formed at scale, from GTBank to Zenith Bank.

In the 2000s, we had the decade of voice telephony when MTN, Econet (Airtel), etc began operations.

In the 2010s, there was a massive ascension as Nigeria witnessed the mobile internet era when connectivity left the bounds of laptops and desktops, into our pockets via mobile device, agnostic of location, making every IP a point of sale.

In the 2020s, the application utility era is here – and we’re in a cambrian moment where young people are building codes baked on cloud computing infrastructure to fix frictions in markets, from financial services to logistics, and beyond. But that redesign has largely focused on big cities like Lagos, Kano and Onitsha. Until now. Yes,  it is going to change because Elon Musk, his generation’s finest innovator, is in town.  He is coming to Ovim, Pankshin, Opopo, etc  and other non-big cities in Nigeria. Yes, SpaceX Starlink is here and it will help markers, builders and innovators to not just serve the cities but the rural economy.

Join me and eminent faculty members of Tekedia Institute as we examine the implications in the next edition of Tekedia Mini-MBA which begins Feb 6, 2023.

As a dynamic business school which educates with the antennas of the market, Tekedia Mini-MBA will teach a new course on satellite broadband with a case study of SpaceX Starlink now that we have the product and the pricing model ($600 hardware, $43 monthly service).

Your business will change. Your career will change. Because satellites will unlock new vistas; join the next Tekedia Mini-MBA starting Feb 6