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I want you to ponder on this: Aliko Dangote is worth about $19.2 billion. He is up by  $1.44 billion since Jan 2021 in this year of the super-rich. Then the big one, according to Bloomberg: Dangote  holds $3.48 billion in cash!

In the Igbo Nation, my best Igbo author, Tony Ubesie, in Isi Akwu Dara N’ala will call it the tree which produces money as the leaves. If you read that novel, he described Chike as the man who controlled industries. Yes, big trees which produced money as the leaves. Ada, his wife, had messed up in the heat of the Biafra War, but Chike was back.

(Ubesie was a great novelist but many would not know because he wrote in Igbo and died young at 44 with limited works. His Ukwa ruo oge ya o daa was quintessential. In Okike, which Chinua Achebe edited, Ubesie and FC Ogbalu, brought the significance of analogy in Igbo literature. Holding a piece of Okike while in FUTO as an undergraduate engineering student was like understanding Igbo literature before Pita Nwanna wrote Omenuko. The great ones have gone indeed!)

People, Dangote Cement is a tree which is producing money as the leaves. If not, how can a man have $3.48 billion  in cash in Nigeria? This is a real financial anointing! You can get a part of it by reading my book on him. You need to plant a new type of tree and the leaves will produce cash.

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It has to be viable for it to have any chance in the market. And how minimum you keep it before you bring the product-hypothesis for the market to validate is ideally the first important decision you are making as an entrepreneur. Why? The MVP (minimum viable product), if not viable, will fail!!! So, the validity threshold is a big call.

Every business idea there is largely valid but not every idea is viable. And that others are already executing that idea must not mean that no opportunity exists therein.

Here is the deal: there are many routes to travel from Lagos to Abuja. Each of those routes will offer different things on time of travel, safety, cost, etc. Simply, you can attack an existing problem with new ideas, and if you do well, your moment has arrived.

You got a business idea? Great – but is it viable?

Comment on LinkedIn Feed

Comment 1: Interesting! Thanks for sharing Sir.

This is similar to what I wrote on my wall earlier in the week about what characterizes Startups. They don’t necessarily have to create something new, they can work on existing business model and create innovative ways to adapt it to suit market problem (s)

Rather than trying to benchmark the big or successful businesses, they can carry out research on what is working in the market, if there are loopholes, fill them with your solution(s), or create cross related services within same market since the existing model already works.

This will help maximize the company’s chances for Success. A typical example is Twitter, without Jack Dawson creativity and problem-solving skills Twitter would never have been born. There is need for quick and reversible decision-making skills, comfort with failure because failure can be a useful learning experience and it’s important to have people on board with you who thinks in similar way.

Comment #2: “They don’t necessarily have to create something new, they can work on existing business model and CREATE innovative ways to adapt it to suit market problem (s)”.

If the assumption here is that modifying an existing technology or business model doesn’t equate to something new, then it’s a bit misleading. This is why you often see people dissing at multi-billion dollar companies because the said companies are modified versions of something else and hence not “original”.

The process of modifying or altering an existing business model or technology also begins with an idea and that idea has to be viable in relation to it’s mission and vision because once you alter something, it’s no longer what it used to be and as such, you have created something entirely new, albeit based on an existing framework. Copycats just as much as originals, fail all the time. It doesn’t really matter. So, copying and modified something that already works doesn’t necessarily increase or decrease your chances of success.

Nevertheless, I get that the point he’s making is that ideation is originality agnostic which I concur with.

Comment #3: Personally, I think there’s a better way to approach innovation than conventionally looking for ideas or viable ideas.

Startup founders, by convention, often seek out ideas first and then spend millions later to define the mission, not that there’s anything wrong with it, but I think the opposite should be the case. This way, you will need less luck because innovation will be influenced by the character of the mission rather than the probability that you will find a viable idea. Hunting for ideas should be for the purpose of expanding perspective on the mission. Missions, although robust, are still concrete, but ideas are versatile.

Instead of hurtling through space-time in search of viable ideas, innovators can just establish a mission and seek out ideas within the boundaries of that mission. Say, “I want to end world hunger, what goes?” A mission may have a lot of width and depth, but your chances of finding viable ideas within a defined mission is better than just hurtling through the boundlessness of reality in search of ideas that are viable. By the time you’re done solving the math within a defined mission, a lot of things will be very clear to you.

What do you think?

My Response #3: “Instead of hurtling through space-time in search of viable ideas, innovators can just establish a mission and seek out ideas within the boundaries of that mission. ” – I think you may be referring to that wasteful venture of assembling people together in a hub and tasking them to come up with a business idea to pursue. They call it Innovation Hub or whatever. I do not believe in that.