There are two ways to achieve unicorn (being a billion dollar startup) status in any sane clime.

It’s either you; create enough real value that makes you worth a billion US dollars, or you create perception value, where you look like the next big thing, you push out numbers and branding messages that make it look like you’re about to change the world (in this case Nigeria), and that anyone who doesn’t invest in you early is on the verge of becoming another Gary Vaynerchuck who missed out on an opportunity to be an early investor in Uber Technologies.

Think of a company like WeWork whose founder said WeWork wasn’t a real estate company, but a “State of Consciousness” (whatever that means), that had a fictitious valuation of 47 billion dollars, who stepped into wall street feeling all confident and wanting to cash out big (I imagine Mr Neumann already fantasizing the experience of a new gulf stream airliner), and had the old money boys at wall street look at their S-1 filings and go nah. Valuation crashed from 47 billion to you know where. Story for another day.

Where were we?

Ah yes Nigeria. In Nigeria that doesn’t work. The whole Silicon Valley model of building a startup that bleeds capital even when it’s worth a billion dollars upwards is unlikely to work in Nigeria.

To the best of my knowledge, we don’t have a Japanese guy who raised hundreds of billions of dollars from Saudi investors that gets excited every time he hears AI sitting in a nice air conditioned office in Victoria Island looking for who to sign million dollar investment checks to.

Let me put it this way. If you’re going to build a unicorn in Nigeria, it is unlikely you’ll get there being unprofitable.

To the best of my knowledge, Nigeria has two unicorns; Interswitch, which was founded in 2002 and still considers itself to be a startup 18 years after being founded. If you’re still trying to startup a car 18 years after buying it, it is safe to say you need to get a new car.

The second is Jumia who we call a Nigerian unicorn, but is really more German owned that Nigerian owned, that found its way to wall street, but got thrown back over the wall.

We need more Nigerian unicorns who will build the future of this country, and I believe this piece should be an eye opener for those building startups in various spaces to take advantage of.

Let’s begin.

Building a Unicorn 101

What is a unicorn? I’ve defined this before, but I’m going to do it again. A unicorn is a billion dollar STARTUP, Not just a billion dollar company. So the Dangote group is not a unicorn, even though it is valued at more than a billion dollars. Glo mobile and all the other companies in Adenuga’s portfolio are not unicorns, even though some of them are valued at well over a billion dollars. Our banks; Gtb, Zenith and the likes are not unicorns, even though some are valued at over a billion dollars.

A unicorn is a billion dollar STARTUP, a new company trying to solve a problem, and create value in what could be in most cases a new niche.

How to Build a Unicorn in Nigeria

Step 1: Understand your market

If you’ve read any of my previous works, you’ll know that I always talk about understanding your market.

I do this for two major reasons; one is that it is a key step in succeeding in any clime, having a good understanding of the culture of any environment, and how the people there think is a very important step in building products that scale massively in that environment. Think about how the Lebanese and Indians have held a grip on some industries in Nigeria because they have a better understanding of the market dynamics than the so-called indigenes (omo-niile) of that environment. The second reason I talk about understanding your market is because I am a design strategist, it’s part of our craft, it’s just something we have to do. Don’t ask me why.

If you copy a model that worked elsewhere and try to replicate it in Nigeria, chances are it may not work. When I talk about copying and pasting models, the first thing that comes to mind is usually Silicon Valley, but it isn’t just Silicon Valley, it’s everywhere.

So, someone asked; why haven’t we been able to build our own kind of Mpesa in Nigeria? So, we consulted our modern-day oracle in this day and time. We asked Google.

With the kind of technology we have today, you don’t really need juju to be a witch doctor. The white calabash they shake to show you people in real time could be Skype, those trinkets they shake to use to inquire of their oracles could be Google, and the part where they show you something your great grandfather did many years ago could be YouTube, But I digress.

From Google, I realized that the financial infrastructure on ground in Kenya at the time of founding Mpesa played to their advantage, and made Mpesa a no-brainer to adopt. Present day Nigeria has better financial infrastructure than what they had then, so trying to use the approach they used will likely not birth the same results.

Let’s look at Tesla.

So today Tesla is a 400 billion dollar business that was founded in 2003. Americans in general, to a large extent care about climate change, Nigerians? Not so much. An acquaintance was pitching an idea that revolved around biodegradable plastic bags to me this past week, and I told him the whole biodegradable idea isn’t a core selling point, some may, but a good number of people will not care.

If Elon had come to Nigeria in say 2004 to start Tesla, I don’t think I’d be wrong to say he’d probably be a cashier at Zenith bank by now.

The better you understand the Nigerian market, the better your chances of building a unicorn.

A unicorn that isn’t based on a lofty valuation should have at least $100 million in ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) to be considered as unicorn material. I saw your heartbeat jump there when I wrote $100 million, don’t fear, the people that have done it in the past may have been white, but like Nigerian parents say, they don’t have two heads.

Let’s begin.

How to build a Unicorn

There are two major steps to building a unicorn in Nigeria;

Step 1: Sell Air

If you take a good look at the biggest companies in Nigeria today, most of them have one thing in common; they sell air. Not literally, but theoretically. Their products are essential products that are important to everyday living.

Shelter, food, telecommunications, banking services, and the likes are not nice to haves, they’re essential. Without housing, you live under the bridge, so you need cement. Without food, you could die of hunger, so you need sugar, flour and salt. Without telecommunications, how do you talk to people in faraway places, or even conduct business, so you need MTN, Glo and the likes, without petrol/energy, Nigerian mosquitoes will use you to do brown skin girl, and without banking services, do I really need to say anything?.

Essentialism is the keyword if you intend to unlock any meaningful value in the Nigerian market.

The Nigerian market comprises of 200 million people, what they don’t tell you is that those 200 million people won’t buy your $1000 product because they either can’t afford it, it doesn’t come across to them as being that necessary, or a mixture of both.

Netflix is a nice product, but mama in the market will not spend #4500 every month to pay for subscription when with #200 she can buy the pirated version of the movie with 7 other movies in one CD (I do not in any way support pirated movies, and the likes, but this is a reality on ground that you simply can’t ignore).

With #2100 she can pay for Gotv and watch all the African Magic she wants from the comfort of her couch without having to do any kind of complex setup to get her phone to display on her TV (you know mama isn’t tech savvy), or paying for data to stream movies she can already watch without any other added cost with her Gotv subscription.

But sometimes mama buys gala and coke in the market, if not for herself, but for her grand kids. mama also buys recharge cards to call her children in the city, and she pays for transportation to move her goods from the farm to the city for her to sell. Even though the trailers that carry those goods look so worn out that I am still wondering how the driver can conveniently take it from point A to B without it breaking down and forever refusing to start, mama still pays for it, as long as it gets her farm produce safely to the city. How it moves from A to B, and whether it pumps smoke like it is about to explode is none of her business, But I digress.

Now I can already imagine you saying; mama is not my target market, but that’s the point, if you want to build a billion dollar business in Nigeria, mama (or people like her) have to be in your market.

Your market is the tech savvy millennial who has a smartphone, pays for airtime from his/her bank accounts, uses TikTok and Instagram actively and streams Netflix day in, day out. But that’s the point, if that’s your target market, you’re already operating in a niche market, and you can’t build a billion dollar startup, or really any billion dollar business in Nigeria operating a niche market.

The millennial’s above may be able to afford to pay say #2000 monthly to use your product or service, but the size of your niche may limit that monthly #2000 to less than a million people (that is if you even cross a hundred thousand users).

You need to be realistic. The bigger your addressable market, the better your chances of getting a billion dollar valuation. You need to sell air.

Think about this; The Rolls-Royce is a premium exotic car manufacturer. They sell cars that push their addressable market to those in the top 1%, or even top 0.1%.

A Rolls-Royce may retail for $250,000, and that looks like a lot of money, what they don’t tell you is that they’re not going to sell as many cars as the guys at Toyota selling Corolla’s for $30,000.

In the end Toyota has a larger addressable market, they go home with $206 million per annum, and are valued at $236 billion. Whereas the Rolls-Royce serves a niche market, goes home with less than that per annum, owes $1.7 billion and are valued at $8 billion. When you go to the dealership, it looks like The Rolls-Royce is winning, in reality; Toyota is really the one winning.

The Nigerian market is an essential market. If you want to build a billion dollar business, stop selling niche products, learn to sell air.

Step 2: Sell to the Big Boys

The average Nigerian can’t afford many things. Most people you see using iPhones bought them second hand, most cars you see on the road are second hand, and most people build their houses themselves (not by literally putting the blocks together). If you really want to make money in the Nigerian market, You need to sell to the big boys, you need to sell B2B.

B2B is an Acronym that means business to business. In other words, B2B is a model where a business’ product is sold to other businesses. In this model, enterprise is the game, the product you sell is used primarily by businesses, rather than everyday Jack’s on the street.

If Innoson Motors wasn’t in the B2B space, I have strong reasons to believe they would have shut down by now. You may have a product of immense value in the Nigerian space, but the fact that people can’t afford it, not because it’s overpriced, but because you really can’t sell it any lesser if you intend to make a profit is the Achilles heel of many businesses today and the reason Nigerian markets are filled with substandard goods.

If the everyday user can’t afford it, design a product that can be used by corporations.

There are two major reasons selling to corporations is ideal; first is they can afford to pay for your service, and two is that churn rates are usually lower with corporations.

Let me put it this way; if I get tired of an app on my phone, all I need to do is hold down on the app, click uninstall, and I’m done. If a corporation is tired of your product or service, off boarding you may be difficult; going through the stress of looking for a new provider and migrating their data to a new provider may not be worth it, especially if you’re not making too many mistakes (this isn’t a license to misbehave, but I trust your good judgment).

Corporations and governments can afford to pay you millions for your product and/or service, whereas the everyday user is limited to maybe a couple of thousands.

If you really want to build a billion dollar startup in Nigeria, you need to learn to sell to the big boys.

The Sweet Spot

In high school math, I was taught how to draw Venn diagrams. There’s a big circle at one end, another big circle at another end, and there’s an intersection point where the two circles meet.

At one end is selling air, at the other end is selling to the big boys, the sweet spot is when you begin to sell air to the big boys. This is what the biggest businesses in Nigeria do.

If you run a bakery, your air is flour, and since selling to a bakery is B2B, when Dangote flour sells to you, they’re essentially selling air to the big boys, and since you’re a bakery (depending on your production capacity), chances are, you’re buying around 200 bags of flour or even more in a month. Not many individuals are buying even 3 bags of flour in a month, talk less of 200 bags. That’s selling air to the big boys.

Axa Mansard is an insurance company. Not many individuals have comprehensive health insurance in Nigeria, but since most big companies make it mandatory for their employees to have health insurance of some kind, companies sign up with Mansard to get their employees comprehensive health insurance. The company needs it, and Mansard gets to sell that service in bulk rather than on a person to person basis. What Mansard is really doing is selling air to the big boys.

Be like Mansard, sell air to the big boys.

Someone may point out Transsion Holdings (parent company of Tecno, Infinix and Itel) isn’t doing any of these, and I would like to say that first of all, Nigeria isn’t Transsion’s only market, but that being said, telecommunications plays a massive role in a normal Nigerians life today. Even the old mama’s In the villages today have mobile phones.

Connectivity is important to both the old mama in the village, and the AirPod wearing youth on the street, albeit at different levels.

You may not know, but Transsion does have a large share of the feature phone market (aka torch light phone market) at 54%, so they’re also selling air. They may not be selling to the big boys, but I never said you must do all three, just pick one and execute on it as best as you can.

Conclusion

Building a unicorn is fantasized as the dream of a majority of startup founders, especially in Nigeria, but dreaming alone isn’t enough to get that unicorn off the ground, you need to be strategic, especially if you operate in the Nigerian market to be able to sell air, sell to the big boys, and if you’re strategic enough, sell air to the big boys.

PS1: If you’re selling air through a digital product, make sure your product can be accessed through USSD codes. Not everyone has access to a smartphone, and not everyone wants to download a new app. I think we’re already having app fatigue.

PS2: If I mentioned your organizations name in this post and you feel offended, I apologize, it is majorly just for humor sake, I’m a funny guy, and that’s just the way I write.

PS3: Honestly, I believe that Nigerian entrepreneurs shouldn’t necessarily focus on building unicorns, but building products that add immense value to the life of Nigerians, and Africa as a whole. Think of companies like Andela, Flutterwave and even Utiva, they’ve added a lot of value to the lives of Nigerians and Africans as a whole, and they’re not even unicorns.

I believe the effort made by the agency to provide the details contained in this proposal deserves more than the overwhelming emotion-based comments I have read in the comment section.

The overarching concerns expressed by the agency center around a lack of control over its statutory responsibilities. They include but not limited to:

1. Lack of visibility of activities of non-immigrants with the affected visa categories
2. Abuse of the trust by DSOs and some university owners
3. Number of the affected visa categories who are likely to overstay
4. Threats to US national security

I will address these concerns by providing points that the agency should contemplate. Because I do not have verifiable data, I will rather raise questions that the agency may have enough data to answer.

To the first point that the agency lacks the visibility of activities of non-immigrants with the affected visa categories. I am not sure how a fixed duration of stay provides better visibility. I believe a student that will err does not need more than their fixed term to err unless the agency thinks it is a lesser risk to have an erring student spend only 2 or 4 years than granted an extended time to do those things that the agency is hoping to curb. Why does the agency need to have an application for an extension before it can vet any non-immigrant for compliance? I do not think it is too much to ask that intending visitors to the US give up some of their privacy rights. They are non-American citizens and should not expect the same immunity that Americans enjoy from the constitution of their country.

This measure removes the need to hope that every visitor will, in good faith, keep to the rules of engagement through the duration of their stay. The agency should also randomly select non-immigrants residents of over one year, two years, three years for vetting. The sample size should increase with the number of years they have spent. The vetting once agreed to upfront does not have to involve the subject of an investigation to avoid any psychological burden. Effective vetting could be achieved through cooperation among intergovernmental agencies. The IRS, Social Security Administration, Department of Public Safety, Financial Institutions can deliver a holistic view of the activities of any subject of investigation. Overall, fix the system, not punish the people for the inefficiency of the system. Estonia will be a poster child of how leveraging technology could help the agency fix the problems associated with visibility.

Abuse of trust by DSOs and some university owners is a problem that can be fixed with better accountability. A lot can go wrong in any system shrouded in secrecy. Perhaps an inter-higher eds accountability could help here. For example, include a requirement that all DSOs identifies in their process an approving authority outside their institution. It could be a DSO from another institution with similar consequences for both the DSOs and their institutions in case of an exposed fraud. Fix the system, do not punish the good ones while attempting to punish the evil ones. Financial controls in government can provide a good model for proofing the current process without adding any more burden on the students.

As regards the number of overstays, I am surprised the agency could track overstay but has no effective measure to limit or eliminate it. Again, an upfront agreement to being vetted as a non-immigrant resident allows the agency to collect information about anyone suspected to be elongating their stays unnecessarily. This measure also justifies the idea that the fraction of those randomly selected for vetting should increase with the number of years spent in the country. Also, does the agency consider the problem with using the percentage of overstay to determine countries that should have stricter restrictions? Accepting Chinese students at 2% overstay versus Burundi students at 50% is like accepting hundreds of thousand erring ones over a few hundred. The numbers do not add up.

A visitor who poses a threat to US national security does not necessarily need more than whatever fixed duration of their admission. The one who starts a process does not have to complete it. Hence, as long as visas are issued at all, limiting the duration of stay should not have a significant impact on the pre-meditated surreptitious activities of individuals or organizations. Increasing intelligence is the only way to keep a country safe. America is so big and diverse in its population that the threats from a foreigner could not outweigh those from its citizens and legitimate residents. Also, the need to single out specific countries is always a pointer to a weakness in the system the agency seeks to failure-proof. There are enough evil-inclined humans in every country on earth. Likewise, those who recruit people for their evil agenda can do so anywhere.

Overall, many variables can help the agency improve its proposal. A breakdown of the visa applicants by education level could show where the system needs attention. For instance, what is the fraction of erring Ph.D. students within the affected visa categories? What is the benefit-cost ratio of an umbrella policy that affects all Ph.D. prospects given the value yield of the upright ones versus the damage from the erring ones? Does nationality matter across all the levels of education? Are there other factors beyond nationality like country of residence of a visa applicant irrespective of their nationalities? Does the academic qualification with which a candidate received admission to the program for which they seek visas have any significance on their behaviour in the US? What about financial metrics? The agency should contemplate these questions at each level of education.

No, today isn’t Mother’s Day. Why then should I be writing an article about my mother and think it would be published, I asked myself. Well, everyday should be mothers’ day because it’s a privilege to have them around after the toils of raising us. If your mom has departed, accept my sincere condolence. This piece is intended to make us honor our mothers more. Few days ago, my siblings and I celebrated her birthday for the first time in her life. I hope the paragraphs that follow will give you a reason if you don’t value your mother. Besides, it’s recorded in Ephesians 6:1-2:

“Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.”

In my previous job, my story was like that of Daniel in the Bible. During the onboarding, by God’s favor, I was singled out as the best amongst my peers. I actually asked God for this, and my Mom always says “We shall be the head and not the tail”. I was elevated to work in the head office instead of the role I applied for.

With this my troubles began. The first was with my direct line manager who didn’t want to work with me. As his request for my removal was declined he stopped engaging me in favor of a female colleague he liked. So, I told my Mom about it and when she prayed he was removed and posted to another country.

A new line manager was brought in from the U.S. and I had favor with her. Now the number of my adversaries increased with fierce attacks. Some of you know what I am talking about working in a large firm with different cultures. I always returned from work unhappy and dreaded going to work in the morning. This adversely affected my mental health.

One Friday we were having a very important training session facilitated by the International Training Department of the company when one of the managers who had been my tormentor-in-chief called my boss (also his boss) to his office. Till today I don’t know what he said to her. She sent another manager to inform me to resume in one of the stores on Monday and remain there. I was heartbroken and humiliated.

Again I told my Mom about it and she prayed. Less than an hour after I resumed in the store, I got a call from my boss asking me where I was and that I should return to the head office. But these people didn’t quit tormenting me. They drove me to the point of depression. As I was stepping out for work one morning, my Mom asked me for the names of my troublers and I gave her three names.

After coordinating a scheduled meeting that same morning, my boss asked two other colleagues and I to wait for her, but strangely, they left. She was the acting MD and her words were strictly obeyed and just less than two minutes after they left, she came in and hurried me to the conference room for another meeting. Sited, she asked me what I wanted. I could not give an answer. In the next two hours she showed me the elaborate plan of the company and my role in it. Then she delegated her complete authority to me.

Henceforth, all store managers were to report to me; all head office managers were to go through me to get to the stores. I should cease requesting for vehicles instead I should use her car for my field work. I should plan my weekly schedule and budget and submit to her. I was to handle every issue from the stores and no one was to come directly to her except through me. I should only come to her on things I can’t solve. I was provided with an assistant. Whoever was not going to do as I said would be sacked and a memo was sent ratifying this decision.

When I got home my Mom asked if something happened in the office. I had missed calls from her during the day. Then I told her all that happened. She said she didn’t go to the market that day that she used the names of my enemies to pray for hours. And the icing on the cake, my tormentor-in-chief was disgraced few days later for sexual assault on one of the expatriate female staff. After being wrestled to the ground he was hauled out by a guard.

I needed to share this to emphasize the value of all mothers, not just mine. You need to honor your mom so that when she prays for you two things will happen: your enemies will be disgraced, and you will be vindicated and promoted.