Three Promising Business Areas Now In Nigeria

Few days ago, I posted an update on LinkedIn on pricing asymmetry and competition:

The age of internet reduces price asymmetry. Internet creates abundance, helping users, but punishes suppliers. Kayak provides airline prices before you – human travel agents gone. In consumer electronics, scale becomes key. Pebble failed. Jawbone failed despite raising nearly $1B.

Increasingly, the key product feature is People because that delivers network effect. For all the innovations in Facebook, its best feature is that it has human bodies, a lot. SnapChat may fail. With stock price below IPO’s, it has to add humans faster.

Entrepreneurs – if your business depends on network effect, please the best feature you can have is adding people. You must have a dedicated person for that. Besides Mark Zuckerberg, the most important person that made Facebook successful was Chamath Palihapitiya, who told him that People are the best products on FB.

For all that they tell you about the web: It is easy to launch a business now; I tell you that it is even harder to have one succeed. You compete locally and internationally, and everyone knows the best product. 

A user had this great comment below it:

1. Scenario planning – a strategy competence that demands ‘predicting’ what scenarios may play out in the near future so a firm can develop alternate strategies. E.g. pre-Ghana election last year I worked on 2 scenarios (norm is at least 3) for the oil & gas downstream per possible election outcome & it was 95% accurate hence a solid strategy for 2017. Businesses in view of this law need to project ie develop scenarios, ask implications and strategise accordingly.

2. Future-proof capabilities – get clarity on current capabilities through diagnostic insights and realign per futures seen in no.1 above. Yesterday’s strengths e.g. This Day strengths may be useless next to Facebook’s domination

Based on this, I will like to map what I think will be potential ideas for business in Nigeria in the next coming months, before the 2019 election. As I have noted, I like to track what government does as that helps to drive strategy.

Promising Business Areas in Nigeria

The following are areas, owing to the the soon coming election, that I do think will be rewarding to those that build capabilities in them.

• Data collection, advocacy and mobilization: As election cycle begins, data collection, political advocacy and citizenship mobilization will become a critical opportunity within Nigeria.There will be many groups coming up to support and campaign for candidates. Now is the time to build the structures to help you play and be hired by politicians and those supporting them. From collecting data of voters to making sense of them, the moment is here.
• Political consulting and document creation: There are many politicians who will need political consultants to develop their manifestos and other documents which they  will need to compete. From websites to campaign flyers, they need contents. Now is the time to develop capabilities and prepare for the moments. You can build a good website as sample which can be shown to these potential clients.
• Youth/Farming Training: Many politicians in power, in coming months, will start doing empowerment programs. The primary goal for most is to be visible to the citizens as they need to get votes from the constituencies. With high unemployment in the country, one way they play this is to offer training and empowerment programs to youth. Parents like it when their children are getting such opportunities and anyone that offers same will be viewed as helpful. The way to play this is to package training programs which can be delivered at scale because the politicians want to be seen delivering scale. You need to give them huge numbers of people you can train to have a chance. What you train must be locally relevant. This training can also include farming related empowerment and training. Most voters are farmers and politicians like to talk about it a lot.

Rounding Up

The economic activity will pick up in Nigeria from October as politicians pump more money in the economy to stimulate it. APC, the ruling political party, will like to have some good moments as they return to voters. Many opportunities will open, in many areas. A good entrepreneur must open his or her searchlights to take advantages of the opportunities. It could be seasonable but it could be lucrative, relatively, depending on the people you are working with.

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