Build the next billion dollar company in Nigeria, or get famous trying. documenting my startup journey as a startup founder living in Nigeria…..

Ignore my intro, haha. I started this blog, or dairy (or whatever I interchangeably call it), because I looked everywhere on the internet for startup dairies like the one I intend to write and couldn’t find any. Imagine Shola Akinlade (CEO of Paystack) or Iyinoluwa Aboyeji (ex-cofounder of Flutterwave) had a dairy or playbook where they documented their process. Maybe many young founders wouldn’t have made many of the mistakes they had made in the past, and who knows, their dairy could have just stopped someone from building something nobody wanted or inspired the next big thing from their story.

My name is simply Damii, and this is my startup journal.

Side note
I have actually journaled every week, to be fair, for the last 10 years, but sharing my stuff out here in public feels like a whole new level to expressing myself…I don’t want to bother about literary plots and arrangements like professional writers do because I am not, and I am going to keep this journal as human as possible. No AI paraphrasing, or anything else….Just me sharing my thoughts and experiences. hopefully with correct spellings and in a language everyone can understand.

In the Begining….
Before April 2023, I had transitioned across most roles in tech, from minor game automations, ethical hacking, frontend development, a bit of backend development, and product design. I eventually stuck to frontend development and product design because I am an aesthetics person and I loved to build stuff that the users interacted with in real time. I also paint (yes, I draw in real life), so it was easy for me to do design. Eventually, I got more and more involved in building and managing small projects for fun, and then larger ones came, and eventually I became obsessed with products. I got my first product role in early 2021 and another one in late 2021, and I joggled them side by side.

In 2023, a few weeks after Nigeria elected her new president, I was laid off from my job as a product manager in finance, and the other blockchain startup I worked with started to misbehave. I was devastated, but the period of not having anything to do gave me a lot of time to do some deep thinking about what I should do next with my life: do I get another job and keep changing jobs every few years?, or should I just go to medical school and become a doctor and Japa (a fancy way of saying relocating overseas in Nigeria)? or maybe I should just start a business…but I had no money. Even if I had, what business should I start? Maybe a tech company, I was tired of payments and I wanted to solve a real problem in an underserved sector…but where?

I faced a problem….
So I am typically a four eyed fellow (I wear glasses, haha). It’s nothing serious, but I cannot comfortably stay in bright light, especially under the sun, without special photochromic glasses.

One time I visited Akure for work, I had this habit of leaving Lagos when I had a large backlog of work to other calmer states that were cheaper, and I didn’t have to pay so much for electricity, transportation, and workspaces.

That fateful morning, I sat on my glasses , Omohh! (a fancy Nigerian exclamation). How was I going to work today? It was then that I was faced with the problem, if I ordered my glasses online on Jumia or from an Instagram vendor, it would take 3–5 days to reach me in Akure. Was I going to be half blind for 3 days until the delivery came? Hell no! I desperately used a tape to mend the hands of my broken eyeglasses and frantically dashed to the market to see if I could buy a new one, even if they would be more pricey, but at least I wouldn’t have to wait for 3–5 days.

Me: Madam do you have photochromic glasses?

Seller: wetin be photo wetin….nah this one i get(points to normal medicated and non medicated glasses she had, THAT WHERE NOT PHOTOCHROMIC.

It was then that it dawned on me. I couldn’t get what I wanted in the market, if i just knew an online vendor that sold these glasses in Akure…that was it! But I didn’t know any, and I couldn’t find any from a quick Instagram or Jiji search. It was 1 p.m., and the sun tortured me and eyes were wet and hurting .

Then i called my friend Triida,

Awfa, you know any anti blue ray glasses vendor for akure? He told me yes and shared with me the vendor’s WhatsApp contact. I quickly contacted her and was able to get my delivery the same day at the mall and even swap the glass frame (I couldn’t use the lenses) with my former one.

And then i realized….
Finding people who sold what you wanted to buy around your vicinity was big problem in Nigeria. That was the reason most people shopped for some materials online in the first place. If only they could conveniently find who sells what they are looking to buy around them, they wouldn’t have to wait a long time for their order to get to them, and there would be less of the “what I ordered is not what I got” problem because the vendor is conveniently just a taxi ride away for you to see the item before you pay for it.

I needed to fix it….
I pondered on this problem for months, observing online businesses and deciding if this problem was something I should dedicate my time to solving. I realized the more I looked at it, that it was larger than I thought. This problem directly affected retail prices and even the way vendors stock their shops outside of metro cities like Lagos.

Pondering about the story I just shared one evening in late September 2023, while waiting for my friend Soph to get out of the bathroom so we could decide what to order from Chowdeck, I was like, ‘F**k it!’. What happens to the food vendors that couldn’t be onboarded to Chowdeck or that unseen seller in Edo state who claims to live in Lagos to gain enough cred to sell online?.

I WAS GOING TO BUILD SNAPSHOP AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS.

Would be updating this thread as much as i can in the coming days as this happen.

Following

Finding the best place to build a Startup in Nigeria.

Lagos City, the Silicon Valley of Nigeria…overflowing with resources and talent. I always had the impression that this city was the best place for tech startups to build and thrive because it was brimming with talent and resources.
….that was before i started building my own startup.
Hi, it's me again, and this is week two of documenting my experiences building a startup in Nigeria as a broke tech founder.
The development of Nigeria's tech scene was very uneven, with many areas lacking a cohesive community or international recognition for an extended period of time. This has improved in the past few years, particularly since COVID has made remote work popular and allowed tech talent to work from anywhere. But the growth of emerging communities is still very slow, maybe because everyone with quality talent stays in Lagos or claims to…..
Getting started
In this blog, I will be sharing my experience so far building my startup from Lagos and other states in Nigeria. This blog is long, so it will be in two parts. Hopefully, I will help anyone who has read it make up their mind if it is worth building from Lagos or not.
Super Pumped
I remember waking up super-pumped on a Thursday morning, the weirdest day of the week, to feel like a CEO. A day before, I had just had a great epiphany about what could turn out to be a unicorn company… or not.. All the same, I was excited and wanted to get my hands dirty quickly! So I called my friend Sude and told him all about my plans. We agreed to meet at a coworking space in Yaba. We hadn't had any quality power supply in my house for almost 2 weeks, my inverter only lasts for 2hrs+. I wasn't going to let Nigeria kill my dreams, I aspired to maguire to myself as I ordered a bolt to my destination.
Took Action
I worked from there for the next two weeks, ideating and designing wireframes for SnapShop, and at the end of two weeks, I had already spent over 200 thousand naira…I was shocked. I had never spent such a large amount of money on workspaces in Lagos in such a short amount of time before. I tried other workspaces close by on the island, and I noticed I spent nothing less than N10,000 on transport, snacks, and co-working daily subscriptions. No matter how hard I tried, I was not so bothered…I knew I was going to spend money, but in such a short period of time, when I had not even finished ideating or had a prototype of what I intended to build, that was what bothered me! If I continued like this, my runway was going to finish early.
Saw shege
Hiring from Lagos was also a big hassle. Any seemingly quality talent claims to have worked with one big tech company, have a large following on social media, or have one big tech connection somewhere. I finally begged someone (with money) to do the high fidelity prototype for me. Unknown to me, that was just the beginning of my begging….i literaly begged this guy to do everything while giving him some money to keep him motivated. This circle continued for other "big boy developers" and designers I tried to onboard, they either did not know their job or were too busy to pay any attention to my small startup.
At the end of October i was frustrated, athough i got some volunteer offer from outside Lagos, i turned them down, " if they where so good, why weren't they in Lagos".
Learnt my lesson
Eventually, my initial budget for the runway was almost depleted, and I panicked. Even though I couldn't complete the product on that money, at least let me be able to make reasonable progress. Around that time, I was opportuned to work alongside my friend Tunji to source talent for an open source project, and it was then that I realized " super star techies aren't made in Lagos, they where nurtured by another emerging community" and decided to break off and become solely identified with Lagos or any other big ecosystem they hustled themselves into.
I also learned an important lesson. As a founder, no one would ever believe in your vision better than you. Never expect anyone to put in the same hours or grind the way you do for the vision in your head, only a few would get it in part. Hold those few tight, regardless of their work experience or skill, they always turn out to be assets.
I was also able to identify that talent is never good enough until it is challenged to do something worthwhile….enough of the advice…..I was still low on cash and i had a startup to build.