Friday, July 22, 2016

Always be experimenting. Always be measuring. Always be iterating.

Yesterday, I had a very long and detailed discussion with Chijioke (who does business and strategy for Tiketmobile) as regards Tiketmobile business; and it was really mind blowing. We started by watching the video below of Austin Ligon at Yale school of management, talking about how he co-founded and built CarMax. This helped put our discussion in the right context.


After which we revisited the assumptions which drives the current execution of Tiketmobile and reassessed the addressable market size (which we've chosen as the most important factor to base decisions on). Then we took a holistic view of the general addressable market of internet businesses in Nigeria. We looked at and tried to figure-out the highest possible valuations of some of the most notable tech start-ups around, while analysing why the really big guys (like Naspers) close their operations too often.

A very repeated sentiment, which both of us agreed to, is that the addressable market for consumer tech isn't large enough for extremely big things to be built and monetised locally (alluding to @asemota's post that tech in Africa is luxury). This is almost true for anything but FinTech.

Because what I'm really interested in succeeding at is consumer tech, all this time I kept asking "mehn, does this mean that I should leave this market and move to a place where what we build will be useful to a large number of people almost immediately?" I'm still considering this question.

However, our discussion led us to lots of different ideas being activated in our heads. We eventually settled on what direction we'll drive Tiketmobile to and the market we'll try explore next. This whole thing has become one very big experiment and I personally look forward to it.

In August, Chijioke will be off to Yale for his MBA.

P.S: Today is Chima, my baby brother's 25th birthday. Officially, all my mum's kids are 25 and above.

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