I went to Nigeria and saw the future of consumer technology

Computer Village in Ikeja, Lagos, Nigeria (www.nairaland.com)

Mobile consumer technology boasts some of the most ferocious competition in business. Technologists aspire to build the next mobile app to steal attention away from the large, established players. These “innovations” are commonly only small improvements that appeal to a niche audience.

Recently I’ve questioned whether the tech industry should continue to spend majority of their time on the saturated US smartphone market, or if more value could be unlocked by building consumer tech products for other markets with less competition.

I’m not the only person who has been thinking about this.

A few months ago I invested in the team (Max Goldstein and Cameron Morris) at Gol Labs who has been working on this exact problem. (I’ll write up more about the investment later). Gol Labs’ first product, GolChat, is an intriguing group messaging app for football (soccer) fans in the developing world.

More specifically, they aren’t interested in acquiring US-based users. They’re fully focused on the continent of Africa instead. While this seems counterintuitive, there are four things you have to understand before you pass judgement.

1. There are a lot of people in Africa and it’s population growth is accelerating. Currently, 1.2B humans live on the continent, but that number will double by 2050. Nigeria, widely considered the heart of commercial Africa, will add more humans to the global population over the next 40 years than any other country. By the end of that time period, there will be more Nigerians on Earth than Americans. This isn’t a pipe dream, these trends are already at play.
2. Africa’s connectivity issues will erode in the near future and internet penetration will drastically accelerate. Only 9.4% of Africans are currently connected to the internet, with Nigeria having 28% of those users within it’s borders. One out of every two Nigerians have access to the internet. These numbers are quickly accelerating as the connectivity infrastructure improves through efforts by local governments, telecoms and major software companies in the US (Google, Facebook, etc). Already, in Ikeja, Lagos, Nigeria there is a two block radius named “Computer Village” that boasts over 20,000 stores and 5 million mobile devices. The biggest cellphone market, in the biggest city in Africa that’s in the continent’s largest economy is empty of technologist trying to figure out where all this is going.
3. You have to be one of the three most opened apps on someone’s phone to win in consumer tech. The metrics for success are time and attention. Without these, you struggle with retention, revenue and sustainability. In Africa, Facebook and WhatsApp have largely won the first and second rankings for the current internet users, but there is no clear winner for the final position. For the users who aren’t yet connected, all three positions are unclaimed. If a new product was to seriously compete for this opportunity, it needs to tap into the cultural (and technical) nuances of the continent, while presenting a differentiated product.
4. Football fans are the most engaged, passionate people across the globe. In Africa, two of the most important cultural focuses are football and music. The identity of a human is tied to the location of their birth, the tribe they belong to and the football team they cheer for. Many of these fans have never watched their teams play in person, but spend countless hours debating with friends and family. In Nigeria alone, there are 1M+ community viewing centers where fans come together to watch games in large groups. Think of the wildest sports experience you’ve ever experienced— a random Tuesday night football game in an African viewing center is probably 10x better.

When you take a step back and look at the macro trends, I’d argue that there is more upside potential at this point in building consumer technology for the continent of Africa, compared to North America or Europe. This is not to say that it will be easy. Instead, it will be one of the hardest things ever accomplished in consumer tech.

As the great Wayne Gretzky famously said, “Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been” because taking on the hard challenges is almost always worth it.

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