The Truth About African Entrepreneurship. Its terrible!
In 2013, a fresh graduate from one of Africans top 10 universities set off on a journey to build one of Africa’s great ventures. The company like many others at the time, built/designed people’s websites. But unlike their peers, they took advantage of Facebook’s poor algorithm to blast messages to hundreds of facebook groups to gather clients.
At the time, facebook had friendly algorithms that enabled anyone post in 500+ groups, attract huge audiences and queries and if lucky, get clients here and there.
As their clientele grew so did their flaws get exposed? The evil of teams in Africa came crawling and the trio parted ways, with one getting a job, another sobering into a life of network marketing as the other went on to start another venture. All their clientele disappeared in thin air.
A narrative has been told about the nature of Startups in the western developed world.
It’s a story of how entrepreneurs succeed usually. It goes like this: You make something for a big and growing market. You raise funds. You scale, shooting up like a hockey stick, and then you exit, a newly minted millionaire sauntering off into the sunset, into a new life of white sandy beaches and a never-ending supply of piña coladas. Tell such a story to an African startup founder and it will seem alien. Such rarely happens in Africa.
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I have scanned so many pages of the internet in search of real African founded ventures that have gone on to exit with nice stories, buyouts etc, to little or no success.
The African narrative is rather ironic. When you start a business here, you are discouraged, expected even, to fail soon. And true to the naysayers, the odds of success are usually so slim, one in 10,000, maybe one in 1,000 — that betting on it is one foolish gamble. Your motivations for starting a business as an African founder usually go beyond the success of the company to some rather intricate motivations.
African entrepreneurs that go on to run their Startups for 3 straight years are a rare species with some unusual passion. They hustle, fight on and dare to dream each day of a better life. A life not their own, but for the communities on whose challenges they are creating a solution.
Look at George Bakka(Uganda) of Patasente ltd, who is delivering credit solutions to small businesses or think of Ama Dadson who founded Akoobooks- Ghana’s first publisher and digital distributor of African audiobooks.
Many like these two are slowly creating a better future for Africa even in the midst of rough circumstances.
Stories of Silicon Valley founders who go on to raise millions of dollars from VC’s from just ideas are rather strange to African entrepreneurs.
The true reality for African entrepreneurs and founders is a painful struggle of bootstrapping your idea to a market entry before you ever smell any sign of investment.
Usually, if lucky, investments might come at a time you no longer need it.
In all honesty, African entrepreneurs are a rare bread of human. Let’s clap for them!
