Every founder dreams of building something that changes the world. It is one of the beauties of Africa’s disruptive story, and there is nothing wrong with having such dreams. The problem begins when “changing the world” becomes an excuse for failing to understand the people living next door.
I premise that one of the most common questions asked among Africa’s Web3 startup circles is, “How do we build globally?” This question may not provide the disruption we strive for. The better question should be, “Who do we understand deeply enough to build for?”
In our previous post, we highlighted seven conversations the Nigerian Web3 ecosystem must have, and in this post, we will be highlighting the need to build for local use. The idea here is that before products become global, they solve a problem for someone. That “someone” is rarely imaginary.
A few years of observing Nigeria’s Web3 ecosystem have led me to a simple conclusion. We have become very good at studying successful startups while surprisingly poor at studying people.
Assuming the Role of a Local Champion
Many founders can explain how Coinbase scaled, discuss Ethereum’s roadmap, know how Uniswap works, and have read about Stripe, Solana, and Base. Ask the same founder about the daily frustrations of a trader in Ariaria Market or a university student trying to verify academic credentials, and the conversation suddenly becomes much quieter.
That should concern us, because startups are built on observation long before they are built on code.
I sometimes wonder if we have mistaken access to global information for understanding local realities. The internet has made it possible to learn from Silicon Valley without leaving Nigeria, and that is a gift. But it seems to have also created an illusion that the best ideas are always somewhere else.
They are not.
Innovation usually requires paying attention to your locality. I have a personal philosophy that I call being a LOCAL CHAMPION. In essence, it holds a simple belief that innovation should begin with proximity.
Build Solution. Scale
The idea behind the article is not to bind every successful startup to a local market. It is to accelerate the belief that Web3 founders must deeply understand the people whose problems they are trying to solve.
Nigerian Web3 founders do not only have to build for Nigerians, as that would be unnecessarily limiting. Some of the most valuable Web3 infrastructure can and should serve global users. However, they must build for people they understand, not for people they have imagined.
I believe one of Nigeria’s greatest competitive advantages has nothing to do with cheap labour, resilient founders, or abundant talent. It is proximity to problems. Problems that Web3 founders can provide blockchain solutions to.
Nobody understands Nigerian realities better than Nigerians. Local founders are better suited to understand the daily inefficiencies of our markets, institutions, and communities and fix those market gaps using blockchain.
Why would we surrender that advantage by copying ideas designed for completely different environments? Scaling as a startup requires building solutions first, not the other way around. The technology should never be the destination but the tool.
The irony is that Nigerian founders don’t need to search far for meaningful problems. They surround them: the market beside your office, the transport system you complain about, the paperwork that delays businesses, the creator struggling to get paid across borders, the farmer trying to prove the origin of produce, and the startup looking to open itself to investors. These are opportunities waiting for someone patient enough to observe them.
Next in this series, we will discuss communities and why we have more thriving communities than products.
