As entrepreneurs, the people building some of the most popular Nigerian Internet businesses, may be getting their inspirations from the wrong places. They may be inspired by what they see on the news and what they read on business magazines and blogs. What they tend to not realize is, media mostly only feeds us with the glamorous sides of the startup companies. There are the hard times of building this startups that you may never hear about.

If you have been in the Internet/startup business for quite a while, you probably must have seen companies come, make it big and disappear. Trust me this has a lot to do with the DNA of such companies. It is what separates the Groupons (heavy inventory, huge sales staff, lots of marketing dollars) from the Googles (technology focused, free word of mouth marketing, simple lines of codes worth billions) type companies.

Top Angel investors say there are mainly 2 ways to build a $100 million company, so what are the Nigerian Internet businesses doing?

You can either build a product that grows virally, or one with very high customer life-time value. So before you commit dollars to paid customer leads, make sure you are not over spending on a market that will peak (small number of potential customers) before you get your investors all of their advertising dollars back.

The bad thing with spending a boatload of money to acquire business is that, a smarter and smally copetitor can come up with a better technology and get those same customers you have paid lots of money for, for free. Look at NNairaland, it has more users and pageviews and probably more profits than most these sites and it's mostly word-of-mouth advertisement, social discovery and search engine traffic that keeps this forum growing beyond 1 million users.

If you want to acquire customers for an Internet startup business that you want to be around the corner in the next five years, find naturally viral means of growth or the least possible cost available.

I don't want to point fingers at these Internet businesses on this forum, but on my blog I discussed a bit more about there markets, what they are offering and when you should expect such companies to disappear. You can continue reading here http://naijastartups..com/2013/04/nigerian-startups-advertising.html