We must learn the truth about which elements of our strategy are working to realize our vision and which are just crazy. What do customers really want?
Not what they say they want Never go to focus groups to learn what customers want because they dont know what they want. You must find what they need through series of business scientific approaches.
The path we walk through trying to know what they need is validating learning. It must be scientific, and not based on only assumptions. Yeah, assumptions are needed, but we must validate them. Validated learning is the process of demonstrating empirically that a team has discovered valuable truths about a startup's present and future business prospects. It is more concrete, more accurate, and faster than market forecasting or classical business planning.
Guys, this is the initial job of the founding team. And you do this by starting small. Do not just rush to start coding. This is the mistake many make. And this is where programmers get it wrong. They work and they get tired. And they produce absolutely zero. They work hard, and achieved zero.
Are you aspiring to be a programmer? Or are you a programmer reading this? It will do you do to listen and change.
Kindly ignore the above guys. Please, let me use one them as a typical example here. One of them created an African forum for programmers. Come on! Will that really sell? And the other...let me not say anything. But funny, they are both kids. And they are bold to send direct insults. I laugh at Nigerian struggling programmers. They are struggling cos they are stubborn. Lol. Or course, if I am wrong, I won't get their attention. Those two guys up there are pained. And many of them are still coming out. If you are new as a programmer and you want to be successful, you dont need these kind of negative boys. Trust me when I say so. Please, let's ignore them all. They will come and talk, but let's ignore them. They are frustrated, but I will still teach them by the grace of God.
Remember that you need to even know who not to work with.
You write well, so funny, go linkedin to start a writing career
PeaceJoyLove: Resouces are scarce Nigeria is borrowing to do what she should have done 20 to 30 years ago. And funny, the money to do it was there, but looted 30 years ago. Now, we are borrowing, and still looting most. The truth is that we se still going to pay for these debts. However, these leaders who created these problems will be gone. Buhari has max of 10 years to live the way I see it. Is it this man borrowing recklessly who is going to pay the debts plus interests? Of course not.
So, I don't understand it when programmers demand outrageously. Well, I dont blame them because they see today and not tomorrow. It is why many of them aren't progressive. They are stagnant.
I am so glad women are taking up programming, and it will soon change. Men believe it is their world, but they haven't done enough in Nigeria. We will see more innovations as more girls move into this area. Yeah, I support programs targeted at only females. It is a nice idea. I even want young boys girls introduced to robotic engineering and artificial intelligence in elementary school. If I was in government today, I would push for including these two Subjects in the curriculum of elementary, middle, and high schools all over the country.
Lean StartUp Around 2010 to 12, startup tech sponsors in Silicon valley realised that billions of dollars were wasted on many new startups (pf course, wastes produce profit..lol) and investors were beginning to have a second thought about the whole idea. So, one professor in Harvard saw the problem, and gave a solution to it. But to me, it was not a problem as this approach has always been the way emerging markets successful business men operate.
Where is your already available market? In most industries in Nigeria, no bank or investor wants to loan out to anyone or invest in who doesnt have a good and lucrative market. After all, you need buyers of your products or services to make income. Why? Investors want to make their money back. Now let's compare it to a flourished economy. Yeah! They can afford to spend huge. They do not care. They can afford to waste money. A friend of mine raised £730,000 for a startup producing what he called "smart toothbrush". I was puzzled when I first read about it in LinkedIn. So, I pulled a call across to him, and we had a long conversation 3 years ago. Now, he has pivoted to another industry, and I guess it didnt work out well. Whaoo! £750,000. Do you know how much that is if I convert it to naira? Waoooo! My point is this: do not expect to get enough cash like you are getting if you live in Europe or in N.America.
Start Small, Grow Big This idea has been with us in Nigeria. Most small businesses which survive in Nigeria use this principle. This is what I believe works well in emerging economy like Nigeria. And it's funny that Americans are beginning to appreciate it also. You just dont go start spending so high at the start of your project. It is unwise to do so. You must grow it gradually. While growing, you make adjustments. And yes! The programmers must work tireless to make these growth work well. I think you need to understand this approach cos if you do not, you are going to feel cheated as programmers.
Recently, I posted here on NL on the thread of a programmer who wants to network here. While I like his approach of networking, he has refused to see my point when I told him to his face that programmers need to relax. In his mind, he needs to network with programmers of his kind. Whaoo! He felt programmers are at the top of the ladder. Lol. Ok. Get all your codes done accurately, if you do not have customers to pay for your work it is zero. And most programmers cannot find customers. They dont find customers because they build what they think customers need. And what they think is not waht customers need. Wasted effort! Wasted resources! Wasted time! They aren't trained to know what customers need. In fact, customers don't know what they need. Lol...We will get to this later. Of course, this is why very few successful programmers always sell their products to business men who know how to take them to the next level and make them huge.
I hope you can see that you need customers first before you make the product or the sevice perfect. Knowing this should make you relax and have rethink about it all. And on the part of the programmer, you should not kill yourself on working so much without a focus. Ok.....I will tell you how it is done so you dont feel being used. Yes, no one should just work and gets dumped. But you need to bear it in mind that you must sacrifice at the initial stage.
Tech+Tech OR Business+Tech? Just like the guy I mentioned above who is a programmer, and he wants to mainly network with other programmers. Why? Because he thinks Paystacks is started by "all programmers team" and they started young together. Oh! He even said Bill Gates used to code, and even Mark Zuckerberg coded mostly FB. Lol. I just laughed when I read about it. So, how many startups are in the US only for him to base his conclusion on just the top successful ones? FYI, there are so many successful startups, but why would anyone pick top 500 Fortune companies to make his decision? Come on! You are in an emerging economy. Gush! Think!
But guess what? Even all these guys partnered with the business brain guys. Apple is all about Jobs Steve. The person who really assisted Bill Gates is Steve Ballmer. And till date, Mark Zuckerberg has his business brains always supporting him.
I will go deeper into lean start up in my next post. It is a principle you can learn yourself as a programmer which will help you. But you need the intuitive mind to do it. Yeah! I want to introduce it to you and see if you naturally can flow with it. I doubt it. Why? Most programmers have trained themselves to think logically, numerically, and silently. But this is a loud area. You gat to move out. You gat to "pinch" people and know their minds. You gat to talk. You gat to loud it. Can you naturally get it done? Can you simplify articles and explain it the way customers will understand it (and not start talking about computer jargons)? OK...Look at my approach to this thread. Normally you expect the usual books recommendation, strategies outlines, and bla bla bla. But programmers dont understand these business jargons. But you guys can relate with my story the way I am telling it. This is the work of the business guy. This is what CEOs do. They simplify hard stuff so everyone can understand it. They give customers what they need so they can sell and make huge profit. They bridge programmers and customers. So, they rule. This is why Steve Jobs ruled.
Ride on though i have this feeling you are not someone any sane person should work with.
Melanin07: Digital Naira Currency (Nairacoin) has just been launched on Github. One interesting thing is that It was developed just like Bitcoin. It is not an ethereum or binance Token.
Check out the Github repository to know more about the coin.
You can only get it by mining just like Bitcoin. The value of nairacoin is equal to normal naira cash we use. And the most interesting part is that the reward for mining 1 block on the blockchain is 1,000,000 nairacoin which is the same thing as 1,000,000 naira.
1,000,000 naira coin = 0.073 Bitcoin = 1.26 Ethereum. This is sweet
For me o, I have already started mined and I have my cool 12,000,000 naira coin in my wallet. Time to be a crypto millionaire.
You know, with more people mining , the more difficult it is to get reward. You better start mining now before plenty Nigerians start mining it o.
If you have started mining Naira coin, do you mind sharing with us how much you have made?
Stablecoins don't work that way, that 12M is worth jack shit.
Data and airtime @ 1,5 ke FB alone don suck all finish in few days
What's up, you've ever wondered why you were able to use Twitter even though the Nig. Gov ban it, I made a simple to understand video explaining how VPN works and why to use it and it's potential disadvantages. Help reshare, thanks ��
Noblebrain22: Hi there! Are you into programming - front end and backend - and you need to connect with like minds? I am available. I started a programming course, and I'm looking for techies like you. Let's connect and share ideas.
falseprophet: Only software engineers, developers and careers around softwares negotiate salaries, those guys are not your everyday jobseekers, employers seek for them and they give the terms and expected salary.
You can't be applying for an administrative position any graduate can do and expect a salary negotiation
Kondomatic: You think some of us care whether a girlfriend leaves or stays?
If you started life on a stony and thorny path and experienced the contemptuous ways women treat poor guys, you will not give a damn about who lives and who stays.
This is how my last relationship ended.
She: I am no longer interested in this relationship.
Me: Alright................... But why though.
She: You don't do this, you don't do that.
Me: Oh, okay.
And that was it.
I no come this life make woman suffer me.
Those creature are overly demanding it's either your time, energy, passion or money. If not for Mr konji, everyone go dey him dey, that's why porn industry does really well. Quick fixes.
candidbabe: Jeeeeeeeeeeeesus He stretched his hands and collected money from your friend for an ordinary banana he bought for her after buying for himself?
Who does that? Your friend should have dumped him right on that spot gosh!!!
She should have created a scene, disgraced him and dump him right there Nonsense
Your brain is overly emoted, cool down and read properly. Switch role thinking helps sometimes, you know. There is more to all story
Litmus: Buhari Must Go is okay but waiting for elections would be better for Nigeria's fragile democracy. The “Revolution now” aspect is unnecessary and smacks of schoolboys enthused by having just discovered Carl Max or something. It also reminds me of Nigerians’ fondness for cure-all slogans such as “Democracy, Democracy!” which you all used to shout during military rule and claimed would solve all ills. Then it became, “Rotational Presidency, Rotational Presidency!!!” Now it is “Revolution,Revolution!” or “Brake Up this country,Brake Up this Country!!!”
If we want a better Nigeria, few things will beat hard work, honesty, putting others first and Long Term thinking!
The most sensible comment I have ever seen on nl fp
danniesoft: I have develop several advance and dynamic softwares for Restaurant, hotels, shopping malls and Logistics. Let me create advance website, tools and softwares that will promote all business activities. I am developer Danniesoft available for your professional and advance web project. Note: I deliver in time and i am open to new ideas = Call me Via: 08155518099, Whatsapp: 07065254824
stanliwise: @Africonn Nairaland is using a cloudflare service, this means most content served to you are through CDN(content delivery Network). When content are served in this manner it makes the speed of content superfast a very amazing speed which is about 4x faster than actually local server download. Also it even becomes about 20x faster because most asset you use like javascript and stylesheet cache automatically. leaving raw speed to just sql queries and php script execution.
As for mysql, I think nairaland is based on SMF and they did a good work as about database schema and indexes. so nairaland is able to query millions of role is less and 0.2s and retrieve all data needed before blind of an eye.
Nairaland is hosting on cloud which give virtually limitless elastic capability to always maintain performance and I think that is what make nairaland still maintain speed.
I stand to be corrected on some of my assumptions though
You really try, from researching what you wrote and what seun wrote about the downtime, it seems they use SMF, and a powerful enough dedicated server to handle all the concurrent traffic, and that is placed in front of cloudflare for speed and security. So there isn't much going on behind the hood.
Kabiesi nice idea if u want to test ideas, there should be a good enough project to test run
The first result was tastigniter from a Nigerian Samuel adepoyigi, there are great 9ja Devs out there but it seems the more experience people gets the more they move away from nl
Well, you might say nairaland is just a script regardless nairaland serves atleast less than 10k users concurrently at its peak hours, and I believe nairaland will have done some systems design during it's peak growing days, it's still growing but I believe it's not enough to break the systems design that has been done in the past even if it does they just can just pay more money to scale vertically or horizontally, Does nairaland uses cache on the fp, I guess so, how do they walk around the dB bottlenecks, do they run any service, we will never find out thanks to Daddy seun, what is the origin of the anti-spam bot cos it does a terrible job. I built africonn.com with d hope it will be something people can easily switch to, but.there is just alot to building softwares than the MVPs. No regrets though.
Or do they use paid services like AWS lambda or similar.cloud service that does the scaling automatically because just from what I have seen it looks like nl as never had another dev employee.apart from seun and the mods and he has never claimed to do DevOps in his active days, cos I don't see why nairaland shouldn't be incorporated and hire Devs like myself. If Reddit can thrive, I don't see why west African tech giant -> nairaland can't atleast struggle. Anyways it's still an awesome place
Myfault: Good day everyone, today I am here to tell you about the benefits of masturbation. I have masturbated for over four years and I can tell you confidently with my full chest that one of the prominent benefits of masturbation is NOTHING. There is no benefit to self pleasure, if anything, self pleasure will ruin your life. Sex is something that is supposed to involve two people. But when you masturbate, you rewire your brain to think that sex is an act only involving one person which is all shades wrong. A major consequence of masturbation is hyper sex-drive. When you masturbate, your brain gets flooded with dopamine which is a feel good hormone. Humans seek comfort, and when you release dopamine, your body will seek out that source of dopamine to feel good again. That is how the addiction to masturbation starts. On a side note, if you are currently addicted to masturbating, congratulations, you have taken the first concrete step to ruining your life. I feel so happy for you, I swear. Now let me truthfully list the benefits I got from masturbation. 1) Weak bones: When you ejaculate, you release semen, and semen contains zinc which is found in the bones. As a result of ejaculation, you lose zinc and it will make you weaker the more you ejaculate. 2 Porn Induced Erectile Dysfunction(PIED): Another benefit I got from masturbation is loss of morning wood. My dick didn't rise in the morning anymore. If you hate your dick and don't want it to rise anymore, I urge you to masturbate like this is the last thing you will do on earth. 3) Pimples: I had too much pimples on my face, pimples colonized my face to the extent that they was no breathing space for me anymore. 4) Loss of hair: I currently don't have hair in the middle of my head, and I am 19years old now but no beards. Young guys who I am older than already have beards troubling them but here I am, no beards. I feel so happy, I really am. 5) Submissiveness: Because of masturbation, it was very easy for me to be manipulated and tricked due to reduced mental capacity. My brain was always thinking about porn, sex and my next fap session, i will always agree with what people say even if I didn't like it.
I will stop here for now. If anyone wants the benefits I listed above, you can continue masturbating.
P.S: This isn't my current state now, this is what happened to me when I was still deep into PMO
shegzhkn: Gumroad is a digital content market place .
please if you have any idea about this , don't hesitate to share .
I have tried selz and I have looked for other alternative but the PayPal thingy is the only roadblock if you know , there seems to be no payment method available for Nigerian folks
Tried e-junkie too but didn't work out , so if any one has any idea where i can sell my content in it real worth , please share.
I built a market place for myself where I plan to sell my digital products, the only problem is I didn't think anyone is going to have that problem, cause the payments is point to my paystack that's not the problem but the feature to keep track of user earning, analytics and payout isn't there yet, but I could easily modify to accommodate users, if only it's a problem people are trying to solve.
Workch: How is it possible to control a machine that keeps learning and learning? A lot of scientists and researchers are of the opinion that AI are the biggest existential threat to human race and are even more dangerous than nukes.
One part of Fermi’s paradox says that intelligent lives always destroy themselves from within. Is AI that point at which we will destroy ourselves or can we ever control them?
Narrow AI, no!! General AI, with ability to generate software through neural network type of reasoning, hell ya, the cloud is big enough for AI to run decentralized when that happens, we can only hope or go analogue, after lots of damage as been done.
We still along way from General AI, but things are moving fast. Narrow AI is the best for man kind.
Investment › Re: Hackers Demand $70M After Kaseya Ransomware Attack by africonn: 9:40pm On Jul 05, 2021
-> nairaland can't atleast struggle. Anyways it's still an awesome place
