₦airaland Forum

beamtopola:
only fraction of these people are boosting the economy. crow is nonsense. south Africa has no crow both they are more improved in terms of economy and infrastructure than Nigeria.

Florblu:
Crowd is one of the major factor causing ineffectiveness.

Alexgeneration:
Just wasting money

simiolu1:
I'll address the bolded.

Every idea is a copy or metamorphosis of another idea. Mention any idea from the top of your head (whether you thought about it) or its already in existence; I'll pick it apart and show you that the above statement is true. It is simply the law of nature and it is true in Science, Technology, Business, Psychology and so on. So, marketplaces are not new; they are very old--eBay, Craigslist etc.

While I understand your point, innovation is not some rocket science we think it to be. Because at the end of the day; your service, product or solution should solve your user's/customer's problem/challenge in the simplest way possible. Customers don't care about the technology; the question is what can it do for them? If it does that thing successfully and delights them in the process; it is innovative.

How do you think people in Nigeria felt when they could buy Nokia 3310, purchase that "thing" called sim card, put it in their phones and call anywhere in the world? Europe and America had been using telephone lines for a very looooooong time. But to the Nigerian; the GSM was innovative. How do you also think it felt when people were now charged per second instead of the per minute billing that MTN and Econet had been known for?

My point: innovation is in the complex engineering problems and it is also in the simple things. It can be as complex as a self-driving car, and it can also be as simple as pricing or mode of payment. That is why Nigeria is the only country in the world that Uber accepts cash. That is also why Nigeria is one of the few countries in the world that e-commerce stores do pay-on-delivery. That my bro is also innovation.

So the question I would ask you is this: would you start a self-driving car company in Nigeria? Would you start something like SpaceX in Africa? The point is simple: people look first and foremost to their immediate environment for problems and challenges to solve. When that solution becomes successful, they then look to expand it.

That is why Nigeria critically needs companies like LifeBank to handle the logistics of moving blood from where it is to where it is needed so that patients would not die. That is also why Nigerians need something like Kudi.ai that allows them to make financial transactions from Facebook messenger. That is also why Nigerians still need something like Hotels.ng to allow them book for hotels from the comfort of their phones. Because in advanced countries, these problems have been solved ten times over.

Startups loose money for a lot of reasons; pegging it at "copying" is at best simplistic.

Cacawa2:
Listen, these are not tech startups.

These are websites. Just websites.

For example, Microsoft is a tech company, Facebook is not a tech company.

When we talk about ICT, Info, Comm and Tech, some companies are simply Info...e.g Facebook. Some are strictly Comm...e.g MTN, While some combine all, e.g Microsoft which runs Hotmail, Skype,Windows, Xbox, PC, Laptops, etc.

Google has began to migrate from being just an Info company (www.google.com, google maps, translator, gmail, etc) to becoming a communications company (hangout, google talk, etc) and also now a Tech company (Google specs, Nexus Phone, etc)

Nigerians would even call Nairaland a TECH company....Illiteracy at it's peak.