Dear Nigerian wannabe startup founder….

Please for the love of god, drop that idea of creating another social network, throw that idea of another “SIMPLEMACHINES” forum out of the window of the nearest high rise and watch it fall to its death 30 stories below without regret. There are some areas in Nigeria and Lagos in particular that require a much needed shot of some “source code” into its veins. These include:

1. Property leasing/letting/rental: In a city of more than 9 million people, getting a property for lease or rent in Lagos is like going through the proverbial eye of the needle. It doesn’t just make sense that in the 21st century I still have to go through some semi illiterate middle men called “Estate Agents” with their exploitative charges and fees, before I can get a property to lease or rent. I don’t see the reason why I cant do the whole process of searching, viewing and paying for a property via the web. This sector is hot and needs a startup with excellent implementation to just “nail” it.

2. News and information services: Why I cant get real time, localized news and information via the web or by sms kind of beats me. For example, why do I have to get stuck in traffic on Ikorodu road when FRSC or LASTMA can just send me alerts and advice me on alternative routes to take? Why do I also have to get stuck in between the cross fire of rampaging thugs in Fadeyi area on my way back from work, when security forces like the police can alert me and advice me to steer clear of the area? I surely would not mind paying for a service like this. [1]

3. Web payment gateways: This sector is a no brainer but the players in this sector are either bereft of ideas or have some sort of hidden agenda. There cant be innovation in the sector if developers are not making money from what they are doing. I do not see the reason why we can’t have our own “Nigerian Paypal” since Paypal has refused to come to Nigeria. The only very high barrier to entry of anyone interested in going into this sector is CBN’s bureaucratic bottlenecks and red tape bullshit before you can get licensed. But its hot and ripe for innovation.

Notes

[1]. Disclosure: I am working on something in this space.

A Nigerian Startup: Not thinking mobile? you are so wrong!!!

Any Nigerian startup that wants to get some form of traction and probably produce a mass product but isn’t doing or thinking about doing mobile is so so wrong. And when I say mobile, I am not talking about the approximately 150,000 blackberry users spread across the major GSM networks in the country, I am talking about the baseline population i.e. people with $50 Nokia phones.  Here are some reasons why you should be going down the mobile route.

1. Nigeria has a population of 154.7million people, approximately 80million mobile subscribers and an estimated 10million Internet subscribers. Any startup that goes the mobile route has opened itself to a potential market of 80million people. Even if such a startup decides to go freemium and have a business model based on advertising, its still a huge market to mine from and make profits.

2. With approximately 10 million Internet subscribers, if out of this number, 5 million access the web through their mobile devices, this leaves 75 million mobile subscribers without access to the web. Any startup that decides to target this demographic with mobile services like mobile alerts, sms search, sms coupons etc will be extremely profitable. Taking a site like Nairalist (a site with huge potential, but hasn’t really taken off) as a case study, if the owners of Nairalist could allow me setup mobile alerts via SMS against keywords of stuff I am interested in buying on the site and then alert me when ever posts which match my keywords are posted by advertisers, this would make the site extremely useful to me and weave itself into the fabric of my daily routine. This is a “sticky feature” which will make me want to use the website more and more.

3. Most people lunge around with their phones and other mobile devices wherever the go, hence sending SMS alerts, coupons or other mobile VAS (value added services) from your application or website will definitely be seen by this users and acted upon almost immediately. This can not be said of pure web services like emails and other web alerts which will only be seen by users only if they log onto your website.

4. For startups looking for that killer idea, I can name so many that involve SMS and other mobile features e.g. SMS alerts, SMS search, Traffic Reports, Mobile Coupons (think Groupon via SMS), SMS news service and alerts, the list goes on and on.

Incorporating mobile features into a website or application isn’t difficult and it exposes your startup to a huge untapped market.

Most Programmers cant solve this (2)

This is the 2nd part of a previous blog post. I have included more programming puzzles which most “programmers” usually fail to solve in programming interviews.

They are sorted in order of increasing complexity.
1. Write a program that prints out in reverse order, every multiple of 3 between 1 and 100.
2. Reverse a string.
3. Reverse a sentence “Bob likes dogs” to become “Dogs likes Bob”. please note the capitalization of the words.
4. Find the minimum value in a list. (hint create your own list of items containing both words and integers)
5. Find the maximum value in the list created in (4).
6. Return distinct values from a list that includes duplicates (i.e. 1, 3, 5, 3, 7, 3, 1, 1, 5) -> (1, 3, 5, 7).
7. Return distinct values from the list in (6) including the number of times each distinct item appears in the list. “(1)3, (3)3, (5)2, (7)1.

P.S: Easter egg: If you are interviewing a horde of “programmers” and want to prune the number by at least 60% give them this puzzle to solve in longhand: “Swap the value of 2 variables”. You would be amazed at the result.