In Lagos alone, the starting point of the problem is not the product market fitting it. It can start with whether your students have the electricity to open their Apps because that's even the most important part of the deal. Start-up in this country is hard, but Edtech is more harder.
If you ask a typical Nigerian on the street you will get to understand that, especially the developers. You get to wake up in the middle of the night 2 a.m. to debug your projects and you can have a lot of pitch decks that gets ghosted at every point in time. This kind of a thing all round up can test your sanity and makes you reason if you are okay or not.
Imagine building and the BEDC strikes with their electricity and the data decided just disappear out of thin air. Then the user experience that you are trying to create gets frustrated out of your brain. This and more are just one of the very few lessons that you learn when you are developing and you are starting up in Nigeria.
We already know that the global Edtech playbook stays on the reliability of the internet, the credit card and parents who treat our online tutorial like Netflix. Nigeria is of a character that flips that script. In this part of the world, trust is currency.
A typical Nigerian parent, be it in Kano, Abuja or Ondo state does not care about what is being known as AI driven adaptive learning. What they want is for their children to send them something that they will use to stay alive and they are also calculative that if I invest this amount of money for my children to learn AI, what comes out of it for me? Their mindset is still stuck at the career of being an engineer, a doctor all around. Another headache that comes with startup and Edtech in this country is the revenue model.
Business to consumer and business to business are both price sensitive. Schools runs on margin. Nigeria has a lot of brilliant engineers and passionate educators but the system is frustrating the life out of them.
If you decide to keep this set of workforce in fintech and crypto, I hope your crypto and fintech projects can pay times three of their salary because it's more demanding unlike others. That's a different level of hard. Yeah, but asking people to choose.
So there's another paradox. Does Nigeria need Edtech as a startup startup more than ever? Presently we have one of the largest population in the whole world and if properly used we might be looking at a scenario where this country has a teaming population of you two knows what to do at the right time and they can get it done. Anyone who can survive the situation of this country gets to become a hero charting the country into another level of greater height.
So when you look at all this you get to know that Edtech and startup is not a child's play in any way.