The positivity myth
As entrepreneurs, we are often overly positive of the outcome of new business ideas or shiny new updates — we feel ‘yes, we’ve finally gotten it this time’ but time and time again, we launch and not enough is achieved; the pin doesn’t move that far and our high hopes when clicking on the launch button immediately meets the cold reality of market needs.
But we brush up ourselves and repeat the process. This time, another new idea, iteration, feature, update…whatever we call it. We just keep launching stuff.
Entrepreneurship is more of a process than a personality. When we call ourselves entrepreneurs, we are basically saying our job is to continually tweak a set of given principles until the market rewards us with either their money or attention.
My hopes were on an unusually high level when we launched Strata — a no code learning community for Nigerians. You see, a whole lot of people wants to become software developers but they know the inherent uphill task: learning to code in more languages than they can currently count. In Nigeria for instance, the job of a web developer involves:
- Graphics
- CSS
- HTML
- Javascript
- PHP
- MySQL
- API/Github/code debugging/code refactoring/AWS/cron jobs…
We do everything from ground up. The reason is simple: the budget clients are willing to pay is so small that if you decide to pawn off even one aspect of it to another developer (presumably an expert in that field; say Javascript), the whole budget is gone.
Strata wasn’t exactly a hit. We got off to a slow start and still far away from where I dreamt we would be within a week of launching.
Myself and my wife run a haircare business (you already know that if you read my blog). The business started as a haircare brand, we (she) developed haircare products and shipped out to customers every Thursday. Then people started inquiring for skincare products and we got into it.
Then in the middle of the pandemic, we launched a training arm of the business. This is one of the few decisions that hit the ground running.
In the first 90 days, we did almost a million Naira in revenue coming from the training alone.
Out monthly ad budget was around 25k and we were doing an average of 300k in revenue per month.
Then we all realised the pandemic wasn’t a pandemic anyway in Africa, people called it’s bluff and everyone went about their normal businesses and sales dipped. Then we moved the trainings from Whatsapp classes to our website, this didn’t go down well with Nigerians also but it was the better decision we could take; automation is key.
Seeing how the training was a hit for our hair/skincare business, I expected Strata to also be a hit — but guys did not turn up.
Now, over the past week, I’ve been consistently chipping in work on this bright idea of completely refocusing my web design business on U.S clients; this time with a twist (because, entrepreneur).
Marketing is difficult but the most important aspect of having a successful product. Automating marketing is cool but for all our “advanceness” as humans, only social media automation has been successfully handled by software — the likes of Buffer, Hootsuite and a few others.
Email marketing, content marketing, SEO and user engagement at micro community levels have yet to be automated, and for a good reason — human logic is still needed. GPT-3, an AI machine which is the most advanced language model ever built by man, trained with over 750gb of text data and with around 75 billion data parameters predicts that AI will finally be smarter than humans by 2045. Perhaps by then, we would automate marketing but for now, thats the chance we are looking to explore — handling marketing for business owners in the U.S.
Our areas include social media, email marketing, lead generation, micro community engagement, content marketing and SEO.
Like every other thing I’ve done, I’m excited about the possible impact this iteration can bring to our clients but I’m also very hopeful it will create a hockey stick effect in our company revenue within a very short period.
Let’s do this.
