Nigerian Startups Advertising Everywhere Are Those You Won't Find Anywhere, In The Future!

My own startup dream started around 2000 and 2001 when the startup market in the US was collapsing. The time prior to the collapse was filled with memories of startup ads on TV and on every website you visited. These startups were everywhere, you couldn't get away from them. From adverts of Boo.com on anything you could get your eyes on to CNN advert videos with (high royalty paid) songs by Beatles advertising Nortell Networks. Where are these companies now?

Be it the year 1999 or 2013, it is never sustainable to spend a lot of money as a startup in order to continue to be in, or acquire new business. That is why startups are called "startups" in the first place. They find creative ways to market or build marketing within their products from the start. How many people taught Groupon was a big idea and bought shares in it's IPO. Groupon would have been a really great idea if they didn't spend so much money on sales.

So there are a ton of Nigerian startups mainly e-commerce sites and some content or media sites buying up Billboards in various locations in the big cities, buying TV spots, Youtube pre-roll ads, promoted tweets and handles, expensive Facebook likes and banners on every high traffic site that is offering to sell ad space. These startups are too focused on the short run and the money they are throwing on ads that may or may not perform at times could be used to build a great product that would promote itself for free in 5 years to come. Building a startup is not about short-term hype but building a successful company or product that would last a life-time.

There is only one way to build a successful startup, and it is by building a product that people will keep coming back to and that would be talked about by people there-by growing virally naturally. That's how I got on Facebook and Yahoo in the early days of email in Nigeria, peer pressure. My peers laughed at me because I didn't have an email address and I was mainly on Myspace till my friends pressured me into joining Facebook.

So I boldly predict that you won't be able to find most of the Nigerian startups making noise right now in the next 5 years. By 2018 a lot would have crashed after burning a lot of venture capital and smarter technology focussed startups come in and disrupt there business. Actually, 5 years is a long time but trust me a lot will happen within the time. If you are building a startup, make sure you make technology your biggest advantage, not a money-bag or some noise making bloggers.

To cut a long story short, very soon a highly focused technically talented startup would come along and optimize the whole e-commerce system in Nigeria, and also a hardware focused, great product genuises would come and change the content and data game. Watch this space :)

9Flix Will Give You N100,000 to Make Your OgaAtTheTop Video Trend!

Make any video about #OgaAtTheTop and make it trend on our website http://9flix.com and we will officially crown you Our Oga At The Top with a N100,000 cash gift.

The first 5 Ogas to submit their videos will get an instant N1500 recharge card as a thank you from us and the winner of the N100,000 cash prize will be the OgaAtTheTop video with the most views.

Just upload your video to Youtube and tweet @9flix or email us the link at myogaatthetoptrend@yahoo.com and we will embed the video on our site and send you the link to the embedded video to share with your friends and let the viewing begin. On Sunday 24th March we'll announce a winner and they'll get their cash deposited by Monday ;)

P.S Remember, the site is http://9flix.com. The dotcom is not silent :|

4 Business Lessons From The #MyOgaAtTheTop Trend!

Unless you have been sleeping under a rock for the past 2 days or don't know the web address of the World's biggest social networks like Facebook and Twitter, (Warning: Don't forget the dotcom at the end of the url) you must have at least noticed, that is if you are not already taking part, the trend/craze about a Nigerian civil defense commandants blunders in a TV interview where he did not even know the web address of his organisation's website and answers tough questions with "I don't want to say one thing and then My Oga At The Top will say another"

So what I'm sure most did not realize or see while they were having fun mocking Oga commandant, was the business opportunity and lessons every viral event like this comes with. So I want to open your eyes and discuss a few ways you can learn and take advantage of such events.

(1) If it is popular, make and sell merchandise fast!

I am really impressed by how fast Nigerian made T-Shirts with the My "Oga At The Top Meme" and began selling them in just less than 2 days from the beginning of the craze. If something is popular, you might as well monetize it.

(2) Piggybacking on a trend.

When people are already laughing at something, it is easy to give it a little twist and even get more people laughing. So if you can be imaginative and creatively insert your brand without messing up the flow or the fun,  you got yourself some free marketing because people will share as long as your variation of the joke is also funny.

(3) Influence is everything.

I noticed that a lot of people were using some of the pictures as their twitter or blackberry messenger display photos and making tweets, Facebook status updates and bbm personal message updates with the MyOgaAtTheTop jokes without actually watching the video. Well, this is actually what makes a trend, when it influences people and they don't even care what started it and why it is done, they just wanna be part of it. Following wisdom of the crowd.

This means if you are looking to start a trend for your brand or anything, start by putting an effort to seed influencers. If a few of them follow, the crowd would follow. Identify influential people on a topic or market before you start a trend and make sure the a participants in it.

(4) How things go viral.

Things go viral when they are funny or amazing and interactive. That Is All! ;)

People share something with their friends if the thing is funny or amazing. But if you want your little funny or amazing experiment to really blow and go viral, make it interactive. Let people mess around a bit with it by customizing it, editing parts of it and even more. Makes people feel like they have vested interest in the trend and promote the message for you.

THAT IS ALL! :)

So tell us what have you observed or learned from Nigerians with this latest trend? I'll be reading the comments and discussing further with you in the comments area. Cheers!

How Could Femi Otedola Pay Back $1.2 Billion When He's Not Donald Trump.

Seriously, who gets out of a negative net worth of a billion dollars, how long do you need to pay that back? How big of a fuel subsidy scam do you need to pull? I know Donald Trump did it, but who else has his leverage?

Forbes valued Femi Otedola's net worth at around $1.2 billion, so since he owes the same amount, technically he is a broke guy with many mansions, and a fleet of sport cars and yachts. Some leverage huh?

Right now I know what you are thinking, "since Femi Otedola is worth as much as he owes and technically that's $0, technically you are in the same net worth?" I know that would make you feel good about yourself, anyways you are wrong! Sorry, keep following, let me show (teach) you how the trick works. Also his $1.2B is from Forbes listing in 2009 which is a while back.

Leverage, connects and building a brand is what makes you wealthy, not the crap some hack wrote on Nairaland the other day here http://www.nairaland.com/1054816/5-proven-tips-multi-millionaire-nigeria/5#12288333 and like 65 of you guys clicked the "like" button on it.

How did Donald Trump get out of his debt? Simple, he leveraged the brand he has built over the years. How did he build the brand? Before you start making up stories about God father-ism and American greed, the environment in co-operate America is different from what we call "business" in Nigeria. We don't really care about branding or building value into our name or business name, all we care about is cashing out anytime we want. But this is exactly what got Donald Trump out of more than $10 billion in debt and got out of the red even bigger than ever. His passion which helps make him a business symbol and why people feel comfortable investing in him and pay tens of millions of dollars for apartments at Trump Towers.

So can Mr. Femi also get out of debt without getting "FIRED?!" I really don't think he has enough leverage to do that but my bet is he will continue to work with people in GOVERNMENT towards forgetting (forgiving) that debt that he no longer owes the banks but the GOVERNMENT's bail-out body ;) AMCON which swallowed the debts from the banks.

We Welcome New Competition, Seriously!

The time is exactly 9:15 in the morning. I didn't wake up early just to write this post, the truth is, I've been awake all through the night. I'm really finding it hard to hibernate the computer and go to sleep these days.

You can put it how you like, say, I'm losing sleep over competition.. Well, I'm not ashamed. Its a good thing, it has changed me and helped me see the bigger picture better than i did earlier.

The emergence of huge competition only last year like Nollywood Love has given us new determination. It has shown us a bigger market exists more than we anticipated or planned for.

Here is why you should welcome competition

1. Market validation
You can use either your competitors traffic or revenues to boost your own confidence and work harder or you can show the figures to investors to give them an idea of the market.

2. Show signs of a boom
If you see startups similar to yours springing up all over, like in the case of Groupon, then the market is experiencing a boom. Do what you can to grow as fast as possible.

The main issue is, AfricaMars Media is what I'd like to call "first generation of African video sites", together with a few early competitors.. We were ahead of our time and the was not much traction to be gained. We were ahead of our time.

With the new African TV services, the time is now and what matters is who's still here in the next 5 to even 10 years!

How African Artists could use new media to boost earnings

This is a write-up a posted on a couple of african entertainment blogs some weeks back. They have generated a lot of buzz, some meaningful commenting and lots of Facebook shares.

After the whole noise has subsided, I figure I should bring the article to my readers after all, lately I've been distracted with some other work and I may have neglected this blog a bit.

Here goes the article;
There is a shift from the traditional means through which we consume entertainment to a more convenient and social medium. Since the new medium is more convenient and interesting than the traditional, in the future, it will replace what we know today as media consumption.

Mobile and digital entertainment technologies are gradually making their way into Africa and the artists and entertainers are quick to jump on the wagon in order to get their names and works out there. With convenience, consumers’ money will move from buying CDs (traditional consumption) to streaming from their mobile phones, the web and soon renting storage space on cloud services to store their entertainment and access it from their cars and other digital platforms.

This shift will definitely favor online marketing and promotion savvy entertainers and the best thing; the Global playing field would be leveled. Works by African artists would be accessible and easily sold globally due to ease and low cost of distribution of new media.

The main problem African artists and producers are facing is the problem of piracy. Illegal CD copies of their copyright materials are made and sold in huge quantities without any royalties being paid or even their consent. Even though p2p sharing and other pirate applications have given the web a bad name as far as music and movie studios are concerned, digital media and the web have a declining rate of piracy thanks to new Internet startups like Spotify and Pandora offering users music for free and making money off advertisement which they share with the record labels. This model and also paid music subscription models would decrease online piracy significantly in the very near future and digital will soon be the main money source for the music industry.

The bottom-line is, the money is in new media and the earlier African entertainers take advantage and make a name for themselves out there, the easier it would be for them to earn in the near future. The only problem is, African artists have to really focus on quality entertainment content in order to compete in the Global multi-billion dollar entertainment market share. I know we have what it takes here in Africa.

My Article Featured on Ghanaian Entertainment Blog AmeyawDebrah.com

I haven't dropped any words on my blog's page for a while now, well, I have been both busy and lazy. I did some work and I am not really proud chilling most of the time. The truth is, whenever you overwork yourself for a long period of time, it reaches a stage when your brain loses steam and you run out of things to do, or at least ideas for things to do. So the best solution is map out a work plan early and when you really don't feel like working, have a rest.

Some of the works I had already mapped out and thought all through include a number of articles I wrote specifically for a few popular African entertainment and technology sites. One of the websites is AmeyawDebrah.com and the article was posted on 2 June 2011. From the comments and the request by a radio station to feature the story, I really felt humbled. It was just like when I was asked to speak at Sandton Convention Center in Johannesburg South Africa.

I truthfully believe that we are building something great at AfricaMars and we will try our best to realise the dream.

Read the post here titled "How African artists could earn more via new media".