Always launched with much fan fair and a long guest list of celebrities and media people. The Nigerian startup ecosystem may be already partying too much, like it's 1999. Except for the biggest media companies and some fast cash burning big ecommerce sites, I doubt if any of the startups have much revenue or even profits to be dropping these launch parties. Yeah, launch parties and events, By "launch" being pre-revenue, pre-sales and sometimes even pre-product.
I'm sure it's nice to mix business and partying like Jordan Belfort even before the first sales start coming in. And I am open to the claims that these PR events are essential for press coverage and early realeases. For example, SlotMobileApp that launched recently, is already at the top of high traffic Nigerian ecommerce sites. But What's the main difference between them and Huntella Gadgets, a similar site that has been around for a while and which in a sustainable way acquire much of it's business through social media and search traffic. Which of the two is profitable and which will outlive the other?
Think of Nigerian music apps that sponsor weekly events with big name celebrities, Are they profitable or will they run out of cash? This is all debatable.
Noise isn't always performance. just take a look at SHOPA. The fast growing $11 million venture funded ecommerce startup that just closed it does after a high profile party attended by models and clebrities and then follow-up campaigns featuring the same class.
Seems we have forgotten the importance of Organic growth. We have no retrospect of how Startups like Instagram and even Facebook and Google got to where they are. They grew by lowering their costs of acquiring new users. Sometimes that cost is brought down to zero with their viral marketing.
Seriously, if you have to pay celebrities to acquire new users (and you are not even an entertainment company) how long will you be in business without again raising a lot of money to keep paying these celebrities and again and again till the funding surpasses your actual business or we hit a funding crunch and you are out of business.
Lastly, I forget where I saw this quote, but the saying goes like this "If you wanna survive in business, be a cockroach." I know investment is good in a booming market to grab as much market share and as quickly as you could, but being wasteful is equally bad and can kick you out of the market.
