Team Startasprout

Magnific.com Most early stage founders eventually receive a specific kind of request from a customer that they are afraid to refuse. The customer is one of the more valuable ones, they have asked for a feature that the founder knows would not actually help the product, and the fear is that saying no will damage the relationship. So the founder either says yes and builds something they should not have built, or says a soft version of no that leaves the customer confused about what will...

The third week is spent finding five to ten users to try the flow, watching them use it, and recording what they do. This is the most important week, and most founders skip it because they are still in build mode and cannot quite shift to observation mode. Do not skip it.

There is a version of the Nigerian founder story that has become the default in how we talk about Nigerian startups, and it goes something like this. A young Nigerian in Lagos or Ibadan sees a problem that everyone has accepted as unfixable, builds a clever technical solution against significant infrastructure constraints, raises money from a foreign investor who recognises the local knowledge as an asset, and eventually builds a company that either gets acquired or continues to grow into one...