African startups need to prioritise Growth
Last week, Canva announced its recent raise at a $6bn valuation. Canva is by far one of the best image design tools on the web. However, it is not valued today simply based on how great of a product it is — it is also valued based on how many people use it and how much revenue it has made. There were many graphic design tools before Canva and there will be many more to come. Canva has grown exponentially because it prioritised growth.
You can find a good analysis of Canva’s SEO practises here.
In my 8 years+ career, I’ve discovered one thing that’s common with African startups — the deprioritisation of growth.
It’s important to realise that startups are different from your normal, everyday businesses because they should be designed to grow really fast from the onset.
Don’t take my word for it, here’s what Paul Graham said about startups in 2012.
In all of my experience and at almost every startup I’ve worked with, growth, marketing and communication efforts are at the back burner. Growth features are deprioritised in sprint planning and other management efforts. When they are eventually prioritised in sprint planning, product teams(PMs, developers and designers) intentionally delay those efforts until deadlines are passed. If ever, they are rarely reprimanded for those actions and marketing people look stupid because OKRs and targets are missed.
We need a complete overhaul of how we think about products. In 2018, I wrote this
It’s been almost 2 years since then and I am saying it again.
PRIORITISE GROWTH
Whether the growth team needs its own team of product experts to assist in growth efforts or they need more management support and capital, it is important that founders assign these requirements to the team. All of the unicorn startups you admire prioritised growth.
Whether it’s Hotmail, Gmail, Dropbox, Slack, Whatsapp, LinkedIn, Stripe, Canva, Hubspot, Buffer, Pinterest or Airbnb — they have all prioritised growth and taken advantage of best practices for growth.
We’re lucky to live in a society where technology is still nascent — this means we can take growth principles & lessons from some of these companies and apply them in the context of our society.
We need to shift from a habit of acquiring, overanalysing and pontificating on data and just do the obvious growth work — build things that acquire and keep users. Whether it’s creating landing pages, nudging users to take specific actions, integrating databases to email tools, building a referral and leaderboard system, teasing a product feature in Beta, creating onboarding and highlight tools for new users, all of these are important work and they should no longer be priority 6 in Jira. Please move them to 1 today.
If you’re a founder, you need to hire growth, communications and marketing people months ahead of product launches. Acquiring users and building audiences can no longer be an afterthought. These are not things you do after writing software, there are things you do WHILE writing software.
As the world becomes flatter and more technology companies expand to Africa(they definitely will), the only African companies that will benefit(via acquisitions, partnerships or otherwise) are those who have created strong growth processes and have a moat. Everything else will be secondary — people with more capital can build all of the features in your product in a shorter time than you have.
Companies that do not grow, die. It’s really that simple.
I have some time this year and will be taking on more growth work to help companies build proper growth processes. If you want me to talk with your product or marketing team or work with you to build growth processes, please email me at binjoadeniran[at]Gmail[dot]com to schedule a consultation session. I am also open to speaking at webinars and on panels about growing startups in Africa.
‘Then he told them many things in parables, saying: “A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still, other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop — a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. ‘ Matthew 13:3–8
‘let the wise listen and add to their learning, and let the discerning get guidance — ‘ Proverbs 1:5
