At Africa3 we’d support the founders of Kubwa in their building and scaling journey by anchoring our suggested steps in the considerations we feel are most relevant to the targeted ecosystem. In the list to follow we pair each consideration with the suggested courses of action for successfully building and scaling across Nigeria:

Localized market research

Consideration:

Communities and ecosystems across Africa are highly localized. Deploying a Super-App across Nigeria will require careful attention to the cultural nuances that will ultimately affect adoption of the technology.

Recommended research:

Within Nigeria select particular target regions and communities to target, and conduct on-the-ground market research to understand their pain-points and potential barriers to adoption. Combine and synthesize this market research to get a clearer picture of some of the different considerations for each region, and to better inform the go-to-market strategy across Nigeria.

Cross-cultural team

Consideration:

Adoption of a customer-facing product like a Super-App will require deep understanding of and familiarity with the consumers in the regions to be targeted. The team deploying the product should be appropriately diverse in backgrounds and familiarity with the targeted regions.

Recommended team:

A. User-experience designer - This team member should have the broadest understanding of the targeted communities, and drive the recommended research described in the previous section. Their ability to design a highly useable and widely-adopted product will strongly depend on their understanding of the customers across each targeted region.

B. Customer-facing marketing lead - Similar to the user-experience designer, the customer-facing marketing lead will need to understand what various communities and businesses are receptive to, and market the product accordingly. They will need to create a sales playbook, broken down by the different regions and customer types, and align the rest of the team on how to leverage this to approach customers.

C. Business and legal relations lead - Relationship building will be quintessential to the success of Kubwa. The founders should leverage their positioning as wealthy corporate leaders in Nigeria’s ecosystem alongside the business and legal relations lead to ensure that they establish the right relationships with business and legal entities across Nigeria.

D. Product Manager and customer advocate - The product manager and customer advocate should ultimately tie all of the above team’s tasks together, while constantly being the voice of the targeted customers. They’ll work closely with the user-experience designer to design the market research, and also proactively weave the research insights into the rest of the team’s workflow and roadmap.

We strongly believe that with localized market research and the appropriate team, Kubwa can successful build and scale across Nigeria. The above effort would begin in parallel: our team would support Kubwa in finding candidates for the roles described, while the founders focus on selecting the targeted regions for their market research, and strategizing around business and legal relationships to maintain within those regions. Once the user-experience designer is hired, they’d help formally kickoff the market research, and eventually work alongside the other listed team members to bring their insights to the product.