Scaling a business in Africa requires a strategic approach, precise timing, and a deep understanding of both the target market and the product. Onyedikachim Nwankwo, who spent five years leading product marketing at Flutterwave before heading marketing at Transactworld Digital Services, knows what it takes to turn ambition into scale.
Bili Sule, who led growth marketing at Jumia during its hyper-growth years, briefly served as Chief Growth Officer at Moniepoint, and now runs the growth agency alGROWithm, bringing the frameworks and insights that separate scalable businesses from those that plateau.
Together, they reveal the strategies, structures, and decisions that actually drive growth in Africa’s startup ecosystem.
Why Products Fail Before Launch
For context, a Unicorn is a startup valued at more than $1 billion, and both experts, Onyedikachim at Flutterwave and Bili at Moniepoint, have contributed to growing companies that have achieved this level of success.
In the high-octane world of African business, a dangerous fallacy persists: the idea that marketing begins only after the product is built. According to Onyedikachim, this “build first, sell later” mentality is the primary reason promising startups stumble out of the gate.
“I quickly learned that if you want success, you have to connect product and marketing from day one,” Onyedikachim says. “You can’t build A and sell B. That is the disconnect that many businesses fall into. Most companies finish a product, then call the market and say, ‘Buy this.’ It doesn’t work that way. You have to build growth into the product itself — every feature, every experience, engineered to sell.”
For Onyedikachim, marketing is an investigative tool used to analyse the market gap before a product exists. This synergy enables subtle brand alignments to be integrated into the product’s DNA. He cites the example of a luxury brand ensuring its ethos, like Mercedes’ “The Best or Nothing,” appears in physical details like headlamps, or a playful brand designing receipts that mirror their social media voice.
Bili reinforces this, referencing the “50/50 rule” from the book Traction. Startups often overemphasise engineering and underemphasise market viability.
“Founders focus 100% of their effort just trying to build the product,” Bili notes. “What invariably happens is that the product is not fit for the market. They then put the onus on the growth person to sell this product when the foundations are already bad. If the foundation of a building is rocky, there’s no amount of fancy technology that can build that house.”
Understanding the African Consumer
Both experts argue that African founders frequently rely on inflated Total Addressable Market (TAM) numbers, often citing Nigeria’s 200 million population, without understanding the nuances of purchasing power and cultural behaviour.
Onyedikachim uses a vivid analogy to dismantle this thinking: “If you wanted to sell caviar in Nigeria and you put up a list of all the rich people, you can’t stop there. Because the rich trader in Idumota is still not going to eat caviar even if he can afford it. He still wants to eat his regular fufu and soup. That’s what he has eaten for 15 years.”
To truly scale, founders must stop trying to fit customers into a pre-conceived “product box” and instead obsess over the customer’s actual needs in their daily life. Bili advocates for an “Audience Definition Framework” that goes beyond demographics. She pushes founders to visualise a day in the life of their user, from the moment they wake up to their interactions with their gateman or the petrol station attendant.
“Stop assuming that you know your customer,” Bili warns. “A lot of times, I see founders trying to fit customers into the product that they’ve created rather than trying to understand the customer and create a product for them.”
The Western Playbook vs African Reality
A recurring theme in the growth of Nigeria’s unicorns, like Moniepoint and OPay, is the rejection of purely Western, digital-first distribution models. In the West, online ads and digital funnels might suffice. In Africa, scale is physical.
“One of the biggest misconceptions I see on the continent is that people think they can sit in an office, run ads, and achieve significant scale,” says Bili. “If you look at the businesses that have become unicorns, you will see that most of them have a significant aspect of the business that is interfacing offline with people.”
Onyedikachim agrees, emphasising that trust in the Nigerian market is visual and tangible. He points to the dominance of agency banking colours: Moniepoint’s blue and OPay’s green, as distinct brand markers that signal reliability to the mass market.
Key strategies for African distribution include:
- Offline Touchpoints: Leveraging physical items to build trust. Onyedikachim points to Transactworld’s “payment aprons”—washable aprons printed with QR codes that let merchants accept hands-free payments in busy markets. It’s a simple, tangible tool that makes digital payments visible and trustworthy. Moniepoint’s POS rollout follows the same principle: providing users with a physical touchpoint turns abstract technology into something people can rely on.
- Low-Tech Accessibility: Rejecting the assumption that every user has a smartphone with data. Bili criticises AgriTech startups building high-bandwidth apps for rural farmers who often don’t need, or even have, smartphones. For many, simple USSD solutions work just as well, proving that growth starts with meeting users where they actually are.
- Strategic Partnerships: Utilising existing offline networks rather than trying to build purely digital communities from scratch.
Growth Engineering: The Science Behind the Scale
Once a product has traction, how do you systemise growth? It is not, as Onyedikachim clarifies, simply about “changing keywords on Google Ads every two weeks.”
Sule challenges the notion that growth is a siloed marketing function, instead introducing the concept of “Growth Engineering”, a diagnostic approach that treats the business as a machine with three pillars: Marketing, Product, and Operations. For Bili, effective scaling is the result of deep integration across every facet of the business. “Growth has to be engineered across the value chain,” she asserts.
Her agency, alGROWithm, utilises Growth Models to run simulations before spending capital.
“We look at numbers and start running simulations,” Bili explains. “Okay, if we’re able to increase awareness, what is the impact on your growth goal? We map out the entire funnel, pinpointing the friction points and the highest-leverage opportunities. That way, we can identify where in the value chain is the most efficient place to unlock growth.”
The Growth Process Loop:
- Analysis: Deep dive into customer behaviour and value chain pillars.
- Hypothesis: An informed guess on what will move the needle.
- Experimentation: Iterative testing. Here, Sule notes: “Once an experiment fails, that’s great. It’s a good way to know what is not working.”
- Systemisation: Once a tactic works, build the infrastructure (server capacity, customer support) to handle the volume.
The Trap of Scaling: When Innovation Dies
There is a distinct difference between growing and scaling, and Onyedikachim believes the transition between the two is where many companies lose their soul.
Growth is the grind: writing weekly newsletters, engaging with early users, and building a community. Scaling is when the numbers explode, the press announcements drop, and suddenly, the whole system shifts.
“When it comes to scaling, you don’t always know what it is that is blowing you up anymore,” Onyedikachim says “A simple raise announcement is enough to spike your user signups. But then it brings fresh problems. People create accounts they don’t plan to use, and you struggle to keep your messaging consistent across both product and communications as activities increase.”
This operational drag creates a new crisis. As the pressure to report “big numbers” mounts, the creative, community-led strategies that built the company are often swapped for mechanical, “tried and tested” methods. The result: a company that looks impressive on a pitch deck but feels hollow to its core user base.
The dangers of the scaling phase include:
- The Loss of Community: As numbers become the only metric that matters, the “crazy spark” and personal touch that attracted early adopters often fade.
- Bureaucracy vs. Speed: New layers of management and professionals who understand theory but lack practical knowledge of the startup’s history can stifle innovation.
- Vanity Metrics: The pressure to show big numbers can lead to acquiring non-paying users, creating a customer base that looks good on paper but generates no revenue.
The Path Forward: Focus and The North Star
For founders navigating the current investment dry spell, the advice from both experts is unified: focus on the core mission and ignore the noise.
Onyedikachim advises against the temptation to dilute the product offering in search of quick cash. “Don’t say you want to improve education, and tomorrow your app has started selling airtime and data,” he says. “You are going to have to invent something new to say to your audience, which means you are losing them.”
Instead, startups should “do more of what got them there.” If a developer community drove early growth, double down on that rather than pivoting to generic PR.
For Bili, the future of African growth lies in intellectual honesty. Founders must stop catering to Western investor biases and build for the reality on the ground, whether that means USSD solutions for feature phones or agent networks for cash-heavy economies.
“If you really want to leverage the population size,” Bili concludes, “we need to be able to get these solutions to the grassroots.”
