Working notes rather than thought leadership. Some of it will turn out to be wrong, which is the point of writing it down where it can be checked.
A jet engine can be taken apart and fixed. A market changes when you touch it. On why analysis alone keeps failing on the problems that matter most — and what the Dangote Refinery IPO exposed about the difference.
Read →It wasn't technology alone that changed our behaviour — it was the market that formed around it. On the feedback loop between culture and markets, and why the ability to organise demand matters more as AI makes supply cheap.
Read →The five constraints, tested on a market closer to home than San Francisco. How OPay went from an app on your phone to the way Nigeria moves money — and why the constraint that binds is rarely the one you solved last.
Read →Proximity, not taste, is the scarce input as production becomes free — and three of the five constraints can only be found by being there.
Read →An entire industry advertised at the barrier that was never binding. What actually changed in Nigerian payments, what it cost, and why the bottleneck moved rather than disappeared.
Read →A car that kept overheating, a man who charged ten thousand naira before he would open the bonnet, and a washer worth almost nothing. The most expensive thing in the room was knowing which part to replace.
Read →Two projects I misunderstood at the time. A Coca-Cola promotion that reached twenty million people when Facebook Nigeria had three and a half million, and a bank gameshow that went out every night at 9:45. Neither was really a campaign.
Read →Every diagnostic we run is registered in advance, including the result that would prove us wrong. When the sample is large enough to mean anything, the hit rate by constraint gets published here — whether or not it flatters us.
Occasional notes on how markets form — sent when there is something worth saying, not on a schedule.
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