Building in Lagos: what the playbooks leave out

Almost every widely read piece of startup advice was written in a market with reliable power, cheap capital, and a customer who assumes a business is legitimate until proven otherwise. Change those three and a surprising amount of the advice inverts.

Take the standard advice to build the product first and worry about distribution later. That works where distribution is a solved problem you can buy into. Where trust is the binding constraint, distribution is the product, and the thing you are actually building is a reason for someone to believe you will still be here in a year.

Founders who learn this early spend their first year on relationships that look, from the outside, like they are not building anything. They are building the only asset that matters.

Three assumptions worth checking

That capital is patient

Advice about runway assumes you can raise again on progress. If the next round is genuinely uncertain, the correct burn is not the one that maximises growth. It is the one that maximises the number of months you control your own outcome.

That the infrastructure is someone else's problem

Payments, logistics and identity are treated as solved layers in most playbooks. Where they are not, the company that solves its own becomes structurally hard to copy. That cost looks like a distraction on a spreadsheet and like a moat three years later.