“This is a snip from our ongoing report titled ‘Viability of the Nigerian Internet Market’ to be released soon. to recieve alert on that, kindly subscribe to our feed or drop your email below”

Our focus here is profitability; I mean, what is the business value of bringing my business online? In essence, is there a ready market for my products & services?

Like I discuss recently about ecommerce in Nigeria, the focus was more on the sites owners and the platform operations. This time we need to know that for everyone who set out for business the number one thing is profitability. You cannot have bunch of people coming to your site and not being able to make any purchase whatsoever on it. It is discouraging!

The USA market grew faster largely because:

• They have well educated population
• They have rich consumer
• They have manpower who can create things
• They have funding for their startups

Looking at the above, I guess anyone who will disagree with it will only add to the list above not substitute from it. It is possible to replicate same in this country! Even though we have challenging problems, we can still adopt their successful pattern.

Our education curricula are not up-to-date; yes! Everyone knows that, but what are the people with updated knowledge doing? What are the people with hunger for knowledge doing? NGOs, how far have they feared?

The basis for any growth is knowledge, if you want me to by your product. I must know the benefit to get from it. So, for people to benefit from I.T, they first need the understanding of it. They will see the benefit and act on it base on the value perception of the product.

IT knowledge is of various levels;

Level 1 ————————> General knowledge of IT

Level 2 ————————> Specialized knowledge (example; ability to use wordpress to blog. Not every can do that)

Level 3 ————————> Technical knowledge. People need to create/build Website/Application/Software that others can use. Talk of manpower, it is most needed now.

Level 4 ————————-> Analytical knowledge. The analytical knowledge is your ability to study trends, predict and give intelligent advice to the usage of a Web services.

Like I wrote in one of my personal blog page, about why you need a consultant in your business. Analytical knowledge is of great value and quickly planning towards it will help save time and cost.

All these are needed to effectively coordinate growth in the web industry. Above all, people need to cultivate idea generation process, an undying quest for knowledge acquisition, innovation and invention.

The citizenry also should be willing to spend. How much things are people willing to pay? Can they buy something online? Strategist also needs to work on people’s buying pattern and how to structure it for increase purchase. See Google Interest based Ads and Facebook Target Marketing

A lot of people go to the Cinemas every weekend what if they conveniently pay online or possibly auction their tickets. With this they optimize their money thereby save more and site operator also makes money. When people make more money their propensity to consume increases. For online businesses to thrive, they must continually create innovative products to drive users to buy on their sites.

Our duty as entrepreneurs, corporate firms and government is to make sure (as much as we could) people are employed the more people who are employed, the more they can buy into the services we provide.

Manpower to provide efficient and professional service must also be developed. Over the years we have seen how vocational courses eroded of value and more people are willing to knot tie and earn fat pay. Yea! It is good, everyone craves for better life. You definitely can make more money as a programmer working hours of work you prefer than most people who overcrowd the third mainland bridge every morning and night. Skilled manpower made India to become home of outsourced projects. To effectively compete globally we must be able to create our own software, websites, application and services that can stand the test of time.

I support Gbenga Sesan effort towards building an ICT driven country for development.

Every big firm today started off as either one or two man job with their savings as driving force. Funding can not be overemphasized at this age, most entrepreneurs have had to juggle part-time jobs with their online businesses. Take a look at the thriving internet businesses today, they had seed funding to get them started, Facebook $500 ,000, Google $100,000 (1998), Twitter recently raise $35M (capital raising). I can’t really tell of a Nigerian site that can boast of seed funding of up to N5million.

The time is now! We need to work closely with Finance Firms to bring fund to the ideas in the market. I see a new Nigeria in the next 5 years when we would have internet millionaires.

“This is a snip from our ongoing report titled ‘Viability of the Nigerian Internet Market’ to be released soon. to recieve alert on that, kindly subscribe to our feed or drop your email below”

Am sure you have some very bright ideas as to how to move Nigeria forward on the web, drop some below let’s discuss.