Why Does Every African Consumer Business Start With a Kiosk
Starting small is practical. Thinking small is something else.
Welcome back to Laughing Hyena's column on African consumer business. Last time, I wrote about distribution and the slightly inconvenient fact that consumers don't particularly care about how beautiful your website is when they're thirsty. They want a drink, and they want it somewhere nearby. You can read it here: Africa Is the Next Big Consumer Market. Now Try Selling Something..
This week, I want to talk about something I've been thinking about after a conversation with a friend who wants to start a honey business.
When he first explained the idea to me, the plan sounded perfectly reasonable. To produce honey, put it in a container, take it to the market and sell it. There was a certain practicality to it. No grand strategy deck or a five-year vision with an upward-sloping graph. Just honey and people who might buy it.
But I found myself asking him a slightly annoying question of why he was thinking about the business simply as selling honey rather than building a honey company?
And I don't mean that as a semantic distinction. I think it changes almost everything.
If you're thinking about selling honey, it's natural to think about the nearest market, the people around you who want and can afford the product, and how many jars you can feasibly sell monthly. But everything changes when thinking about building a honey company. The questions become different. What could this brand become? Why would someone trust it? How could it grow beyond one location? What would it take for somebody who has never heard of you to recognise the name five years from now?
The funny thing is that the first way of thinking is completely rational. It is also where a lot of African consumer businesses seem to stop.
The Size of the Business in Your Head
I don't think African founders necessarily lack ambition. That would be too easy an explanation, and probably an unfair one. I think it's something more subtle where your environment teaches you what a business looks like.
If most of the businesses you've seen growing up are shops, kiosks, market stalls and small distributors, it is natural to imagine your own business in those terms. You make something, put it somewhere people can see it, sell it, make some money, buy more stock and do it again.
That is how a lot of businesses begin, and there is nothing wrong with it. The problem is that the starting point can quietly become the mental ceiling.
A founder starts with one shop and begins thinking like the owner of one shop. Someone starts making skincare products in their house and thinks primarily about how to sell the next fifty bottles rather than what would have to be true for the brand to eventually sit on shelves in ten countries.
That's the difference between being constrained by your resources and being constrained by your imagination.
The first is a business problem and the second, well... can become one.
Why Does the Geography of the Beginning Become the Geography of the Business?
Let's consider Red Bull as a case study. First off, have you had a sip of the drink? I'd love to know in the comments.
RedBull began in Austria. There was no obvious reason that an Austrian beverage company had to become a global cultural phenomenon. It could have remained a successful Austrian drink and nobody would have found that particularly strange.
But being Austrian was where the company started. It wasn't necessarily where the company imagined it would end.
We often make a strange assumption about African companies: that because they are African, their natural ambition should be local.
A Nigerian company becomes a Nigerian brand. A Ghanaian company stays a Ghanaian brand. A Kenyan company remains a Kenyan brand. Then, if things go particularly well, perhaps it expands into another African country.
Meanwhile, we look at American brands and rarely find it surprising when a company that started in California or Ohio eventually wants to be everywhere. The difference isn't necessarily that the American founder is more ambitious. They simply have grown up inside a business culture where building for a large market feels normal.
An African founder can start in Lagos and think globally too. The two aren't contradictory. In fact, I suspect one of the biggest opportunities in African consumer business is precisely this: building global consumer companies from places the world has historically not expected them to come from.
Starting Small Is Fine. Staying Small Isn't.
There is an important distinction here because “think big” is one of those pieces of entrepreneurial advice i think becomes meaningless after you've heard it enough times.
I am not suggesting that a founder with ₦500,000 should behave as though they have a billion-dollar company. You still have to pay for packaging, sell first units, and convince the first retailer to take your product.
You cannot tell a shop owner that you're building the next global consumer giant and expect them to forget about their margins.
The point is not to pretend you're already big, but to design the company with the possibility of becoming big. Because a company can begin with one product and eventually have twenty. Or begin in one city and eventually enter several countries. And can have ten customers today and still think carefully about what its systems would look like at ten thousand.
You don't have to solve the problems of a multinational company on day one. But it helps to know that those problems are coming. Otherwise, you can accidentally build something that works beautifully at a small scale and becomes incredibly difficult to grow.
The Honey Problem
This is what made the honey conversation with my friend interesting to me.
Honey is not exactly a new invention. Humans have been eating it for thousands of years. Yet as a modern consumer category, it has a problem that is particularly interesting: trust.
Walk into a market and look at the honey on offer. You can find all kinds of claims about purity and quality, but the consumer often has no easy way to know what they are actually buying. Has it been diluted? Where did it come from? Was it processed properly? Is the label telling the truth?
That sounds like a problem for the consumer. It is also an opportunity for a brand.
A founder could look at honey and see a product to package and sell. Another founder could look at the same market and see an old category with a trust problem that could be rebuilt around a modern consumer brand.
Those two founders are looking at the same honey. But they are not building the same business.
And this is the part I find interesting about consumer entrepreneurship in Africa. We spend a lot of time asking whether a market is large enough, whether consumers have enough purchasing power and whether distribution is difficult, all of which are important questions.
But before any of that, there is another question: what kind of company are you actually trying to build? Because the answer determines what you notice.
If you're trying to sell jars of honey, you notice jars. But If you're trying to build a honey brand, you start noticing trust, packaging, quality, sourcing, consumer behaviour, category perception and all the other things that sit around the product.
The product hasn't changed. What has is the size of the question.
Maybe We Need More Consumer Companies That Start Local and Think Otherwise
There is nothing inherently impressive about being global. A profitable business serving one city is better than an unprofitable “global brand” with a nice website and no customers.
Nor does every African consumer company need to become a multinational. Some businesses should remain local. Some founders will be perfectly happy building them that way.
But for the companies that could become much larger, I wonder whether we sometimes make the first version of the business too small in our heads.
We think about the first customer instead of the hundred-thousandth. We think about the first shop instead of the retail network. We think about the first city because it is the city we can see.
And perhaps that is understandable. You can only see what you have experienced. But a company doesn't have to remain the size of its founder's immediate surroundings.
Start in Lagos. Start in Accra. Start in Nairobi. Start with one product, one customer, one warehouse and, yes, maybe one kiosk. Just don't confuse the place where the company begins with the place where it has to end.
There is nothing wrong with starting small. The more interesting question is whether the business has been given permission to become something much bigger.
Prosper Nobert works with founders, creators and public figures to build brands that make their expertise, experiences and ideas impossible to overlook.
His work sits at the intersection of Content strategy, Storytelling and Audience growth.
He is also building NormRift, a drink that challenges the notion that calm, focus and energy requires stimulants craches or compromise.
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