Adapted from Chapter 10 of my book Chasing Black Unicorns, written five years after I first landed in Lagos. Figures are from that time.

As I write these words, five years after I first landed in Lagos, I feel at home. I have fallen in love with this place, even though it is a toxic relationship, an addiction to Nigeria despite its many drawbacks, its often strange inhabitants and even stranger customs. I have friends here. I have begun to understand the social mechanisms that govern this country and others on the continent.

My frequently painful but never boring discovery of this world is perfectly described by a learning model created by Martin Broadwell in 1969. It has four stages, and the actions of every European or American in Africa can be sorted into them. Well, into four, in theory. In practice most people, after reaching the second stage, say something like: “Nothing works here the way it should. I’m outta here.”

Stage one: I don’t know that I don’t know

The crisis most often comes after about six months. Most of the expats at Rocket crumbled and went home. The record holder booked his return ticket the next day (by the way, bravo to the recruiter). If you stay a year, you will stay for many years more. Those who leave so quickly are making a mistake. Everything works here, only in a different way, sometimes in a very different way. Realizing that is the first and usually the most painful stage of building a business in Africa. It is the stage where you don’t know what you don’t know, because you think you know everything.

After two or three months, a guy like me who thinks he knows everything about business realizes he can throw at least half of his experience in the bin. Literally. One day I turned on my computer and moved tens of documents with notes and analyses straight into the trash.

Each of us, including me, thinks Africa is safaris, desert and mud huts. But according to the United Nations, within a decade half of Africans will live in cities. Thirty years ago, one million people lived in Lagos. Today it is twenty million. The middle class is a third of the population and is expected to reach 60% soon. There is going to be big money here, and the tech giants sense it. But even they arrive with expensive analyses and no feel for the place: three-quarters of Nigerian drivers, for instance, could not use the basic functions of a navigation app.

Phones are another matter. Forty percent of phones here are smartphones, mostly brands you have never heard of, like Tecno, Innjoo or Infinix, arriving in containers and costing about $50, which is a lot of money for a Nigerian but not so much that he cannot have two.

Data was insanely expensive, so people use the internet on their phones completely differently from “civilization”. They turn on data, go to Facebook, add a post, comment on something and turn data off again. Notifications might as well not exist. Once a delegation from Evernote came to our office with a plan to persuade all of Jumia’s couriers to use Evernote daily. They looked crestfallen when we explained that we were still at the stage of promoting Google Maps and Gmail.

Why you cannot copy Amazon

Another difference that keeps the big boys away is infrastructure. Amazon started without a warehouse or even a book. It made a deal with publishers: we send you the orders, you pay us a commission and ship the book.

In Nigeria, the book would first have to travel from a publisher abroad, because there are few publishers in Nigeria. If nobody paid off the port official in advance, the container ship could stand at the coast for a month. Then the roads: to cover a thousand kilometers you need two days, compared with nine hours in the USA. Flying does not help: Abuja, with a metropolitan area of six million, handles about as many passengers as Gdansk, a city of less than half a million.

To start any e-commerce here, you first have to build warehouses, fill them to the roof, and create your own delivery network. When I arrived, Jumia already had a bigger delivery fleet than the entire Nigerian branch of FedEx.

Imagine I wanted to follow Amazon in hotels, and to open my own hotel, say one bought for a song somewhere near the sea. First I would need a road, and I can bet you 100% there is only a dirt track or a narrow potholed strip of asphalt. To build the road I need to bring in materials and equipment. To do that commercially I need my own quay in the port, because otherwise it would take about ten years. But to reach the new quay I would also have to build a road. A vicious circle.

At first all of this surprises the hell out of you. The success of a foreign investor depends on how quickly they can swallow their pride, roll up their sleeves and get to real work.

Stage two: I know that I don’t know

It took me over a year and several hundred thousand dollars to get there. By then I had a completely different attitude. Life is full of surprises, and I would simply adapt. I decided to be like water, according to Bruce Lee. That was the second stage in the development of Marek Zmysłowski as an African businessman: I know that I don’t know. Conscious incompetence. I know nothing about this world, but at least I realize it and am careful.

At this stage I concentrated on fixing what had not worked. The first, and perhaps most crucial, lesson I learned a month after arriving: one of the greatest challenges of doing business in Nigeria is service quality.

It started with Easy Taxi, the Nigerian Uber, which also belonged to Rocket. My first days in Lagos coincided with its first days on the market, and it was a flop. Why did Uber work and Easy Taxi eventually fail? In Nigeria, Uber started differently from the rest of the world. Only rich people have nice cars in Africa, and they do not need extra jobs as taxi drivers. So Uber made deals with the biggest car fleet companies, found everything in Lagos that could be rented, and then brought in drivers. Each driver got a decent car, with strings attached: it was not theirs, it had to be clean, smell nice and be roadworthy. One slip-up and we take the car back and you lose your job.

Easy Taxi was built on existing taxis. The average Nigerian taxi driver drives a thirty-year-old car, and, as in Poland, it is his car, so there was nothing we could do. Even if we cut him out of the app, he would earn his money as before.

For hotels, the reality looked like this. The customer orders a room through our service, sees beautiful photos and nice descriptions, and is convinced he will stay in a little corner of heaven. Then he arrives and does not get the room he booked, the air conditioning is broken, the Wi-Fi does not work, no one has cleaned the room, and it is on the proverbial tenth floor with no elevator. Initially Jovago had a terrible reputation, because the customer rated the whole service and gave us one star. After we changed it, you could rate the app and the hotel separately.

In this story I intended to be Uber, not Easy Taxi. Easier said than done. Years later we could strike from a position of strength: “Your hotel doesn’t meet our service standards? We’ll cut you off from the system and you’ll lose a lot of money.” That works when a hotel has had fifty guests a month thanks to us. But at the beginning, when they got two a month, they didn’t care about us. So we did it ourselves. My people went to the hotel to check that the room had been cleaned, that the appliances worked and that the description matched the facts, and if not, we made a row. Paradoxically, the terrible online reviews helped: “You think nobody will find out how awful your hotel is? Look, it’s all described here, for the whole world to read.” It usually worked. Not always: some hotel owners threatened us with the police, sometimes the army, if we did not take the reviews down.

Eventually, this work gave us satisfactory service quality. But it would not have worked if we had not grown. During 2014 we saw week-to-week growth of 5% in nights booked. Once hotels got 20% of their reservations from us, we had them in the palm of our hand. In our training sessions we did not say how cool the internet is. The message was: it is not an opportunity, it is something you need to survive. Whoever does not work with Jovago will die. And to work with us you had to guarantee quality and pay on time.

The payment problem that almost killed us

The payment issue nearly finished us. In Africa trust in mail order is almost nonexistent. Either the buyer pays 100% up front before the seller sends anything, or pays nothing until they see the product. Paying online is like the hotel Wi-Fi: there, but not working right now. Payment on collection is well over 80% of transactions. Research showed we would have needed a discount of at least 20% to get anyone to pay online, which would have eaten our entire commission.

So we took the normal route and issued an invoice at the end of every month. Then serious problems arose. Most of our partners were small hotels that were just about breaking even, and by the time our invoice arrived, the cash from the guest had gone on running costs. Some cheated us, saying the customer had never arrived. So we rang the customer, who said: “What do you mean I never arrived? I’m still here, sitting in the bathtub.” We cut such hotels from the network immediately. A month later we called: “We had forty customers for you this month and had to send them to the competition. If you promise not to cheat us again, we’ll reconnect you.” They always promised. We had lots of crooks, but never the same one twice. You have to make sure that being nice is not mistaken for being weak.

Teaching people to book online was not enough. We also needed marketing.

Stage three: I know that I know

This was the third stage: I know that I know. Conscious competence. I knew, more or less, what worked and what didn’t, where to be careful and where anything goes. I was a long way from calling myself an African business expert, but I knew what I had to do to get things going, and what I could not do.

Online everything is quantifiable, so you can test tactics on a small scale. But in Nigeria, online alone is not enough. We had to find customers as in the good old days: on the street, on the radio and on TV. I gathered the entire team, put a cap on the table and said: “Everyone throws in an idea for offline promotion. Even those that seem stupid.” Two days later we had a list.

• We distributed 10,000 beer mats with a discount code, to track how many customers they generated, to bars and restaurants in Lagos.
• We gave Hi-Vis vests with our logo to the Okada drivers. We took care of their safety, and a whole army of Okadas advertised us to everyone in SUVs passing by.
• We got access to the airline ticket sales areas at airports and showed people standing in line, on tablets, how quick the service was. After all, they are flying somewhere, so they need a hotel.
• On intercity buses, our guy bought a ticket, and at some point stood up, took ten tablets from his bag and asked who wanted a little fun. Everyone did. The driver got his palms greased, so there was no trouble.
• We signed a celebrity, a guy known as the local Kanye West, as brand ambassador. In Nigeria only telecom companies could afford celebrities, so this made Jovago a player in the big leagues. Under the hood, his fee was a few free hotel nights a month.

The next project was thought up by, wait for it, the guy who delivers our food. About 60% of Nigerians are under 30, and the vast majority of them are looking for work, often with the whole family helping. In every large town we announced that we were looking for people to do small jobs: check hotels, secure new partners, hand out leaflets. We really did need people, and we had over a hundred jobs ready to go. The response was spontaneous. People retweeted the announcement and put it up on Facebook, because everyone in Nigeria knows someone who is looking for work. Not only did our recognizability grow gigantically, we became a “friendly firm”, because any company offering a hundred jobs in Nigeria must be friendly. The only drawback was that we received over 100,000 CVs, and our servers exploded.

Then we went for TV. TV stations in Nigeria often keep to their contracts loosely, signing for a number of commercials and broadcasting far fewer. So serious advertisers hire a company to check the number broadcast, and another to check the first. My old friend “I’ll show you” turned up, and I decided against paying off this conglomerate. Instead we announced that the first ten people to call us after each Jovago commercial would get a thousand naira each, about three dollars. We bought a thousand spots. Besides $500,000 for the commercials, we spent $30,000 on prizes, half of what the TV inspection companies would have cost, and the buzz took our reach many times beyond what a normal commercial could have guaranteed.

Stage four: I don’t know that I know

Only the fourth stage is left: I don’t know that I know. The intuition stage. You just feel this is the best decision, even though you don’t know exactly why.

But your subconscious knows perfectly well, and remembers why.

What I took from it

• Staying past the second stage is half the job. The people who leave after six months leave at the moment the learning starts.
• Copying a model from another market means copying its infrastructure. Amazon could start without a warehouse. In Nigeria, you have to build the roads first.
• Control the quality you are paid for. Uber owned the problem, Easy Taxi borrowed it.
• Cheap beats expensive when it is clever. Our prize idea cost half of what TV inspection companies would have, and gave us more reach than the commercials alone.

This is from Chapter 10, “From ‘I don’t know I don’t know’ to ‘I don’t know that I know’”, of Chasing Black Unicorns. All of my income from the book goes to the MaYa Foundation.

Listen to this chapter: Polish audiobook on YouTube (English version coming soon) · Spotify