What I learned building Africa's largest home services marketplace

• 5-10% of people doing “entreprenuership” want to do it. The rest would prefer a job but can’t or don’t know how to find it. A more centralised approach could cater for this dynamic.
• Small business SaaS is hard. But really cool
• “Design” can make itself small for no reason. If you can give people money - they will forgive a lot of UX/UI things. Design for giving people money then get better from there
• Aka, offtake is everything. consumer can have a ceiling especially in a naturally low frequency use case
• Online to Offline is hard. Collect your money at the point of value you control and make that the business. Or try to control the entire interaction
• The more you control, the less breadth you should have. A “marketplace” only makes sense when you can outsource properly.
• Venture culture is poison. It’s not relevant for most things. It’s very important to know why you need that kind of money
• Culture is everything. Very hard to get right but when you do - it sings. When you don’t - it wails.
• Mergers are tough. Culture is very much contextual and very difficult to reset
• It’s not enough to read the fine print. Every promise should be written down
• Some businesses are inherently ugly. You can’t change that. But you can protect against it.
• Be mission driven

I’ll keep adding things as I remember them