There was no honest playbook for building in Africa. So we wrote one.
There was no honest playbook for building in Africa. So we wrote one.
The Method
A shared language for building a company where the data is thin, the benchmarks do not apply, and being wrong is expensive.
Developed across more than 160 companies in eleven African markets over eight years. Corrected wherever it failed.
Each cycle begins from the evidence the previous one produced.
What it is for
A founder makes hundreds of decisions and can defend almost none of them with evidence. The method gives a company one language for the only question that matters at any moment: what is actually stopping us, and what would have to be true for this to work.
Its governing principle is that going to market and raising capital are propositions to be tested rather than beliefs to be argued. Form a view. Try it. Keep what the evidence supports.
This is how a dark founder becomes fundable on the business instead of the story: not by polishing the pitch, but by producing the evidence that makes the pitch unnecessary.
What is actually holding this company back?
The business is mapped in full: market, numbers, team, constraints. Most companies discover their binding constraint is not the one they had been working against.
Once it is named, hypotheses are developed for what would move it, each scored on impact, confidence and ease, so the choice is between real options rather than preferences.
Produces
A constraint stated in one sentence
A ranked shortlist of hypotheses
What would have to be true for this to work?
Each hypothesis becomes a defined experiment: the metric it should move, the baseline it starts from, the result expected, and what it will take. Then it runs against real buyers, in the real market.
Most companies stall here rather than at the product. Something works, and there is no repeatable way of putting it in front of the people it is for.
Produces
Experiments running against real buyers
Evidence instead of opinion
What did the evidence actually say?
Each experiment is measured against the metric it set out to move, and the gap between result and expectation becomes the material for the next round.
Every result gets a determination. What proved itself is written into something a team can run alone. What half worked is refined. What failed is recorded rather than repeated.
Produces
A measured result for every experiment
A playbook the team owns
Then begin again
What it assumes
That the binding constraint is knowable. That it can be tested rather than debated. That the real bottleneck changes as a company grows, so any diagnosis has a shelf life.
What it asks
Access to the numbers and the customers. A willingness to have the hard choice put on the table. Enough runway to finish a cycle.
Diagnose surfaced a trade-off the company had been resolving by accident.
Build produced a measurement system the team still runs.
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Diagnose named two structural gaps before an investor could find them.
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Analyze turned referral luck into deliberate sourcing.
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Where the loop was learned first, from inside, the hard way.
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