Users come before technology

Sometime in early 2011, I visited a friend at his home in Lagos from where he was running a technology startup. I got to find out that the business was an SMS dating platform with hundreds of thousands of active users. He did not advertise this business publicly; it grew organically by word of mouth. I asked who the typical users were? He told me that they were ordinary people on the streets- Traders, mechanics, tailors, everyday people. Shortly after, another social media platform called “Eskimi” revealed their numbers and everyone could not understand how they had millions of active users in such a short time. We were all shocked when we discovered that the platform was built and run from Eastern Europe. The founders were not even in Nigeria at the time.

Tecno and Infinix are no doubt some of the most popular phone brands in the Nigerian market today, but do we know the founders or does it make any difference to us at all if we knew? People are buying the product on the merit of it and not because of any attributes of the founders.

A relative I grew up with in Benin is the largest supplier of towels and bedsheets to hotels in Nigeria. He is also probably the biggest producer of bedding in Nigeria, but you would never know him if he drove past you in traffic by himself in his Honda. Others rebrand his products, and he does not care as long as he makes a sale. He told me that he sells four times more online through e-commerce marketplaces and his online store than his physical store inside a mall in Abuja.

What is common with the platforms and products I have mentioned above is that they found a massive audience and users with the founders in relative anonymity. The users accepted the products on their merits, and it didn’t have anything to do with the promoters’ personalities.

With most startup announcements in Nigeria, the media starts with the personalities behind them first before any narrative about the product. It is even worse if the founders have had some pedigree or notoriety. Announcements about products are no longer seen through objective eyes but with tainted bias about feelings towards the founder. This bias came out widely when Linda Ikeji (an ex-model and blogger) launched LindaIkejiSocial recently.

A lot of the reactions to LindaIkejiSocial from the technology space were acidic and vitriolic. Her users, however, welcomed it in high numbers and signed up. She has a large following because the users like the content she provides. Her personality and her relative success is part of the content that she is serving. It is an entertainment blog, and she is part of the show.

It is an entirely reasonable argument to say that she asked for all that scrutiny by making her name the brand and using herself and her relative success to promote it. I think there is a method to her madness but most people focus on the madness and not the process.

To also be entirely fair, the first time I have ever heard her mention anything about her user statistics was when she said that 50,000 people signed up for her social media site on the first day. Now, that shows her method works.

Nollywood is a bit different. While members of the African technology startup community are avid consumers of Jason Njoku’s personal blog, a lot of the consumers of IrokoTV content may not even know who he is or read his blog. I also don’t think any of the people watching Africa Magic care about the owners of Multichoice.

To the typical African Internet consumer, the founders or opinion of the tech community does not matter. A painful truth. Even companies don’t care about any controversy around Linda Ikeji; they just want to get to her users.

Users Before Platform
One of the very best books I have ever read on the topic of “Usability” in technology is titled “Don’t Make Me Think”, written by Steve Krug. In the book, he says — “usability is about people and how they understand and use things, not about technology. And while technology often changes quickly, people change very slowly.”

It is interesting to note how content consumption in Nigeria has rapidly shifted online. Yele Sowore, the founder of Sahara Reporters, once told me that the number of hits he gets on an article in an hour is usually more than the entire daily circulation of most Nigerian newspapers. These statistics are relevant. I may not be a consumer of Sahara Reporter’s content. I have never watched a Nollywood movie in full, and I have not spent more than 5 minutes at a time on Linda Ikeji’s site, but I will not deny that the content produced by Sahara Reporters, Nollywood and Linda Ikeji have mass appeal. This mass audience is the one a lot of Nigerians in the tech space do not know whereas advertisers fight for space on Linda Ikeji’s online properties to reach these people.

The people are still consuming the same content they were used to offline, only this time, they get it faster, and because word of mouth is very effective, these new platforms gained tremendous numbers. Habits have not changed. Technology only adapted to those habits.

There was something Linda Ikeji said during the launch of her new platform which a lot of people may have missed. Her new social media network is the result of feedback from “her current users”. It was not an attempt to mimic Silicon Valley or launch another product just for the sake of becoming popular. She is already quite famous. She became famous by providing something to a massive audience and wasn’t made famous so that she can reach a larger audience. There is a difference.

I believe her success in doing this is not just about her personal brand. There are hidden lessons in there. Someone without a technology background, used the simplest of tools online — a free blog, to gain a massive audience and amass wealth from advertisers.

She figured out what most technology people miss. She figured out what her users want and she delivers it. Technology people should rather be humbled than remain aloof. If we keep looking at the people behind products and motives instead of the products and users, we will miss a wealth of knowledge.

My observation about these popular Nigerian online platforms is that they gain a broad audience because they are consistent at producing new content. A lot of times, they cross ethical boundaries in the process, but they keep the audience engaged. This simple explanation takes a lot of hard work to achieve. The genius in Linda Ikeji’s new model is that she has now made that process user-powered and will pay the content providers for stories in a surprising new twist.

Technology is The Simple Part.
We are all simple people when it comes to technology products. Very few of us use complicated things. We typically use things where the experience is as frictionless as possible. Great fortunes were made by companies who quickly mastered the art of making things as simple to use as possible; this is why “User Experience Design” became quite valuable.