Market entry
80M people are holding the product you haven’t shipped.
They have the phone, the ID, the registered SIM, everything except an account built for how they actually live, pay, borrow and save.
From HQ, that looks like a market.
A big one.
Most adults don’t have a bank account. Mobile penetration is rising. The gap looks obvious.
So the “Africa launch” starts to look inevitable.
But then you get on the ground, and the same continent stops being one market.
In Kenya, M-Pesa turned mobile money into everyday infrastructure years ago.
In Nigeria, mobile money barely moved for years, then surged once platforms like OPay and PalmPay built around how Nigerians actually pay.
In South Africa, a mature banking sector meant mobile money never really became the default.
Three markets.
Three completely different answers to the same product question.
Mobile money now moves $1.4 trillion a year across the continent, two-thirds of the global total. But almost all of that volume runs through a handful of markets, each for its own reason.
An “Africa strategy” would have been wrong in at least two of them.
That’s the trap with big market numbers.
They make demand look aggregated.
But demand is never aggregated on the ground.
It sits inside payment habits, trust networks, agent density, regulation, cash dependence, bank penetration, and the thousand small ways people already move money.
I’ve spent years landing in markets like these to work out what is real and what is just TAM wearing a nice suit.
The demand may be there.
But it is never just “80M people.”
You only find the real market by getting close.
The market is rarely the thing you’re waiting on.
It’s the distance between you and it.