Dee 𖤍

I remember speaking with a friend a few months ago last year, that the trajectory of the next frontier consumer apps in Nigeria is going to be social. The plethora of apps and build in the past couple weeks that has dominated the space has proved my point to an extent. While fintech is still definitely a progressive industry with more feats to attain, it is safe to still say in a context that “its solved” Better put, the payment rails and infrastructure needed to power digital economies have been put in place, the next frontier would certainly be social. Now that people now have the means to ‘buy and sell’ online the next junction would be creating social experiences that would facilitate this and allow people interact within our own Nigerian context. Don’t get me wrong, Twitter is great, same as Facebook and all of the Social Consumer apps from Silicon Valley but one thing is for sure they weren’t designed according to the African context or our default mental models. We adapted or had to learn along the way but it also presents the fact that we’ve got opportunities to design social spaces on the internet in a way that is native to the Nigerian demography. Definitely there are financial constraints to achieving this and I’m well aware of the unfriendliness of the VC firms towards new ideas that try to explore these new ideas but I’ll say the hype and buzz of last week is the validation to see that there is a missing vertical we might not be paying as much attention to Why am I speaking on this, well it’s because I believe designers would be really pivotal and instrumental in making this happen, and by designers I don’t mean those who stop at pixel pushing alone. I mean people who would take a step away from Silicon Valley playbook and really ask ourselves what does the African or Nigerian social consumer app look like. Now, thinking on these thoughts I had an interesting angle of thinking about how our fintechs might be even better positioned to take a shift here, and I’ll explain. Social apps thrive on network effects, a reason to be on there because the next person is there. One social app that had almost everybody was 2go. We didn’t know ourselves but it was a melting pot. Folks could join in Unilag groups and rooms and meet new people, there was gamification with the hierarchies and all those came with certain social status within these groups. If you think of a fintech app like say Opay, well almost everyone uses Opay. All it might take would be to design a social layer ontop its financial rails. Now one might ask, why is this necessary. From my observation of the Nigerian society. Social = Commerce, people weere selling on WhatsApp before WhatsApp business became a thing, people sell on twitter and all of the other social apps before these apps evolved to facilitate commerce and if we’re honest a lot of it wasn’t built with a thought for the African market necessarily, but we adapted regardless. Now let’s take a cue from the Asian community. If we look closely We actually have more close parallel with the East than the West. And the growth of WeChat and how it supports their social and financial systems is part of what I’m driving at. I’m not saying the social app is a Danfo game or whatever. I just have a thesis that if the financial layer has been set with the success of a number of fintechs in our ecosystem, I dare say a new layer ontop this can be the social layer. With the right mix of design [I mean both system and product], proper research on how to tap into our social structures and financial backings from money bags. We might be able to recreate feats that Evans from Snap or Nikita from Gas achieved. It’s a thesis and last week was validation from the digital market square (X I mean) that there might an opportunity here.