Asher's Blog

One of the most valuable lessons I took from Y Combinator—and perhaps took to an extreme—was this: forget about Forbes, The New York Times, TechCrunch, “30 Under 30,” “40 Under 40” and all the other forms of external recognition that can make a founder feel successful before the business has actually succeeded.

Focus on making genuine progress. Focus on what your customers want. Focus on building something that many customers will value. Improve the product. Increase the usefulness. Understand why people stay, why they leave and what they are willing to pay for.

For the first two or three years of building our company, that was largely what I did. We did not invest heavily in marketing. I concentrated on making the product better and better. There was always another part of the customer experience to simplify, another operational problem to solve and another reason for the customer to trust us.

That discipline has stayed with me. We now do much more marketing, but I remain deeply concerned about return on investment. I am not easily moved because my name appears somewhere, our product is mentioned in the press or people in the ecosystem are discussing us. My first questions are more practical:

What did this achieve? How are we measuring it? What behaviour changed because of it?

Founders should be difficult to impress—not cynical, ungrateful or incapable of celebration, but sufficiently grounded to distinguish attention from progress.

Attention is not the same as demand

Publicity can create the feeling that something important has happened. A photograph circulates; a respected publication mentions the company. The founder receives invitations and congratulatory messages. Website traffic rises for a day.

None of this is necessarily bad. Attention can be valuable; but attention and demand are different things.

Attention means people noticed you. Demand means people want what you have built strongly enough to act.

They sign up, make a purchase, complete onboarding, use the product, renew, refer another customer or accept a higher price because the value justifies it. These behaviours create a business. Publicity may contribute to them, but it should not be confused with them.

Paul Graham has written that the central mistake that kills startups is not making something users want. The statement sounds simple, but it forces an uncomfortable question: if the press is impressed and customers are not, whose opinion matters more?

The answer is obvious. Yet founders repeatedly allocate more energy to looking important than becoming useful.

Recognition is pleasant, but the world continues

I understand the value of recognition. I am invited to the United States Consulate in Lagos from time to time, and in December last year I was one of a small number of people recognised for the work we had done during the decade. It was meaningful. When a respected institution acknowledges years of effort, you should be grateful and allow yourself to appreciate the moment.

Then the world continues; customers still expect the product to work. Employees still need direction. Revenue still has to grow. Compliance obligations remain. An award does not improve retention, repair a weak margin or extend runway unless you deliberately convert the recognition into something useful.

This is the right relationship with awards: receive them with gratitude, but do not build your identity or operating plan around them.

An award may strengthen credibility, open a relationship, encourage employees or make a customer more comfortable. Those are legitimate benefits. But its value comes from what it enables, not from the plaque itself.

The moment recognition becomes more emotionally satisfying than customer progress, the founder is in danger.

Every publicity activity should have a job

I am not against publicity. Some publicity is extremely valuable. The question is: valuable for what?

A communication campaign may be intended to:

• create awareness among a defined customer segment;
• strengthen trust in a category where credibility is essential;
• generate qualified demand;
• improve customer loyalty;
• attract a particular kind of employee;
• support market leadership;
• educate regulators or policymakers;
• shape culture or public perception;
• make future partnerships easier; or
• give existing customers language with which to explain the product.

These objectives require different channels, stories and measurements. If the goal is awareness, relevant reach, search activity or direct traffic may matter. If the goal is demand, measure qualified leads, conversion and acquisition cost. If the goal is trust, examine sales-cycle objections, conversion among previously hesitant customers and the quality of organisations willing to engage. If the goal is retention, look at usage, renewal and referrals among the audience exposed to the campaign.

Not every brand investment can be tied neatly to immediate revenue. Market leadership and reputation can compound over years. But “the effect is long term” should not become an excuse for having no theory of effect at all. Before spending money, write down what you expect the activity to change.

Unplanned press is not automatically good press

Some days ago, our head of marketing sent me a press item about the company. We did not know who had commissioned or written it. Some people were excited, but I was not particularly moved. The article felt generic, and it appeared to have been written with artificial intelligence without enough understanding of the company. I could not connect with it.

This is becoming an important issue. It is now inexpensive to manufacture large amounts of content. A company can appear everywhere without saying anything distinctive. Founders can buy distribution, generate polished articles and count mentions, yet leave the market with no clearer understanding of why the product matters.

More content does not automatically create more meaning; an unclear article may even weaken the brand. It can misstate the product, attract the wrong customers or make the company sound like every other startup using the same fashionable language.

A founder should ask:

• Is this accurate?
• Does it express something recognisably true about us?
• Is it meant for an audience that matters?
• Does it help that audience understand, trust or choose us?
• What do we want the reader to do next?

If nobody can answer these questions, the press mention may be noise wearing the clothes of progress.

Fashionable metrics are dangerous because they are easy to display

The metrics founders discuss publicly are not always the metrics that best describe the health of the company.

Downloads can rise while active usage remains weak. Registered users can grow while few customers pay. Gross transaction value can look enormous even when the company earns a tiny margin or loses money on each transaction. Social-media impressions can multiply while qualified demand remains unchanged. Capital raised can attract admiration even though it is an obligation to create future value, not proof that value has already been created.

These numbers are not inherently useless. Each may answer a legitimate question. The problem begins when a metric is selected because it creates a flattering story rather than because it guides a consequential decision.

Eric Ries calls this distinction the difference between vanity metrics and actionable metrics in The Lean Startup. An actionable metric helps a team understand cause and effect. It enables the company to decide what to repeat, change or stop. A vanity metric moves impressively but leaves the decision exactly where it was.

A useful test is simple: if this number rises, what will we do differently? If it falls, what will we do differently? If the answer is nothing, the number may be decoration.

Features can become another form of publicity

I once watched another company in our market that had raised about $7 million. It appeared to have several exciting features, and I found myself thinking about what we should add to our own product. This feature looked interesting; that feature seemed modern. Perhaps our product needed to become more exciting.

The company was also doing a great deal of marketing. Today, the business no longer exists.

I do not tell that story to celebrate another founder’s failure. Building a company is difficult, and I do not know every circumstance that produced the outcome. The lesson is that funding, publicity and an impressive feature list do not necessarily reveal the quality of the underlying business.

Features themselves can become vanity metrics. Teams count what they shipped instead of measuring what customers adopted. A product becomes more complicated while its central value becomes less clear.

Before copying a competitor’s feature, ask:

• Which customer problem does it solve?
• How frequently does that problem occur?
• Is the customer already asking for a solution?
• Will it improve acquisition, activation, retention, revenue or referral?
• What will it cost to build, support and secure?
• Does it strengthen our strategic position?

A competitor’s activity is evidence that they made a decision. It is not evidence that the decision was good.

Unit economics are harder to celebrate—and more important

Founders should be impressed by the quiet numbers that show whether a company can endure.

Unit economics examine the revenue and direct costs associated with an individual unit of the business: perhaps one customer, subscription, order, delivery or transaction. For a recurring software company, the questions may include:

• How much does it cost to acquire a customer?
• How much gross profit will that customer generate?
• How long does it take to recover the acquisition cost?
• How often does the customer leave?
• Does the customer expand their spending over time?
• What does onboarding, support and service delivery truly cost?

The formula depends on the business, but the principle is constant: does each additional unit strengthen the company or deepen the loss?

This matters everywhere, but the pressure appears differently across markets. In many African markets, operating talent and some services may cost less in dollar terms, but purchasing power is also lower, currencies can depreciate and customers may be highly price-sensitive. A company can attract many users without generating enough contribution to support the infrastructure required to serve them.

In the United States and other high-cost Western markets, customers may pay more, but salaries, distribution, compliance and competition for attention are expensive. High revenue per customer can conceal an acquisition machine that consumes too much capital.

Geography does not repeal mathematics. Whether the customer pays in naira, shillings, rand, pounds or dollars, a founder should understand what happens economically when one more customer arrives.

Test small before you spend big

One of the operating principles I value is to try things in bits and pieces until you discover what works and produces cash flow. Then you can invest much more aggressively.

This is not timidity; it is staged conviction. Suppose a company wants to test a new marketing channel. It can begin with a limited audience, a clear offer and a predetermined budget. Before the experiment starts, the team defines success: cost per qualified opportunity, conversion to a paying customer, likely payback period and customer quality after acquisition.

If the test produces encouraging economics, increase the investment. If it fails, study why. Change the creative, audience, offer or channel. Test again where the learning justifies it. Do not commit an enormous budget merely because the channel is fashionable or a competitor appears to be using it.

The same principle applies to products, countries and partnerships. A pilot should buy information. The founder’s task is to determine whether the information warrants the next level of commitment.

In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries describes validated learning as a central measure of progress under extreme uncertainty. This is useful because early experiments may not produce immediate profit, but they should reduce uncertainty. Money spent without revenue can still be productive if it generates reliable knowledge. Money that produces neither cash nor learning is simply gone.

Marketing ROI needs a broader but disciplined definition

It is easy to say that every naira spent on marketing must produce an immediately traceable naira of revenue. The real world is more complicated.

A customer may hear about the company through a press article, see an event, receive a recommendation, search online and then speak with a salesperson. Giving all the credit to the final click would misunderstand the journey. Brand activity may reduce future acquisition cost, increase conversion or shorten the sales cycle without receiving direct attribution.

Therefore, founders should avoid two extremes. The first is demanding immediate sales from every brand activity. The second is treating brand as an unmeasurable mystery.

Use a portfolio of evidence:

• direct-response conversion;
• qualified pipeline attributed or influenced;
• customer-acquisition cost by channel;
• payback period;
• branded search and direct traffic;
• conversion-rate changes;
• sales-cycle length;
• retention and referral;
• customer interviews about how trust was formed; and
• controlled experiments where practical.

The goal is not perfect attribution. Perfect attribution rarely exists. The goal is sufficiently good evidence to allocate the next amount of capital intelligently.

Founders need an internal scoreboard

The world will offer you many scoreboards. Media publications will score visibility. Award organisations will score stories and profiles. Investors may temporarily score fundraising momentum. Social platforms will score attention. Industry events will score access and status.

You need a scoreboard that belongs to the business. For one company, the important measures may be weekly active users, retention and contribution margin. For another, they may be recurring revenue, implementation time, collection days and customer expansion. A marketplace may care about liquidity, repeat behaviour and take rate. A financial product may prioritise trust, repayment, loss rates, assets under management and liquidity.

Choose a small group of measures that reveal whether customers are receiving value and whether the company is becoming economically stronger. Review them consistently. Do not change them every time another number looks more flattering.

The internal scoreboard protects the founder from emotional manipulation by the external one.

Publicity becomes useful when the business is ready to receive it

There is also a timing question. Publicity can become wasteful when the product is not ready, onboarding is broken or the company lacks the capacity to serve the demand. The campaign creates traffic, but the traffic encounters a disappointing experience. The founder has paid to accelerate customer frustration.

When the product works, the customer retains, the message is clear and the economics are understood, marketing becomes powerful. It can take an already functioning engine and provide more fuel.

That is where we are increasingly focused now. After years of working on the product and operations, we can invest more deliberately in telling the story and reaching a wider market. We are also thinking seriously about expansion into the United States, where the economics, competition and customer expectations will be different.

The lesson from Africa cannot simply be copied into another market. We will need to test the offer, price, channel, sales process and cost structure again. A higher willingness to pay is attractive, but it arrives with higher operating costs and stronger alternatives.

Expansion should not be an announcement; it should be a new set of hypotheses.

Be grateful, but remain unimpressed

Founders should celebrate progress. Teams need moments of recognition, and gratitude protects ambition from becoming joyless. An award can honour years of work; a thoughtful article can strengthen a category. A prestigious introduction can open an important door.

But none of these things should suspend judgment. Ask what the attention is for. Ask which customer behaviour it should influence. Ask whether a feature creates value or merely creates conversation. Ask whether the company earns more from a customer than it spends acquiring and serving that customer. Ask whether the latest experiment produced cash, learning or neither.

Most importantly, do not allow another company’s publicity to alter your strategy without evidence. You can see its headlines; you cannot see its bank account, churn, customer complaints, internal conflict or board meetings.

The founder who is easily impressed becomes easily distracted. The founder who is difficult to impress can appreciate recognition without mistaking it for success. They remain focused on the work that is less visible but more consequential: serving customers, improving the product, protecting cash, strengthening the economics and building an organisation that can last.

Forbes cannot save a weak business. TechCrunch cannot repair negative unit economics; an award cannot manufacture retention.

Applause is pleasant. Progress is the business. —

References and further reading

• Paul Graham, The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups.
• Paul Graham, The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn.
• Eric Ries, The Lean Startup.
• Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm.
• Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow.
• Mercury, Understanding unit economics and why it matters.
• CB Insights, Startup Failure Post-Mortems.