We’re building a venture studio

The aim is to launch several ventures in parallel, form hypotheses quickly, build a first version, test it in the market and adjust based on what we observe. Our ambition is simple: build resilient, profitable businesses.

Today, we’re working on three ventures in particular.

Jago makes it easier to source African products in bulk. We start with shops’ requests and manage the supplier relationship through to the order.

Tiimora is operations software for accounting firms, initially focusing on time-consuming tasks around their core accounting work.

Dumaan develops frozen West African food products that save time on some preparation steps.

Our ventures usually start with problems we know first-hand, either because we experience them ourselves or because we already work with the people who face them.

So we begin by taking the problem seriously: experience on the ground, existing solutions, alternatives people use today, available information and the people concerned.

Our approach is then fairly simple:

Understand enough → form a hypothesis → build → test in the real world → adjust.

We draw mainly on two approaches that resonate with us.

Seth Godin has had a strong influence on how I think about marketing: as a generous act of service. Choose a specific audience, understand the change they want, create something that matters to them and earn their trust before trying to sell.

And Steve Blank, through Customer Development: discovering and validating needs with customers, treating early convictions as hypotheses to test in the market rather than established truths.

That’s also why we take an audience first approach: start with the people we want to serve.

To guide the product, pricing and channels, we first try to understand who we want to serve, which groups we want to test and the difficulties they face.

To structure this initial strategy, we’re currently testing a simple framework: APOP.

Audience

Who do we want to serve? Which groups do we want to test? What difficulties do they face?

Positioning

What promise do we want to make to this audience? What benefit do we offer compared with existing alternatives?

Offer

What exactly are we offering, in what form and at what price?

Promotion

How will we bring this offer to market? Through which channels, and with what approach to reaching demand?

We add one final question.

What we want to test

What do we need to observe to consider our hypothesis sound?

APOP helps us turn what we think we know into an initial strategy we can actually test.

We’ve done this exercise for Jago, Tiimora and Dumaan. Some answers remain hypotheses, particularly the offers, prices and uses we need to test. The articles set out these starting choices; conversations and early trials will help us refine them.