An idea is not a product. Most ideas should never become products. We say no a lot.
Every quarter someone — a partner, a customer, an engineer at a dinner — brings us an idea for a product BOU "should build." Most of them are interesting. We build maybe one in twenty. Here is the filter.
Filter 1: Do we need it ourselves?
If the answer is no, we usually stop here.
BOU is a real estate operator, an energy operator, an agriculture operator, an education operator, and a tech operator. We have a lot of internal pain to point a software team at before we go inventing new pain for ourselves. If a product idea solves a problem none of our businesses actually has, we are very skeptical.
This is why Xtate exists (we manage properties). This is why BOSS exists (we run operating businesses). This is why our tracking platform exists (we have fleets). The list of products we have built that did not start as an internal need is short, and most of those have not done as well as the ones that did.
Filter 2: Does Nigerian context actually matter?
If a generic global SaaS already does this and the local angle is "but cheaper" — we pass.
"Cheaper" is not a moat. The moment a real competitor with deeper pockets shows up, you lose.
What we look for instead is a problem where the local context is the product. NIN and BVN integration that an offshore vendor will never bother to build properly. Naira-first pricing that does not break when the FX rate moves. Forms that ask for the right things in the right language. Support staff who understand Nigerian business culture without a translation layer.
Local context is a real moat. We have watched well-funded foreign products bounce off Nigerian markets because they could not bring themselves to localize properly. That is a gift, and we accept it.
Filter 3: Is the maintenance cost survivable for five years?
Every product is a long-term commitment. Every product has an indefinite tail of customer support, security patches, regulatory updates, and integration drift.
Before we ship a new product, we ask: if this only ever has 100 paying customers, can we still afford to keep it alive for five years? If the answer is no — if the product only makes sense at huge scale — we are usually wrong about the scale, and the product will get killed two years in.
Products that survive this filter tend to be either (a) so cheap to run that scale does not matter, or (b) the customer pays enough that even a small number of customers covers the operating cost.
Every product is a long bet. The cheapest way to make it survivable is to keep it small enough that a small team can keep it alive.
Two that passed the filter
Xtate passed all three. We needed it (we manage rentals). Nigerian context matters (rent collection here is its own animal). Maintenance is survivable (we use it ourselves, so the marginal cost of running it for outside customers is small). It is now one of our best products.
Ninja passed all three. We needed it (every product needed auth). Local context matters (we wanted NIN/BVN-native identity that offshore vendors do not do well). Maintenance is survivable (it powers our own products, so it stays maintained regardless of external uptake).
Two that did not
We have flirted with building a generic consumer messaging app. It failed the filters. We do not have an internal need that justifies it, the local context is thin (WhatsApp owns this market), and maintenance would be brutal at the scale required. We did not build it. We probably saved ourselves $300,000 and three engineer-years.
We have flirted with building a clone of a US accounting SaaS, "for Nigeria." It half-passed — we kind of needed it, and local context kind of matters. But the maintenance cost of a full accounting product was way past what we could absorb if it did not hit traction. We decided to integrate with existing tools through BOSS instead. Cheaper, lower risk, faster to ship.
The framework in one line
Build it if you need it, if local context matters, and if you can afford to keep it alive for five years. Otherwise, do not.
It sounds obvious. It is. The number of African tech companies that ignore at least one of those three filters is also obvious.