African market opportunity · International management
There is real opportunity in African markets, and real cost in getting the details wrong. We help you work out where demand is, what it will take to serve it and whether the numbers hold up. See the World Bank outlook.
Investors welcome. NDA on request. A limited number of engagements at a time.
Flagship engagement
Before you commit, get a clearer answer to three questions: who will buy, how will you reach them, and what will it cost? We bring customer research, a route to market, financial scenarios and a practical launch plan together.
People before assumptions
One market and agreed locations. Research design, schedule and total price confirmed before payment. Longer interviews or additional markets require a separate scope.
The Africa Pre-Mortem
Likely failures ranked by damage, with the cheapest test for each. Before the budget is spent.
Cameroon · Pre-Mortem · Sample
The growth opportunity
Market size gets attention. Trust, distribution and unit economics decide who earns it.
The cost of getting it wrong
A promising forecast is only a start. The wrong payment partners, local setup or customer assumptions can tie up cash and make a good-looking plan hard to run.
Mobile-money and bank rails differ by country and provider. Async confirmations, delayed settlement and outages can leave accepted payments in limbo; retries, fallback rails and reconciliation take real engineering and operations. Pre-funding and FX exposure can tie up cash before revenue arrives.
Licences require more than filing fees: local readiness, specialist compliance, credible partners and sustained regulator engagement. Each entity can add banking, tax, reporting and treasury work. Regulators, banks and local partners are relationships to build before the emergency, not names to add after launch.
Formal IDs and mapped street addresses may not fit every onboarding journey. KYC friction, verification failures and single-provider dependence can cost legitimate customers. Paid ads alone may not reach them: WhatsApp, community referrals, agents and assisted onboarding all have operating costs. Local operators are essential—and sought after.
The pressure is not a made-up deadline. In our experience, local learning, regulator and partner trust, and customer relationships take time to build—and cannot be bought overnight when launch day arrives. Waiting indefinitely has a cost: other teams keep learning while your assumptions stay untested. But launching everywhere at once multiplies fixed costs, compliance exposure and management load before the economics are proven. Pick a beachhead, validate the hard assumptions and expand on evidence.
Build the market-specific case before you commit
Lessons from building here
A map pin can be accurate and still leave a rider lost. A polished demo does not mean people will trust it. And data costs that look small in a spreadsheet can add up fast. We build and run our own products in African markets, so these are problems we have had to work through ourselves.
See what we buildWhen the idea survives
One workflow, one country, a written decision. Implementation follows only if justified, at CHF 300/hour.
Cameroon · French and English requests · Human review
Before you sign, before you scale
It works in the demo. Will people use it? We look at trust, language, habit and the workaround you are replacing.
Will they use it? 02 / Before you sign · CHF 1,200A vendor promises AI, scale and local fit. We find the unsupported claims, the year-two costs and the lock-in.
Read it before you signOutside the cities
We design for places where connectivity is limited too.
Question it. Take it apart. Build it better.
Francis OsihThe person behind the work
Your brief stays with the person doing the work. With 20+ years in programming and technology, we can move from a tested workflow to a fast-to-market prototype when the evidence supports building. Experience in Cameroon gives us a practical grounding in challenging market-entry conditions, not a template to impose on every country. Each market needs its own evidence.
Francis Osih on LinkedInWe build what we advise on
Our own products, built and run by OSIH.
Custom work
Tell us what you are trying to do. We will let you know within two business days whether we can help and what a sensible next step looks like.
Send your briefAI first. People always.
Local knowledge. Clear responsibility. Knowing when to stop.