A Beautiful App That Nobody Ever Saw
There was a young man I once knew around Sinza. His mind was frightening. He sat in his small rented room, between a computer that kept stalling and a cup of milkless tea that had already gone cold, and he built a mobile app that would completely change how the Tanzanian farmer sells his produce. A beautiful app. Finished. Without a single flaw. Engineers over in Silicon Valley would have learned something from this young man. But today, three years later, that app lies on some server waiting to die quietly. Nobody knows it. Nobody uses it. And that talented young man? He has gone back to the village to farm.
On the other side, there is another young man. His app is full of flaws. It crashes every five minutes. But every week he is on the radio, he is in the newspaper, he is on some podcast speaking boldly about his “vision” to change Africa. Today he has investors. He has secured funding in the millions. That same flawed app now has users multiplying by the day. And here is where the most astonishing thing sits: that first young man, the one with the real talent, now uses the app built by this second one, the one with all the noise. This is the secret nobody likes to tell you. In the world of business, the best company does not win. The most visible one wins.
In Africa we are producing startups like mushrooms after the rains. On every corner of the city there is a young person with an “app,” a “platform,” a “solution” to some problem. But most of them walk around with one mistaken belief in their heads: that the customer will come on his own simply because the product is good. They believe quality alone is enough. That if you just build something good, the world will come knocking at your door on its own. But go to Kariakoo and see the lie in this. There is a trader with the finest tomatoes of all, tucked away in a corner, waiting politely for a customer to discover him. Beside him is another, his tomatoes ordinary, but he has a voice, he is calling out, he coaxes every passerby. Who sells out first? Not the one with the best tomatoes. The one with the voice. The seeing man needs no one to tell him to look.
Now let me tell you a truth they don’t teach properly in those business degrees. Every business passes through three stages before it stands firm: birth, growth, and maturity. Many people think Public Relations, this thing the educated ones call “PR” is a luxury for big, mature companies. They think it is the ornament of those who have already grown rich. That is exactly where they lose the road. PR is not a finishing ornament. It is a founding pillar. It is at that very stage of birth that you need people to know you, to trust you, and to tell your story, even before you have landed your first customer.
So what is the problem? A young person gets his small startup capital, and he sees that every shilling must go to the “essential” costs, renting an office, paying engineers, buying equipment. He sees PR as a waste of money. He says he will deal with it “later, once I’ve made it.” But this is the decision to live the easy life. It is like a farmer who plants the very best seed and then refuses to water it because water has a cost. He waits for the crop to grow on its own. Yet the truth is that the little money you invest early in building relationships is the very bridge that gets you to market before your competitors have even woken up.
True PR Is Discipline, Not the Work of Sycophants
And here I must warn you of something heavy. True PR is not that work of the sycophants I once spoke about. It is not blowing false trumpets, it is not dressing up things that aren’t true, it is not empty noise without meaning. No. That is an entirely different trade. True PR is discipline. It is building genuine relationships with journalists who understand your sector. It is giving the reporter the truth, information of substance, and a story worth telling. When a journalist trusts you and writes about you, he gives you something money cannot buy for you, credibility in the eyes of the public. When the market sees you in a respected newspaper, it begins to trust you even before it has tried your product.
The great task of PR is to carve out your story. Every startup has a reason that birthed it, some problem it came to solve, some dream of its founder, some value that sets it apart from the rest. PR takes all of these and turns them into a story that is understood, that touches the heart, that stays in the customer’s head. In a market crowded with people selling the very same thing, your unique voice is your weapon. People don’t buy apps. They buy the story they believed. They buy the feeling of being part of something bigger.
But a good story has no meaning if it never reaches people’s ears. This is where you must know the way into the world of the media. You bring journalists topics that align with whatever is burning at the moment, you give them a unique angle on where the sector is heading, you connect them with experts. When you secure space in the papers people actually read, you build yourself a lasting bridge to the voices of influence in your field. That bridge is not broken easily.
Can Startup Visibility Be Measured?
Now some will ask, “Will this PR pay?” Every investor wants to know the return on his money, how his money will come back. And it is fair to ask. PR, too, has its measures. You can measure how the public feels about you, the number of new customers coming your way, how many times your name is mentioned, how many people have visited your website, and how people’s perception of your company shifts from month to month. Anyone who tells you PR cannot be measured does not know his job. PR is measurable like anything else,only it demands patience, because trust is not built in a single day.
And at the end of the day, this is what carries you to the bigger dream. A startup that wants to raise its next round of funding, that wants to be bought at a good price by a larger company, none of this rests merely on the quality of your product. It rests on how the world knows you. An investor does not invest in something he does not know. A big company does not buy a name it has never heard. Being visible is not arrogance. It is strategy.
A Choice for the Next Generation
I don’t know how long we will keep up this habit of building beautiful things and hiding them. But I have one fear. May our new generations of African entrepreneurs, with their frightening minds, with solutions to problems even the Westerners have failed to solve, not lose their beautiful dreams in the darkness of invisibility. Do we want to be remembered as a continent that had many talents that died on a server waiting to expire? Or do we want to be remembered as a continent that knew how to tell its stories until the whole world heard? To plan is to choose. And the time to choose is now.
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