Bayomi asked what building a startup taught you. The replies had no chill.
One question. Several painful truths. Zero sugarcoating.
On Wednesday, our founder Semudara Abayomi walked onto X and dropped one question: “What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned running your startup?”
No context. No bait. Just the question, sitting there like a therapist waiting for you to say something you’ll regret.
The replies came in hot. We pulled the best ones, added the numbers behind why they sting, and turned it into this. Especially for anyone currently building something and quietly wondering what they’ve gotten themselves into.
You’re not alone. Read on.
01. Your co-founder is not a formality
Dean Ukanah said it plainly: picking your co-founders is just as critical as finding product-market fit. Wrong people at the table and it doesn’t matter how good the product is, you’ll spend 80% of your time managing internal chaos and 20% actually building. The business becomes a hostage situation where everyone is both the kidnapper and the negotiator.
Carta analyzed over 22,000 founding teams and found that roughly one in four co-founders had left by the three-year mark. Losing a co-founder in the first two years raises your failure rate by 28%. Nigeria has receipts: Pivo raised $2.6 million, maintained a 98% loan repayment rate, and still shut down in 2023 because a co-founder dispute made it impossible to continue. A business working on every metric that mattered, gone.
The founder agreement you keep postponing is not paperwork. It’s a prenup. Sign it while everyone is still smiling.
02. The market will embarrass you. Your team will not.
Victor’s reply was short and surgical: the market tells you the truth faster than your team ever will. Not because your team is dishonest, humans just don’t enjoy delivering bad news to someone who clearly needs this to work.
Your friend will hype you. Your investor will frame things carefully. The market will ghost you, churn without warning, and leave a detailed one-star review explaining exactly where you went wrong.
42% of startups fail globally because they built something nobody wanted. Not bad luck. Not bad timing. Nobody wanted it.
Go looking for the hard signal before it finds you.
03. Rejection is the job description
Faith Fadare kept it simple: normalize failure and disappointment so fast that when it comes, you don’t freeze, you pivot and keep moving.
First-time founders have an 18% success rate. Founders who previously failed sit at 20%. That tiny improvement isn’t talent, it’s just surviving long enough to know that failure doesn’t kill you. Nigeria’s startup failure rate is 61.07%, the highest among Africa’s three biggest tech ecosystems. The market is hard. You are not imagining it. The edge is simply not quitting when every spreadsheet says you should.
04. Budget for gbas gbos. Seriously.
Gbenga Agunbiade dropped this from personal experience with zero elaboration: keep a small budget for lawsuits and drama.
We laughed. Then we thought about it. Then we stopped laughing.
Internal disputes and missing shareholder agreements are recurring patterns in Nigerian startup failures. OyaPay collapsed entirely because a seed round from the CEO’s uncle created a deadlock when outside investors came in, months of standoff that eventually broke the whole business. The drama is coming. Budget for it before it budgets you.
05. Have garri. Expect debt.
Vicanto kept it Nigerian and kept it real: have garri no matter what and brace for plenty of debt.
Failed Nigerian startups burned through an estimated $100 million in just 30 months, companies that had raised money, built products, found users, and still collapsed. The startup press covers the raise and the shutdown. Nobody covers the months in between where rent is a problem and the runway is gone. The garri is not a joke. It is a meal plan.
06. Building is mostly learning how not to quit
Marv put a bow on it with no framework, no hot take: building a startup is mostly learning how not to quit.
Paystack almost didn’t survive its early years. PiggyVest was a side project. Fincra has raised $120,000 and now holds licenses in six countries. None of these are stories about people who had it figured out. They’re about people who kept going past the point where stopping made sense.
Six replies. One question. No jargon, no deck slides. Just the stuff that actually keeps a founder standing.
Garri is a meal plan 😀
Love it