Emeka Ajene on the one factor African startups preserve getting fallacious

Many African founders discuss pivots; few discuss positioning. And based on Emeka Ajene, founding father of Afridigest, a media and intelligence platform, that’s the place the actual downside lies.

Talking on a panel titled “The Actuality of Constructing and Scaling Startups in Africa” at Moonshot by TechCabal 2025, Ajene argued that poor positioning is commonly what drains startups of time, cash, power, and morale. “When you’ve got the fitting positioning,” he mentioned, “you shut offers quicker.”

For instance, he pointed to Listerine and Flutterwave. Listerine, as soon as bought as a surgical antiseptic, didn’t obtain mass success till it was repositioned as a mouthwash. Flutterwave, in the meantime, discovered its edge by branding itself because the infrastructure powering Africa’s funds, reasonably than one other consumer-facing fintech.

Ajene broke it down additional, explaining that each profitable firm operates in three dimensions: its present actuality, its imaginative and prescient, and the technique that connects the 2. Many founders, he famous, skip straight to the imaginative and prescient — advertising a distant future as a substitute of grounding their technique within the current.

“The error I see startups make is that they begin with their imaginative and prescient. Tomorrow’s mission shapes how they place the product right this moment. The logic is straightforward: prospects pay right this moment’s money for right this moment’s worth, not tomorrow’s guarantees.”

To assist founders put positioning into follow, Ajene outlined 5 steps. It begins with figuring out what alternate options prospects would flip to in case your product didn’t exist — that’s your actual competitors. Subsequent, outline the distinctive attributes your product gives that these alternate options don’t. Tie these attributes to clear worth and proof, then zero in in your goal market traits. Briefly, positioning is about understanding what you promote, why it issues, and to whom.

Ajene speaks from expertise. He’s the Managing Director and co-founder of Gozem, a Francophone Africa-focused tremendous app that has developed from ride-hailing into digital monetary companies. Earlier than founding Gozem, he was second-in-command to Uber’s Nation Supervisor for Nigeria. Right this moment, by way of Afridigest and Africreate, he helps African founders scale smarter by combining knowledge, perception, and technique.

In the long run, Ajene says positioning is about route — it’s how startups discover their place out there and construct momentum from it. As he put it merely, “Positioning is a superpower.”