Top 5 Tech Decisions for African Startups

With the rise in SIM-swap fraud in Lagos and Abuja, we're seeing Nigerian fintech founders questioning SMS-based two-factor authentication. Last week, three startups in our network reported user account compromises despite SMS 2FA being active.

A single breach costs ₦2.5M-₦15M in direct losses plus regulatory fines from CBN. User trust takes 6-12 months to rebuild. With SIM-swap attacks up 300% in Nigeria this year, SMS 2FA is a ticking time bomb.

Many African founders are seeing Vercel bills climb from $20 to $300+ as they scale. With dollar scarcity and FX rates hitting ₦1,600/$1, that's ₦480,000/month just for hosting. Alternative options like DigitalOcean cost $50-100/month.

At ₦480k/month, you're spending ₦5.76M yearly on hosting alone. That's enough to hire a senior developer in Lagos. However, bad hosting costs you 10x more in downtime, lost customers, and developer time managing infrastructure.

After seeing competitors struggle with Nigeria's complex regulations and payment infrastructure, some founders want to 'test' in Ghana first. Ghana has 31M people vs Nigeria's 220M, but clearer regulations and more stable infrastructure.

Ghana's entire market is smaller than Lagos alone. If you can't solve for Nigeria's complexity, you can't scale across Africa. Investors know this - 'Ghana-first' raises red flags. You'll spend 6 months learning lessons that don't apply to your next market.

You need a mobile app yesterday. Your technical co-founder says 'real apps use native Swift/Kotlin' but your timeline is 3 months and budget is tight. React Native promises one codebase for both platforms.

Native iOS + Android = 6-9 months, $40k-60k. React Native = 2-3 months, $15k-25k. In African markets where 95% of users are on Android (often older devices), you can launch Android-only in React Native and add iOS later. Time to market beats perfection.

70% of African users are on 3G or slower. Your app works perfectly on your iPhone in Lagos on 5G, but customer support says users in Ibadan can't load product images. Your dev team says 'that's a user problem, not our problem.'

You're cutting off 70% of your potential market. Jumia and Flutterwave spent millions optimizing for slow networks - it's why they won. Every 1-second delay = 7% conversion loss. Your competitor who loads faster wins the customer forever.