Rotimi Babs @Fothlog

As a Business Analyst, this isn’t just sad news. It’s a case study in why good execution doesn’t save a broken business model. Few things to note: 1.Demand ≠ viability GoLemon proved people wanted planned, large-basket grocery shopping. Average order size was around ₦43,700 ($32). Tens of thousands of deliveries completed. Customers came back. But validated demand only answers “will people use this.” It says nothing about “can this business fund itself.” Those are two separate hypotheses, and BAs need to test both, not just the first one. 2.Operationally intensive models need a much higher bar for capital efficiency Grocery delivery touches cold chain, last-mile logistics, supplier relationships, and thin margins, all at once. Every one of those is a cost center that scales linearly (or worse) with order volume. Jumia Food and Bolt Food already exited this exact segment before GoLemon even launched. That wasn’t a warning sign the founders missed; they knew it going in. They bet execution could beat the structural problem. It’s a reminder that “we’ll do it better than the last guys who failed” is not, by itself, a viable thesis. 3.Timelines misaligned, not “no demand from investors” GoLemon’s own statement is specific here: no single reason investors passed. It was runway versus the time required to close a deal. That’s a cash flow and timing problem as much as a strategy problem. For anyone doing financial modeling or business case work: the gap between “investors are interested” and “investors signed” is where startups die. If your runway model doesn’t have enough margin to survive a slow close, the requirements gathering and TAM analysis were never the risk. 4.The org chart is the real cost of a pivot-free model 20% of the team placed elsewhere so far. Fulfilment ops, engineering, product, growth, support, finance, all built out for a specific operating model. When the model itself is unsustainable, you can’t easily redeploy that team into something adjacent; the org was built to run one machine. For BAs building business cases: map not just the cost of the operating model, but the cost of unwinding it if the model doesn’t work. That’s part of the risk register too. The takeaway I keep coming back to: strong founders, real traction, genuine customer love, none of it substitutes for a business model that can fund its own operations before the capital runs out. Requirements clarity gets you a good product. Financial model clarity gets you a company that survives long enough to matter. GoLemon built something people wanted. That was never the question that killed them.

GoLemon 🍋 @golemonhq

2 days ago

Hi everyone 👋🏾 We’re bringing our operations to a close. We started GoLemon because we believe grocery shopping can work better. Over the past two years, you’ve trusted us with tens of thousands of grocery orders, invited us into your homes, told your friends about us, and

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This line hit hard "For anyone doing financial modeling or business case work: the gap between “investors are interested” and “investors signed” is where startups die."

Ubon | Business Analyst @ubonanalyst

2 days ago

As a Business Analyst, this isn’t just sad news. It’s a case study in why good execution doesn’t save a broken business model. Few things to note: 1.Demand ≠ viability GoLemon proved people wanted planned, large-basket grocery shopping. Average order size was around ₦43,700

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Many exceptional GoLemon colleagues are now looking for their next opportunity. We’ve supported ~20% of the team to secure new roles so far, and we’ve put together a list of people across fulfilment operations, engineering, product, growth, customer support, finance and other roles. If you’re hiring, please reach out to [email protected] for access, direct introductions and recommendations 💚

GoLemon 🍋 @golemonhq

2 days ago

Hi everyone 👋🏾 We’re bringing our operations to a close. We started GoLemon because we believe grocery shopping can work better. Over the past two years, you’ve trusted us with tens of thousands of grocery orders, invited us into your homes, told your friends about us, and

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I, personally, look forward to the 220-team World Cup presented by Blackrock, hosted exclusively in the United States every six months and powered by Polymarket.

Martyn Ziegler @martynziegler

3 days ago

EXCLUSIVE: Fifa's president Gianni Infantino is planning to sell stakes in the World Cup to private investors under a scheme that could potentially earn him tens of millions of pounds. Investor discussions held with figures close to the Trump administration, say sources.

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A lesson I wish I knew sooner: Don’t make the mistake of becoming great at something you hate.

Major cheat code for life: Assume good things are still ahead. You are not behind. You are not too late. You are not disqualified by your past. One new season can change the entire story. Keep showing up with belief. The best chapters are often written after the hardest ones.

Game theory explains why improving yourself rarely fixes your outcomes. People keep treating their own skills and discipline as a dominant variable because it's the one they can consciously control. They end up running never-ending optimizations but leave the whole structure around them untouched. Suddenly, they are the shiniest object in the room, but it gets them nowhere. That's because a diamond in the mud is still part of the mud. Cleaning it and putting it back to where you found it changes absolutely nothing. Hence, you must change the structure. Swipe the whole room clean; toss out the junk. Ask yourself which environment converts what you already have into a return and what it would cost to move there. Don't spend a decade improving yourself while covered in filth. The structure around you either works for you or against you. There is no middle ground.

I used to envy people who seemed to have more freedom than I did. Better careers. Larger audiences. More influence. Over time I noticed something I’d ignored before. Every one of them was carrying responsibilities I didn’t have to think about. They answered difficult emails I never saw. They made decisions that affected other people. They absorbed criticism that would have kept me awake at night. I realized I wasn’t comparing lives. I was comparing rewards while editing out the responsibilities that produced them. There’s a question we rarely ask when we admire someone else’s success: What did they agree to carry that I wouldn’t? That’s why meaningful opportunities seem rarer than they really are. Every worthwhile opportunity asks something of us before it gives us something in return. Influence asks for accountability. Growth asks for discomfort. Every version of this trade works the same way: you don’t get one side without the other. Most people spend their lives trying to separate the two, hoping they can keep the reward while avoiding the responsibility. Reality never makes that trade. Accept one, and you inherit the other. Reject one, and you lose both. Once this became clear to me, I began asking that same question of every opportunity: Am I willing to carry the responsibilities this opportunity will place on my shoulders? That single question changed many of my decisions. I stopped chasing rewards I wasn’t prepared to sustain, and I committed more deeply to the opportunities whose burdens I was willing to carry. If you’re not growing in a particular area of your life, ask yourself: What responsibility have I been treating as a burden when it may actually be an invitation? The responsibilities you’re avoiding are often the price of admission to the opportunities you admire. I still catch myself doing it sometimes, admiring someone’s life for an afternoon before remembering I only ever saw the version they let me see.

"Better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war" .

Filikieterian @Filikieterian

a week ago

Today's royal families are all engaged in an incessant larp. Doing military training for a war they will never fight, studying politics, diplomacy and languages in a country they will never govern, pretending to remain an important national institution when they're not

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Hmmm for my bootstrap founders who have been following me, you’d know I’ve chatted about this before. For distribution in Africa’s informal markets, you do not need to convince 10,000 people. You need just 1 cluster.  Conquer 1 cluster first, move to the next cluster. By the time you get to the 4th cluster, the ripple effect has started. The first to second month in the first cluster will be trial and error, listening and feedback, balancing strategies that reflect and balance ROI, revenue, expenses, etc. The third month is the same thing but you are already getting a hang of the mathematics and their ways. By the end of the 4th month you’re balancing. You need 3 - 5 field agents to get this done.  Or you can just go the traditional route. Get a shop in the market. Hire 3 agents which one doubles as admin. Give them a target. Conquer there and move to the next market. And if you are that cracked, you can turn the shop to your own office that you open in the morning and close at night. Lead the team and be the admin/lead agent yourself.  There is a neobank we are currently distributing. This one is even very interesting because the founder was very specific about his target numbers in target days. His team is running feasibility studies to see if what they envision can move. They just need the real target users in the monthly GMV to test the app for that time frame.  I connected with 2 Phone store girls in Computer Village. One of them is a close acquaintance of mine. They pulled in 2 more of their friends who are also sales girls in big gadget stores. Just a small commission in getting bosses in their network to use the app. It’s like a side gig for them since it's just 3 months thing.  Distribution is very tough and costly yeah but know that it is a cluster conquering thing. Once you earn the trust of 2 to 5 clusters, they will continue the work for you. I think where founders are getting it wrong is in the misconception that distribution is a marketing function. I do not know about other continents in the world but I know that as far as Africa is concerned distribution is a social function. Our people don’t adopt something because they discovered it. They adopt it because someone they know has tried it and that’s reduced the risk of them trying it too. This is why distribution is harder in Africa. You’re not just earning attention, you’re earning trust.  Be sincere, the reason you as a digital savvy person started using OPay or moniepoint is because everybody is already using it. Yes or no? You reach there, Opay. You go there, Opay. Social function!   You do not have funding like OPay or Chowdeck. You’re just a lone struggling founder who got intrigued with an infrastructure solution from one corner in Ajah Badore. That funds you are looking to pour on an ad that won’t likely reach your target audience who are busy 9-7 in the market. Employ 5 smart talkers inside that Ajah market. Place them on salary and commission based performance. I usually tell founders on budget to base salary around minimum wage. This is Nigeria. You will find your people that will work with you at the cost you have. Gradually follow them through 1 cluster at a time.

Oreọfẹ 𓇢𓆸 @Thedanieloreofe

2 weeks ago

I genuinely think distribution is harder than building. You can lock 5 cr#cked engineers in a room and eventually something will work. Now convince 10,000 people to care. Omo.

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You don't need $25,000 for a wedding anywhere. Even in England I went to so many weddings where we just went back to the person house had sandwiches and a cup of tea, that was it. They spent $50 max. The expense is borne out of our culture.

Ewgi @Ssaasquatch

a week ago

Still wild to me that a genuinely decent wedding in Lagos now costs north of N40m. Makes you wonder; what kind of net worth does someone in their early 30s need just to afford a wedding, buy a decent car, and live in a decent apartment? The cost of starting a family has become

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One of the most tragic videos you'll see...and not uncommon stuff. Be intentional with your life, folks.

Christopher Ward @modelstrangers

a week ago

For many who watched this video, it was a warning from the future. Over 8 million views across YouTube and Instagram. One of the most raw encounters I’ve ever had. 👇🏼

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Insightful

Christopher Ward @modelstrangers

a week ago

For many who watched this video, it was a warning from the future. Over 8 million views across YouTube and Instagram. One of the most raw encounters I’ve ever had. 👇🏼

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Every oversized energy system is someone paying for fear instead of facts. Good engineering replaces guesswork with data. #PowerbyDesign

Most buildings don’t need more power—they need better load management. Knowing what runs together matters more than adding capacity.

This 30-room Surulere hotel ran on our solar microgrid before grid power or generators arrived and still is running. Diesel savings have already returned the investment in this 48kW, 140kWh & 50kWp system and the purchased gen. #PowerByDesign

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Charlie Munger literally explained how "Inversion Thinking" helped him become a billionaire: 1. He solves every problem backwards. Munger calls it inversion, and he uses it constantly. Most people ask how do I succeed at this. He asks the opposite: what would guarantee failure here, and then he simply avoids that. He says it works like algebra. Some problems you cannot solve forwards, but invert them and the answer falls out easily. 2. As a young weather forecaster, he asked how he could kill pilots. Stationed in the Air Corps ferry command, drawing weather maps alone in a hangar at night, he didn't ask how to forecast well. He asked: how would I most easily kill these pilots? He worked it through in reverse and found only two answers. Send them into icing their plane couldn't handle, or send them somewhere they'd run out of fuel before any airport was clear. He became fanatical about avoiding exactly those two things. 3. He points out that inversion could have saved Kobe Bryant. The two ways he found to kill a pilot, icing and getting caught out with nowhere to land, are flight risks a disciplined person simply refuses to take. If someone around Kobe had thought that way, Munger says, he'd still be here. It was so stupid, in his words, to die that way. The whole point of inversion is that the fatal error is usually obvious once you go looking for it on purpose. 4. His grandfather taught him the same trick as a boy. When Munger went swimming, his grandfather told him to swim as long as he wanted, but stay near the shore. It sounds simple enough to laugh at, but it's inversion in one sentence: don't optimize for the best swim, eliminate the way you drown. Munger insists the man was genuinely wise. 5. The military gave him a second trick: bracketing. In ROTC he was taught to fire mortar shells one long, one short, then correct to land the next one on target. He says he never fired a real shell in his life, but he has used that bracketing method to size decisions ever since. When he needs to know how big or small to make something, he brackets it high and low and closes in. Kapow. 6. His best inversion turned $125,000 into $600,000. As a young lawyer he had a client whose ranch land the Edison Company wanted an easement through. The client's famous, pompous appraiser valued it at $125,000, using the standard two-dimensional method: comparable sales, price per acre, acreage. Munger, who wasn't even an appraiser, saw the flaw. The land was hilly. 7. He forced the problem into three dimensions and the answer changed completely. Hilly land gets developed by lopping off the tops of hills and filling the valleys. The transmission towers would freeze the grade and make that impossible, doing enormous damage the flat, two-dimensional appraisal never captured. The old appraiser refused to change a thing, so Munger told his client to fire the twit, hired one who could think in three dimensions, and got $600,000 out of honest engineers who also thought that way. 8. The more due diligence someone does, the weaker a thinker they usually are. This is his sharpest line. Munger says endless analysis is often just a way of soothing an inner insecurity, and it doesn't actually work. The genuinely capable thinkers understand a situation fast and act. The armies of young lawyers billing by the hour to comb through every purchase order are, more often than not, papering over the fact that they can't see the answer. 9. You don't need certainty. You need to be about 96% sure. Munger is blunt that waiting for 100% is a mistake, because in most cases 96% is all you're ever entitled to, and the rest is wasted motion. The skill is knowing when you already have enough to act, and having the nerve to move on it. 10. He and Buffett closed a multibillion-dollar oil deal in about two days. When Occidental needed money fast to buy Anadarko, Munger didn't fly anywhere or run endless analytics. He and Buffett talked by phone, and after decades together, he says, one grunt speaks a volume. It was obvious: the Permian Basin is America's best oil, layer after layer with nothing comparable, and they'd get an 8% preferred dividend from a reputable operator plus upside. A no-brainer, he says, as long as you don't insist on making it hard.

Jaynit @jaynitx

6 months ago

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30 1BR apartments. 60 ACs. 30 induction cookers. All powered by 48kW, 120kWh & 100 x 550w panels. As our CEO likes to say: “People often overestimate their power needs.” The right design beats an oversized system every time.

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Everyone is watching for the next African unicorn. The smarter investors are watching something quieter.

There is everything wrong with this.

Killa 🌺 @KillaKreww

2 weeks ago

Stephen A. Smith was HEART-BROKEN after his daughter Samantha told him that she won’t let him live in her house when he’s older & she plans to put him in a Nursing Home instead 😭💔 “In my house?? With my kids? And my car? And my husband & my pool? In my guest room?” “I’m just

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