Build Your Power by Helping Customers Make Money

Running a business in Lagos, or anywhere across Africa, means you’re constantly making tough calls about where to focus your limited time and money. It's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day, chasing small wins, or building features you think your customers want. But what if there was one core idea that could dramatically change how fast your business grows and how powerful it becomes?

Recently, I was reading an essay by Paul Graham called "Making Startups Powerful." He talks about asking a simple question: "What would make this company more powerful?" He notes that asking how to make more money often yields incremental improvements. But thinking about power can sometimes make a company orders of magnitude more valuable. Among the many ways he suggests, one stood out as particularly potent and directly applicable for founders like you: helping your users make money.

This isn't just a feel-good strategy; it's a direct path to faster adoption, higher willingness to pay, and ultimately, a more resilient business. When your product or service directly impacts your customers' ability to earn more or save significantly, you become indispensable. They don't just like what you offer; they need it to thrive.

What Makes a Startup Truly Powerful?

Paul Graham explains that true power comes from finding structural ways to embed your company deeply into your customers' success. It's about moving beyond being just a useful tool to becoming a critical engine for their growth. In his words: "When you help users make money, they're (a) quick to adopt your product and (b) will pay a lot for it." The result, he notes, is revenue that grows doubly fast.

Think about it: if your solution helps a founder increase their sales by 20% or cut their operational costs by 15%, they won't just be happy; they'll become your biggest advocate. They'll actively seek out your product, integrate it deeply into their operations, and be willing to pay a premium because the return on investment is so clear and direct.

This idea is deeply linked to a fundamental truth Paul Graham highlights: any strategy to make your startup powerful must ultimately make things better for the customer. Helping them make money is the clearest, most measurable way to achieve that. It bypasses guesswork and focuses on a universal motivator: profit.

How to Apply This in Your Business

Applying this principle means shifting your focus from just solving a problem to solving a problem that has a direct financial impact on your customer. Here’s how you can approach it:

Step 1: Understand Your Customer's "Money Flow" Before you can help them make money, you need to know how they make it themselves. Start by asking: What are your customers' primary revenue streams? What are their biggest, most consistent costs? How do they track these? For example, if you run a small business selling artisanal products online, your primary revenue is sales of your products. Your biggest costs might be raw materials, production labor, shipping, and marketing. Spend time talking to your customers. Don't just ask about their pain points; ask about their profit and loss. You might ask, "How do you calculate your profit margin on this product?" "What's your biggest unexpected expense?" or "What's the hardest part about getting paid?"

Step 2: Identify Pain Points That Block Revenue or Increase Costs Once you understand their money flow, look for the leaks or bottlenecks. Ask yourself: Where do your customers lose potential sales? What processes waste so much time that it directly impacts their ability to generate revenue? What unexpected costs are eating into their profits? For the artisanal product seller, perhaps they lose sales because their online store goes down frequently, or customers abandon carts due to complex payment processes. Maybe they spend too much time manually tracking inventory, leading to stockouts and missed sales, or they overpay for shipping due to inefficient packaging or carrier choices.

Step 3: Design Solutions That Directly Impact Profit Now, connect the pain point to a solution that has a clear, measurable financial benefit. Ask: How can your product or service directly increase their sales, improve their margins, or reduce their operational costs? Can it automate a revenue-generating task? Can it prevent a common, costly error? For the artisanal seller, solutions could include a more stable e-commerce platform with a smoother checkout to reduce abandoned carts, or an automated email marketing tool to bring back inactive customers. To improve margins, you might offer a system that helps them source raw materials more efficiently or optimize production schedules to reduce waste. To reduce costs, consider a logistics system that compares shipping rates and optimizes routes, cutting delivery expenses, or an inventory system that accurately tracks stock to prevent over-ordering or stockouts.

My Experience: When I built OPNMRT, a multi-tenant e-commerce platform, a key feature was BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) direct payment settlement. This wasn't just about convenience; it was about ensuring founders had direct, immediate access to their funds without platform delays or commissions eating into their margins. It removed a significant "money leak" and trust barrier often found with third-party payment aggregation. Similarly, on BG Laundry I designed the rider app around assigned jobs, route support and verified handoffs, and gave the admin team clear order tracking. Those choices target the places a service business quietly loses money: wasted trips, lost items and the refunds that follow.

Step 4: Communicate the Value Clearly Founders are busy and often non-technical. Don't make them guess the financial benefit. When you talk about your product, lead with the financial impact. Instead of "Our new dashboard gives you better insights," say, "Our new dashboard helps you identify which products are slowest-moving, so you can reduce inventory costs by X%." Use concrete numbers you can stand behind, and if you don't have them yet, start measuring so you will.

Adapting This Idea for Founders in Africa

The core principle of helping customers make money is universal, but its application needs to be grounded in our local realities.

Payment Reliability and Trust: In many African markets, payment infrastructure can be a major headache. If your product helps a founder make money, but the payment processing is unreliable, slow, or eats into their margins with high fees, you're not truly helping them. Your solution must integrate robust, locally relevant payment gateways. For example, building a platform that seamlessly handled payments for cargo moving from China to Nigeria was crucial for one project. The ability to collect and manage payments reliably, in local currency, directly enabled customers to conduct business without financial friction.

Logistics and Infrastructure Challenges: Making money often depends on moving goods or people efficiently. Poor road networks, inconsistent power, and high fuel costs can severely erode profits. If your product optimizes logistics – whether it's route planning, real-time tracking, or managing a fleet – you're directly addressing a significant cost center and helping them make money more reliably.

Scarcity of Technical Talent and Resources: Many early-stage founders operate with small teams and tight cash. They can't afford complex, hard-to-maintain solutions that require a dedicated tech team. Your product must deliver clear financial value quickly, with minimal overhead. This means focusing on the most impactful revenue-generating or cost-saving features, not unnecessary bells and whistles. For instance, automating blog content creation entirely can save founders the significant time and cost of hiring writers and editors, freeing them to focus on revenue-generating activities.

Currency Swings and Economic Volatility: In economies with frequent currency fluctuations, helping users protect their margins or price dynamically becomes incredibly powerful. Can your solution help them manage inventory to mitigate import cost increases? Can it enable dynamic pricing that adapts to market changes?

A Note on "Selling Cheaply": Paul Graham suggests that sometimes it's "worthwhile to sell at a loss" initially to acquire users, then worry about margins later. For a well-funded startup, this can be a viable long-game strategy. However, for many early-stage, bootstrapped founders in Africa with tight cash, this approach is extremely risky. Selling at a loss without a clear, immediate path to sustainable revenue can quickly drain your limited funds and put you out of business before you ever reach scale. While generosity in terms and value creation is crucial, always ensure your pricing strategy allows you to survive the short game. You need to earn enough to keep building and supporting your customers, even if those early margins are slim. It's a trade-off: aim for value that justifies a sustainable price, rather than just chasing user numbers at any cost.

What I'd Do This Week

Here are three concrete actions you can take this week to apply this idea in your own business:

1. Map Your Customer's "Money Journey": Sit down and draw a simple flowchart or list the top 3-5 steps your ideal customer takes to make money or incurs their biggest costs. Be specific. Where does your product or service fit into this journey? Which steps are slow, expensive, or prone to errors?
2. Identify One "Money Leak" or "Money Opportunity": From your "money journey" map, pick the single biggest pain point that your product could address to directly increase revenue or reduce cost for your customer. Focus on the one that, if solved, would have the most tangible financial impact.
3. Craft a "Money Statement": Write a one-sentence statement for your marketing that clearly articulates how your product helps customers make or save money, using a concrete (even hypothetical) number. For example: "Our platform helps [customer type] increase [revenue stream] by X% by [how you do it]" or "Our service reduces [cost type] by Y% for [customer type] by [how you do it]." Practice saying it out loud.

Building a powerful startup isn't about grand gestures or complex strategies; it's often about deeply understanding your customers' needs, especially their financial ones, and delivering solutions that directly contribute to their bottom line. When you help them make more money, you naturally build a powerful, resilient business yourself.

— Samuel