Follow the Friction

The common pattern for creating a company is innovation. Build something new. Build something better. Bring breakthrough technology to market.

But I no longer believe innovation is the right starting point.

Not because innovation doesn’t matter. But because the word quietly centers the builder instead of the customer. Developed market innovation optimizes existing participation. Emergent market innovation must often address participation itself — which means starting somewhere completely different.

Innovation asks: what can we create? Friction asks: what is making this unnecessarily hard, and how do we make it stop? One is an invention question. The other is a painkiller question. In markets where people are already in pain, the order matters.

If you start from supply-side abstractions, you end up building for the system you think should exist instead of the one people are actually navigating. In emergent markets, people are already improvising around broken systems, unreliable infrastructure, thin trust, and daily uncertainty. The workaround everyone accepts because nobody has removed it yet. The extra trip. The failed transaction. The missing trust layer. Behavior that exists — just wrapped in so much pain that participation stays low.

The real opportunity is rarely inventing new behavior. It’s removing the friction surrounding behavior that already exists. And friction is easier to see. You can hear it in complaints. Feel it in the extra steps people take to complete ordinary transactions. Once you learn to look for it, markets become far easier to read.

What appears to be a diverse set of winners begins to resolve into the same basic pattern.

The companies that won:

• OPay/PalmPay → reduced payment friction (send money without visiting a branch, without waiting in line, without the transaction failing)

• Jumia/Bolt → reduced logistics and discovery friction (find what you need without knowing which market to visit or which vendor to trust)

• Flutterwave/Paystack → reduced payment integration friction (merchants accept payments without building relationships with five different banks)

• M-Pesa → reduced cash movement friction (move money without physical travel or formal banking infrastructure)

• MTN → reduced billing friction (per-second prepaid vs. per-month postpaid — no bill shock, no credit check, no contract)

• Interswitch → reduced payment interoperability friction (connected fragmented banking rails so your GTBank card works at a Zenith ATM)

• Agency banks → reduced bank access friction (banking services without traveling to a branch)

• Computer Village → reduced access, price, sourcing, and distribution friction simultaneously (all four lower than formal retail channels)

• Digital banks → reduced account opening friction (bank account without branch visit, paperwork, or minimum balance requirements)

• Ride-hailing → reduced transportation friction (reliable ride without standing roadside negotiating with multiple okada riders)

• Pay-as-you-go data bundles → reduced data access friction (buy exactly what you need, when you need it)

• Moniepoint → reduced SME banking and cash movement friction (business payments and agency banking without complexity)

None of these companies won on superior technology. None won on stronger branding. We make those arguments anyway because they’re crowd pleasers — and because we haven’t yet found the language of our own markets. These companies won because they identified one specific thing that was unnecessarily painful and made it stop.

Friction isn’t a UX problem or a conversion metric. In emergent markets, it’s the competitive landscape.

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What would you build if you accepted that your customer isn’t waiting for innovation — they’re waiting for relief?

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These reflections sit alongside a longer body of work in progress — The Emergent Economy — which explores how markets form before institutions notice them.

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