In Silicon Valley, product-market fit is that elusive moment when users “can’t live without your product.” But what happens when your users aren’t early adopters with disposable income, but price-sensitive, offline-first customers with different priorities? In Africa, product-market fit isn’t a celebratory milestone, it’s a survival mechanism.
It doesn’t just mean building something people want. It means building something people will use consistently, pay for without reminders, and eventually tell others about
What Counts as Traction?
In many African markets, revenue isn’t always the best signal of product-market fit. Sometimes, the clearest signs are behavioural. Are your customers finding hacks to keep using your product? Are they substituting a traditional solution because yours finally works better?
Tulaa, a Kenyan agritech platform, initially tried to offer farmers a full-stack solution for buying inputs, accessing credit, and selling harvests. What stuck? A narrow slice input financing. That insight led them to focus product development on just one part of the value chain where they had strong pull.
Behaviour Speaks Louder Than Words
Forget surveys. Many founders find product-market fit not through interviews but by watching what users actually do. The bottom 90% don’t always give articulate feedback but they’ll show you what matters.
Do they bring others into the app without referral codes? Do they find ways to save data while still using your service? Do they keep using even when customer service is weak?
In rural Ghana, Farmerline noticed that smallholder farmers preferred voice messages over SMS for agronomy tips — even though SMS was cheaper to deploy. That behavioural shift shaped how the product evolved and helped scale user retention.
Fit Isn’t About Your Best Customers
African founders are often tempted to focus on their earliest or most vocal users — usually in cities, usually on Android phones, and usually in the top income bracket. But true product-market fit happens when your product resonates with your median user.
That user may not be tweeting praise, may not be a repeat buyer just yet, and may not even use English as their first language. But they are the reason your margins will work or won’t.
Companies that scale across multiple states or regions quickly learn that appealing to the bottom 90% means solving for trust, access, and pricing — often before building any loyalty.
Why Copy-and-Paste Fit Doesn’t Work
Too often, African startups model product-market fit on Western tech narratives — user obsession, scaling fast, raising before monetising. But those models often collapse at scale, especially when products depend on infrastructure or behaviour that doesn’t exist yet.
For African founders, market fit often requires deep distribution innovation. Sometimes it means building a service layer first (like delivery, agent networks, or offline support) before product usage can even begin.
PMF Looks Like Efficiency
In African markets, where margins are thin and capital is tighter, product-market fit should eventually show up in efficiency: lower cost of acquisition, higher retention, organic referrals, and stronger repayment or usage patterns.
If your CAC remains high and LTV is murky, it may not be real fit just brute force growth. Real fit is when customers come back without needing to be chased. It’s when your operations tighten even as your revenue expands.
