Constraint is the engine of innovation, not its obstacle.
A decade of building ventures for patchy connectivity, low trust, and irregular income, turned into a method other builders can use. Not a slide deck. A field manual.
What a decade of building actually taught me, written down so you don’t have to learn it the expensive way.
Founders, corporate innovators, investors, and DFIs building into Africa and other resource-constrained markets, and anyone tired of playbooks written for conditions they'll never operate in.
A repeatable method for turning constraint into design input, a trust-first go-to-market model, and the rolling roadmap that replaces the 18-month plan that never survives contact.
Twelve chapters, each anchored to a named case study, from a $100K farmer-traceability contract to a hub that produced 40+ startups. Field notes, not frameworks.
Twelve chapters. Three are free.
Read the first two and the pivotal chapter on trust, in your browser, no email required.
The margin is the market
The first venture I built failed in a way I didn't have language for. The product worked. The demo landed. The pilot funding came through. And then, in the field, nothing moved.
I spent months looking for the bug. There wasn't one. The bug was in my assumptions. I had built for a user who had reliable power, a data plan she didn't have to think about, and a reason to trust a stranger's app with her livelihood. None of those users existed in the market I was actually selling to.
What I learned, slowly and at my own expense, is that the constraints I kept apologising for were not obstacles to the product. They were its real specification. The patchy connection, the shared phone, the fifteen-shilling data top-up, the rational distrust of institutions that had failed before: these were not edge cases to handle later. They were the centre of the brief.