What Shazam, Nobel Prize-winning poverty research, Nigerian consumer behaviour and a simple question about human problems may teach us about building things people actually value
By Francis E. Madojemu
In 2002, you are sitting in a café.
A song begins to play.
You like it.
But you have no idea what it is called.
There is no iPhone in your pocket. There is no Shazam app. There is no Siri. There is no modern App Store.
But the problem already exists:
What is this song?
Shazam’s original solution now sounds almost ridiculous.
You dialled 2580 on your mobile phone, held the phone towards the music, waited while the system listened, and later received a text message telling you the name of the song and artist.
Primitive interface.
Extraordinary idea.
Because Shazam understood something that I think many of us—entrepreneurs, pastors, leaders, professionals, educators and even people trying to discover their own purpose—frequently get backwards.
They did not begin with the technology.
They began with the problem.
The smartphone did not yet exist.
The App Store did not yet exist.
The infrastructure they would eventually use did not yet exist.
But the human problem existed.
And so they asked a much better question:
Given what people already have, how can we solve this problem now?
That question has been troubling me.
Because I am increasingly convinced that it represents a much larger paradigm shift.
We may be starting at the wrong end
Most organisations naturally begin with themselves.
A business asks:
What can we sell?
A church asks:
What programme should we run?
A conference centre asks:
How do we rent our halls?
A consultant asks:
What course can I teach?
A professional asks:
What can I do with my qualification?
An entrepreneur asks:
What business can I start?
A development organisation looks at a poor community and asks:
What do these people need?
All perfectly reasonable questions.
But perhaps they are not the first questions.
Perhaps the first question is:
What is this person actually trying to accomplish?
And immediately behind it:
What problem is standing in the way?
That sounds obvious.
I am discovering that it is anything but obvious.
Poverty does not automatically tell you what people value
This became particularly important to me while revisiting the work of economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo.
Their 2007 paper, The Economic Lives of the Poor, examined household data across 13 countries to understand how extremely poor people actually live, work, spend, save and make decisions.
The findings challenge simplistic assumptions about human behaviour under poverty.
One might reasonably assume that someone living on an extremely small income would spend every available additional amount on food and basic physiological needs.
They don’t necessarily.
Banerjee and Duflo found that poor households retained meaningful choices about how they allocated extremely scarce resources.
They spent money on better-tasting foods rather than simply maximising calories.
They spent on alcohol and tobacco in some places.
They spent on entertainment.
They acquired radios and televisions where circumstances permitted.
And they spent on celebrations.
In Udaipur, India, more than 99% of the extremely poor households surveyed had spent money during the previous year on a wedding, funeral or religious festival.
The median household spent 10% of its annual budget on festivals.
That deserves some thought.
It would be easy for an outsider to look at that household and say:
“What these people need is food.”
The household itself might simultaneously be saying:
“My daughter must be married with dignity.”
Both realities can be true.
This is not an argument for romanticising poverty.
Neither is it an argument against clean water, healthcare, nutrition, education or other basic necessities.
It is something subtler.
Human beings do not stop being human because they are poor.
We still want dignity.
Belonging.
Pleasure.
Celebration.
Identity.
Respect.
Relationships.
Hope.
Progress.
Beauty.
Recognition.
A future.
The poor are not simply stomachs waiting to be filled.
And that leads to a distinction I think those of us interested in solving African problems need to remember:
Poverty can tell us something about what somebody lacks.
It does not automatically tell us what that person values most.
Banerjee and Duflo would later share the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with Michael Kremer for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.
One of the great contributions of that approach was methodological.
Instead of sitting far away from poverty and constructing enormous theories about what poor people ought to do, break the problem into smaller questions.
Go there.
Observe.
Experiment.
Measure.
Learn.
Allow reality to correct the theory.
There is a profound lesson in that for much more than development economics.
What do Nigerians actually want?
That question has become increasingly important to me.
Not:
What should Nigerians want?
Not:
What do Americans want that we can reproduce here?
Not:
What does a Lagos professional on Instagram want?
Not even simply:
What do Nigerians say they want?
But:
What does their actual behaviour tell us they value?
Where do people spend scarce money?
What do they save for?
What will they borrow for?
What inconvenience will they tolerate?
What will they travel across town for?
What embarrasses them?
What gives them dignity?
What do they proudly display?
What do they complain about continuously but never pay to change?
What do they call expensive while somehow finding substantially more money for something else?
What workaround have they already invented?
Whose opinion matters when they make the decision?
What does the purchase allow them to say about themselves?
Those questions are very different from asking people to complete a questionnaire about their “needs.”
And Nigerian consumer research makes the distinction even more important.
Feyi Olubodun has argued repeatedly that businesses can fail in Africa not simply because they lack capital or competence, but because they misunderstand the African consumer.
One of his provocations is:
Consumers don’t care about your products.
That sounds harsh until you realise what it means.
People care about what the product allows them to accomplish.
And sometimes the value being purchased is not primarily functional.
A financial product may transfer money.
But perhaps what the customer is really purchasing is independence.
Or speed.
Or credibility.
Or the ability to fulfil an obligation immediately.
Or the ability to signal:
“I have arrived.”
Context changes value.
Culture changes value.
Identity changes value.
Aspiration changes value.
The people around us change value.
And Nigeria itself is not one consumer.
Lagos is not Nigeria.
Ibadan is not Lagos.
The North is not the South.
A 24-year-old graduate building a career in Lagos is not necessarily solving the same problem as a 24-year-old apprentice in Aba.
Income alone cannot tell us everything.
Neither can age.
Neither can education.
Neither can a demographic spreadsheet.
We need to understand the circumstance.
Selling the Naija way
This also connects with Ayo Akinola’s Credit Alert, a Nigerian book about selling to Nigerians.
Its importance to me is not that every sales technique should become a universal rule.
It is that the book takes seriously the idea that Nigerians have buying behaviours worth understanding on their own terms.
Trust matters.
Credibility matters.
Fear of being cheated matters.
Social proof matters.
Pricing matters.
The offer matters.
How the buyer perceives risk matters.
And that means a business cannot simply say:
“This is an excellent product.”
Excellent according to whom?
Solving what?
For which Nigerian?
Under what circumstances?
Against which alternative?
At what perceived risk?
Recommended by whom?
And providing what kind of progress?
Then Myron Golden made the idea uncomfortable
I recently listened again to a short clip from Myron Golden.
He asks whether we are creating and compounding value or merely chasing money.
His prescription is almost obsessive:
Become intensely interested in other people’s problems.
Understand them so deeply that you can discover, develop and deploy an elegant, effective and efficient solution that people happily pay for.
Then in another clip, he attacks a common approach to storytelling.
We say:
“I want to tell my story.”
His response, deliberately provocative, is essentially:
People are more interested in fixing their story than hearing yours.
That does not mean personal stories have no value.
Of course they do.
Stories create connection.
Stories teach.
Stories inspire.
Stories give ideas flesh.
But the orientation changes.
My story becomes useful because of what it illuminates in your story.
My expertise becomes valuable because of what it helps you accomplish.
My product becomes valuable because of the progress you can now make.
My ministry becomes meaningful because Kingdom truth is actually transforming your life.
That is a very different orientation.
Can you describe my problem better than I can?
There is another principle we have been studying:
If you want people who already want what you offer, articulate their situation better than they can articulate it themselves.
That can sound like a marketing technique.
I think it should be much more demanding than that.
It is a test.
If somebody listens to me describe their situation and says:
“Exactly! That is precisely what I have been trying to say.”
then perhaps I have earned the right to begin proposing solutions.
But if I cannot describe the problem accurately, why am I so confident that my solution is correct?
This applies far beyond selling.
Imagine a church able to describe the economic, marital, emotional, vocational, parenting and spiritual realities of its congregation with such accuracy that people think:
“These people understand the world I actually live in.”
Imagine a business doing that.
Imagine government doing that.
Imagine a school doing that.
Imagine a pastor doing that.
Imagine a young entrepreneur doing that.
Imagine an architect doing that.
The quality of the solution would almost certainly improve because the quality of the seeing improved first.
The problem is not the same as the complaint
There is another complication.
What people complain about is not necessarily the problem.
What they say they need is not necessarily what they will act upon.
And what they want is not necessarily the deeper progress they are trying to make.
We need better distinctions.
A complaint says:
“Planning this wedding is stressful.”
A need might be:
“We need better coordination.”
A want might be:
“I want a beautiful wedding.”
An aspiration might be:
“I want our families to be proud of this celebration.”
The deeper job-to-be-done might be:
“Help us create a beautiful and honourable celebration without turning the bride, groom and their families into exhausted event managers.”
And the current workaround might be:
A sister manages the caterer.
An uncle handles parking.
A cousin is chasing the decorator.
Somebody’s friend is calling the DJ.
The bride is sending WhatsApp messages at midnight.
The groom is transferring money to six different vendors.
Now we are beginning to see the problem.
Which brings me back to Shazam
The brilliance of Shazam was not:
Dial 2580.
2580 was merely what the solution looked like in 2002.
The enduring problem was:
“What is this song?”
The core capability was identifying music from sound.
The telephone call was a wrapper.
The SMS was a wrapper.
Years later the wrapper became an app.
Then integration into smartphones, watches and other systems.
The wrapper kept changing.
The problem remained remarkably stable.
And this gives us a principle I think African innovators desperately need:
DO NOT CONFUSE THE SOLUTION WITH ITS CURRENT DELIVERY SYSTEM.
Your shop may be a wrapper.
Your website may be a wrapper.
Your app may be a wrapper.
Your building may be a wrapper.
Your conference may be a wrapper.
Your classroom may be a wrapper.
Your Sunday service may even be a wrapper.
The deeper question is:
What job is this helping somebody accomplish?
The Great Hall may be our 2580
This has immediate implications for me at NuStreams.
We have a Great Hall.
Garden Hall.
Poolside.
Gallery.
Studio.
Library.
Cinema.
Other spaces.
It is easy to conclude:
Our business is renting spaces.
But suppose somebody approaches us for a wedding.
They say:
“How much is your hall?”
It would be easy to assume the problem is:
I need a hall.
But perhaps what they really mean is:
“My daughter is getting married. Hundreds of people are coming. Two families are involved. There are dozens of vendors. I don’t want embarrassment. I don’t want generators failing. I don’t want guests wandering around. I don’t want the bride crying because the decorator isn’t ready. I want our family to celebrate beautifully and go home saying, ‘That went well.’”
Now the business changes.
They didn’t really hire square metres.
They hired certainty.
Coordination.
Hospitality.
Dignity.
Memory.
Relief.
Perhaps even status.
The Great Hall is important.
But perhaps the Great Hall is only our 2580.
That could eventually lead to a completely different NuStreams business model.
But—and this is crucial—we should not simply declare that from our office.
We need to go and find out.
Sunday service may also be a 2580
This question becomes even more uncomfortable when applied to church.
A church cannot simply become a religious consumer business.
The Gospel is not a product.
Truth is not determined by market demand.
Discipleship frequently requires confronting desires rather than satisfying them.
But none of that excuses us from understanding the people God has called us to serve.
At The Bridge Network, we have Sunday services.
Real Success.
Kingdom Conversations.
Prayer meetings.
Strategy Laboratory.
Training.
Outreach.
But those are programmes.
What are the actual human problems Kingdom wisdom is addressing?
A young Nigerian may be asking:
“How do I build an honest business in an environment where dishonesty appears rewarded?”
A husband may be asking:
“How do I repair this marriage?”
A graduate:
“How do I become economically useful when my degree has not prepared me for the marketplace?”
A parent:
“How do I raise children with values in this environment?”
A business owner:
“How do I grow without becoming corrupt?”
Someone else:
“What exactly am I here to contribute?”
Another:
“How do I recover from failure?”
Another:
“How do I make sense of God when my life is not working?”
Those are not programme titles.
Those are lives.
Perhaps church programmes are also wrappers.
And perhaps one measure of an effective church is whether ordinary people become increasingly equipped to solve the real problems of life with Kingdom wisdom.
What problem are YOU becoming capable of solving?
This reaches the individual as well.
We often ask young people:
What do you want to become?
Doctor.
Lawyer.
Architect.
Engineer.
Banker.
Pastor.
Entrepreneur.
Perhaps there is another question:
What class of human problems are you becoming unusually capable of solving?
Suddenly your qualification is not your identity.
It is equipment.
Your skill is equipment.
Your network is equipment.
Your experience is equipment.
Your failures may even become equipment.
The question becomes:
Who is struggling to make progress that I could become exceptionally useful to?
That is a different approach to career.
And perhaps a different approach to calling.
Africa does not have to wait for perfect infrastructure
There is another reason I find the Shazam story so compelling.
Shazam did not say:
“The technology isn’t ready.”
They asked:
What already exists?
People had mobile phones.
Telephone networks existed.
SMS existed.
So they built around those.
This is extraordinarily relevant to African innovation.
We often imagine innovation as something shiny and futuristic.
But perhaps the more useful question is:
What is already in people’s hands?
WhatsApp.
USSD.
Church networks.
Market associations.
Cooperatives.
Informal apprenticeship systems.
Community groups.
Motorcycles.
Human agents.
Feature phones.
Physical meeting spaces.
Family networks.
Existing payment habits.
AI combined with human intermediaries.
Those may be somebody’s 2580.
Innovation does not have to look futuristic.
It has to solve the problem.
This changes what Strategy Laboratory could become
We recently started experimenting with something we call Strategy Laboratory.
The idea was to move people from merely discussing problems into learning how to solve them.
But our early experience taught us something.
Give people a problem and they quickly jump to tactics.
“Let’s use social media.”
“Let’s build a website.”
“Let’s put up signs.”
“Let’s advertise.”
Activity feels like strategy because activity is visible.
But perhaps Strategy Lab needs to begin one stage earlier.
Not:
What is your strategy?
But:
Are you sure you understand the problem?
I now see a possible discipline:
SEE → UNDERSTAND → DEFINE → SOLVE → TEST → LEARN
SEE
Observe the person in the real setting.
UNDERSTAND
Listen for circumstances, aspirations, anxieties, trade-offs, influences and workarounds.
DEFINE
Articulate the problem in language the person recognises.
SOLVE
Design the smallest credible intervention.
TEST
Put it in front of real people.
LEARN
Allow their behaviour to correct your assumptions.
Then build again.
And better.
Evidence before ideas
Imagine therefore that Strategy Lab participants are not given the homework:
“Come up with a business idea.”
Instead:
Go and speak to three real people.
Ask:
What are you trying to accomplish?
Tell me about the last time you tried.
What was frustrating?
What did you do instead?
What have you already paid for?
What have you borrowed for?
What have you travelled for?
Who did you ask for help?
Who do you trust?
What would success look like?
What would embarrass you?
What would make you switch?
Then don’t only listen to what people say.
Observe what they do.
Because behaviour is also data.
Look at:
Money.
What receives scarce cash?
Time.
What receives hours, queues, journeys and repeated effort?
Workarounds.
What homemade solution already exists?
Networks.
Who is trusted?
Status.
What signals progress?
Tolerance.
What pain have people simply accepted?
Abandonment.
Where do people give up?
Then come back to Strategy Lab.
Now we have something to work with.
Not imagination.
Evidence.
Understanding Nigeria could itself become a project
And this may be the most exciting implication for me.
What if Strategy Laboratory becomes more than a Sunday class?
What if it gradually becomes a listening system?
A place where ordinary Nigerians learn to investigate ordinary Nigerian problems.
Where entrepreneurs bring observations.
Professionals bring patterns.
Young people bring interviews.
Church members bring community problems.
Researchers bring evidence.
AI helps us organise what we are discovering.
And week after week, month after month, we begin accumulating a living picture of:
What are Nigerians actually trying to get done?
Not “Nigeria” as one enormous abstraction.
This mother.
This trader.
This mechanic.
This bride.
This graduate.
This small business owner.
This widower.
This apprentice.
This pastor.
This teacher.
This landlord.
This tenant.
This event organiser.
This family.
This city.
Our Jerusalem first.
Then perhaps Judea.
Then further.
There is an ethical boundary
There is also a danger in all this.
Understanding people deeply can be used to serve them.
It can also be used to manipulate them.
The ability to articulate someone’s fears, desires and aspirations creates power.
So the Kingdom question cannot simply be:
Can we get them to buy?
It must also be:
Are we creating genuine value?
Does the solution increase dignity?
Capability?
Agency?
Truth?
Flourishing?
Are we exploiting a vulnerability or resolving it?
Are we helping people make genuine progress or merely making them dependent?
A business can be profitable and predatory.
A church can be popular and unfaithful.
A politician can understand people’s fears extremely well and weaponise them.
So problem obsession needs moral architecture.
Perhaps we have been asking the second question first
For years, I have found this question compelling:
What problem were you built to solve?
I still believe it is a powerful question.
For individuals.
Businesses.
Churches.
Institutions.
Cities.
Perhaps even nations.
But this research has forced another question in front of it.
A question that is more humbling.
Before:
What problem were we built to solve?
comes:
DO WE UNDERSTAND THE PEOPLE WE BELIEVE WE WERE BUILT TO SERVE WELL ENOUGH TO KNOW WHAT THEIR REAL PROBLEM IS?
Because I can passionately solve the wrong problem.
I can excellently solve the wrong problem.
I can build an organisation around the wrong problem.
I can advertise the wrong solution brilliantly.
I can preach around a problem nobody actually has.
I can build an app nobody needs.
I can provide aid people do not value.
I can construct a hall when what people really need is certainty.
I can create programmes when what people desperately need is capability.
The first responsibility of the problem solver may therefore not be invention.
It may be attention.
Go there.
Listen.
Watch.
Ask.
Observe.
Test.
Learn.
Then solve.
What is your 2580?
Somewhere around you today, somebody is trying to make progress.
They have probably already invented a workaround.
It may be inefficient.
Expensive.
Embarrassing.
Stressful.
Unreliable.
Slow.
Unsafe.
But they are doing something.
That workaround is evidence.
There is a problem worth understanding.
And perhaps the technology, institution, skill or infrastructure you wish existed does not yet exist.
Shazam’s didn’t either.
So don’t begin by waiting for the perfect platform.
Ask:
What do they already have?
What behaviour already exists?
What network already exists?
What technology already exists?
What capability do I already possess?
What can we test this week?
What is the smallest credible solution?
What is today’s 2580?
Because sometimes the great innovation is not inventing a new human need.
It is finally seeing an old human problem clearly enough to solve it.
And perhaps that is where strategy really begins.
Acknowledgements and Research Notes
This essay grows out of ongoing BridgeWorks/Strategy Laboratory research into problem discovery, Nigerian consumer behaviour, market-creating innovation and Kingdom approaches to human flourishing.
Key sources informing the argument include:
Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, “The Economic Lives of the Poor,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 21, No. 1 (2007), pp. 141–167.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, awarded to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.
Clayton M. Christensen, Efosa Ojomo and Karen Dillon, The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty.
Ayo Akinola, Credit Alert, and related discussion of selling and consumer behaviour in the Nigerian context.
Feyi Olubodun’s work and talks on understanding African consumers, culture, identity, aspiration and context.
Myron Golden, short talks on becoming deeply focused on other people’s problems and shifting communication from merely telling one’s own story toward helping people address theirs.
Shazam’s documented history of its original 2580 telephone/SMS music-identification service and subsequent evolution into the smartphone era.
The Bridge Network’s Strategy Laboratory experiments and discussions in Ibadan, Nigeria, August 2026.
The author treats the “poor people wanted televisions/phones rather than basic necessities” anecdote sometimes associated with development-economics discussions as a popular shorthand rather than a verified experiment by the 2019 Nobel laureates. The argument above relies instead on what the cited research actually documents about spending, choice, entertainment, festivals, assets and economic behaviour under extreme poverty.
