Startup advice targeting low and middle income countries

By lincolnq @ 2024-09-30T14:35 (+60)

This is a linkpost to https://www.lincolnquirk.com/2024/09/27/lmic-startup.html

This post was inspired by a week of working from Ambitious Impact's office in London, and chatting with several of the startup charities there. While my experience is in the for-profit world, I think it's applicable to entrepreneurs working on impact-driven endeavors in lower-income places, both for-profit and non-profit. (Acknowledging that much of this advice will be obvious to entrepreneurs from lower-income countries; I am mostly writing for readers who like me are from high-income countries.)

On Speed and Focus

On Learning Things By Going Places And Talking To People

A lot of people start by looking at the demographic and economic statistics (like population numbers, GDP, density etc). This is a good start, but it's easy to spend too long theorizing, when the best next step is actually to visit and observe things on the ground and in-person.

On Regulation

On Product


Mo Putera @ 2024-10-01T05:42 (+7)

I appreciated the bullet point fleshing out prioritizing tech accessibility. Techier folks might also like Dan Luu's various examples in How web bloat impacts users with slow connections, which I remember both for his sharing of Wave ex-CTO Ben Kuhn's internet connectivity experience in Ethiopia as well as Dan's own anecdote:

When I was at Google, someone told me a story about a time that “they” completed a big optimization push only to find that measured page load times increased. When they dug into the data, they found that the reason load times had increased was that they got a lot more traffic from Africa after doing the optimizations. The team’s product went from being unusable for people with slow connections to usable, which caused so many users with slow connections to start using the product that load times actually increased.

emmannaemeka @ 2024-10-01T03:23 (+1)

Thanks for this piece. This is particularly so because I hope to setup a biotech phage based company that will produce phage based solutions like phage thereby and phage vaccines. From my experience, when propeople talk about startups in LMICs the emphasis is usually on tech startups. The environment favors tech startups and not biotech startups.

I will give you my experience, we won an Emergent venture grant to setup a phage bank. This we have done and at the same time we have been working on two projects: Developing phage therapy for local strains of Psuedomonas and Salmonella typhi. We are pushing for enabling policies as well as how to move on to the next stage.

It will be interesting to read more about how to move to the next stage if you have a biotech startup experience.

So far, we have phages that kill 80% of our local strains. Planning to get on to pre-clinical trials. But thats the problem, which funder will agree to invest thousands of Dollars in an African biotech startup. If you have some thoughts on these issues I will be glad to read more or to interact.