Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of iROKOtv, Jason Njoku, has advised young budding entrepreneurs to desist from focusing solely on money as a basis for setting up businesses.
He was speaking at the 13th MTN Business World Executive Breakfast meeting held at the Movenpick Ambassador Hotel on Thursday August 28th under the theme “Building Great Technology Companies out of Africa”.
According to Mr. Njoku, clients look out for value in products or services and the entrepreneur, even though it will take a lot of hard work and time, must take the pain to create and build it [value] in order to succeed.
“You need to work on it for a very long time and you must not think about money, not at the beginning. Just think about building and creating value. That is the most difficult thing to do. If you create value, you will make money.”
The England-born Nigerian millionaire and online media expert also advised against spending so much time on business processes and modules.
He opined that tech start-ups were more about experimentation and therefore what was important was for them to just “get out there and start doing stuff. A lot of start-ups have to do with rapid experimentation; the more you experiment, the better you get at it”.
Having grown his business from his London bedroom, to a YouTube channel then to a standalone venture capital backed dedicated movie platform, Njoku has built one of Africa’s most talked about and arguably one of the well funded Internet companies on the African continent today.
He is pioneering the African digital content market by bringing previously unobtainable content to a global Diaspora audience.
He has been recognized by CNBC Africa as the 2013 West African Young Business Leader and is also one of Forbes’ Top Ten African Internet Millionaires to Watch.
Earlier this year he was recognized as one of Fast Company’s Top 1000 most Creative Person in Business.
Njoku has been described by the media as a pioneer in African technology start-up.
The Executive Breakfast series which is in its fourth year, has become the leading platform for executive briefings, networking sessions and business matching platform for CEOs, Senior management professionals and Entrepreneurs in Ghana.