We talk a lot about building globally, for the global market, without truly understanding what that means in retrospect and taking the right action.
Too many builders here think building global means starting by making your service available to all, or ensuring your narrative is not tied to a region.
If Zuckerberg had that mentality, there wouldn’t be Facebook today. Facebook was created and meant for Harvard students. Some of the code had the word “harvard” hardcoded. You even needed a Harvard email to join. Early press and messaging were tied to a social site for elite colleges.
But if you build an app that requires only Ghanaians to access, linear-thinking folks would think it’s not a global product from day one. They didn’t realise that to build a truly global product, you must first think in concentrated markets or features. For Facebook, that market was Harvard students. For PayPal, it was eBay merchants. For Stripe, it was YC startups. This is what Peter Thiel was talking about in Zero to One: “we must think small to build great products.”
We think that because a product is tied to a market, then it is not global. But we will call Cash App - which is not available in many regions - a global product, while refusing to call Paystack a global company because it is “too tied to Nigeria.”
My definition of a global product is a product that solves a global problem, even if at the moment that product is tied to a market. For instance, “salvation of sin” is a global problem. The gospel must be preached everywhere and to everyone. And you can start anywhere, even in a small town in Zaria.
It is why you see a pastor who starts in a small town in northern Nigeria and 10 years later is preaching to a Harvard audience and has branches in many Western countries.
Because he started in that small town did not mean he wasn’t global. The problem is global; he just needed to start somewhere and keep rescaling. The product is not what makes it global; the problem is.
Connecting with friends is a global problem. It mattered little that thefacebook.com was tied to Harvard students; all Zuckerberg had to do was sit down with the engineers and rebuild the product to make it available to more colleges, then countries, then buy out other social media.
Accepting payment is a global problem. Because you start by supporting only Ghanaian merchants doesn’t mean you are not building globally. People tie building too much to writing code and shipping software; that is the least of what building is all about. What they don’t realise is that thinking that way is the same as thinking like a “construction worker” or a “roadside mechanic.”
When YC released its list of Top Companies by Revenue in 2023/2024, the only African company on that list was Wave Mobile - a mobile money service that is available in multiple countries. It started in Senegal. But it has continued to expand into new countries since. Because mobile payment is a global problem.
I’m putting this out because I see many builders thinking “global” in products first rather than problems.
Afterthoughts 1:
I want to push my own argument one step further, because I may have been extreme.
A problem may be global, but the solution you are building may not.
and that is fine if you can rebuild them in the future.
but then if the test for “global” is just “does this problem exist everywhere,” then the roadside mechanic I just dismissed is also building globally.
But he clearly isn’t. so the definition can’t stop at the problem. it has to include something the problem alone doesn’t guarantee.
That something is whether the solution can actually travel.
I used a Pastor case as an example earlier: “Starting a church in northern Nigeria with a limited audience and no streaming; now people in Harvard stream his weekly online services.” The problem is global; his solution is his message, his words. It costs almost nothing for him to copy, refine and transfer his message across countries. Words travel for free with the internet. He is a global builder regardless of where he started.
Afterthought 2:
Some problems are global, but the solution can be stubbornly local.
Payments is a great case here, and it quietly breaks my “just rebuild it later” line. For Facebook, “Mark just sat down with the engineers and rebuilt it” The social graph works the same everywhere, and deleting the “harvard” string was trivial.
But payments don’t work like that. Stripe didn’t “just rebuild” per country. Payments are banking rails, regulation, currency, KYC, fraud patterns, chargeback culture, and every one of those is local. Wave being stuck in Senegal wasn’t something it could fix by editing some code. It reflected that the machinery of mobile money - agent networks, telco integration, central-bank approval - has to be rebuilt almost from scratch in every market. The problem is global. The solution is stubbornly local. Whether Wave goes global depends entirely on whether that machinery replicates - and that is the hard part, not an afterthought.
So to build global is to solve a global problem; and if you want to grow strong, respect physical laws by starting in a specific niche, region, or a limited set of features.
But solving a global problem is the entry ticket, not the finish line. So here’s the fuller definition I would stand behind:
A product is global when three things are true: the problem shows up in market after market, the thing that makes your solution work can be rebuilt somewhere else without breaking, and you can build for that move anytime.