Why copying competitors won’t help African startups build category-defining products
Why do some products become indispensable while others remain just another option in a crowded market? Arinze Onuoha believes the answer lies in moving beyond feature parity and thinking differently about scale.
There is a familiar pattern across Africa’s startup ecosystem. A company launches a successful product. Soon enough, competitors emerge with similar features, matching interfaces, and often the same value proposition. Within a few years, the market becomes crowded with businesses offering largely identical solutions, competing over marginal differences in pricing, incentives, or customer-acquisition tactics.
For Arinze Onugha, a product leader who has spent more than a decade building products across Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and North America, this obsession with feature parity is one of the biggest reasons many products struggle to achieve meaningful scale.
The problem, he argues, is not that companies are building poorly. It is that too many are building the same thing.
“Many teams get trapped in the chase for feature parity,” he says. “They keep optimising existing products until they become indistinguishable.”
It is an observation that eventually inspired his book, Designing for Scale, which explores why some products become category leaders while others remain trapped in a cycle of incremental improvement.
The limits of incremental thinking
For many startups, growth often begins with studying competitors. What features do they offer? What are customers asking for? How can we make our version slightly better? At first glance, the approach appears logical. Product teams reduce risk by building what has already been validated in the market.
However, Onugha believes this mindset eventually creates a ceiling. “They were efficient products, but they were not memorable products,” he says.
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