A while ago, I was connected to a project that wanted to introduce Sake, yes, the Japanese rice wine to an African audience.
The team was sharp.
The branding was clean.
The rollout plan was tight.
But it didn’t take long to realize something was off.
We were asking the wrong question.
Not “how do we get people to buy this?”
But “why would this even matter here?”
The Relevance Gap
In Nigeria, the average person doesn’t drink Sake.
They don’t dream of it, crave it, or even talk about it.
It doesn’t signal wealth. It doesn’t represent health. It doesn’t carry any cultural weight.
And so, no matter how stunning the label looked or how perfect the messaging sounded, the product was trying to sell uphill — fighting for attention and meaning in a market that had no frame of reference for it.
What happened with that Sake project is exactly what happens to a lot of Web3 products trying to “enter Africa.”
They come in polished, funded, and technically sound.
But they ignore the one factor that matters most:
Cultural Relevance.
Africa Doesn’t Need to Be Educated. It Needs to Be Understood.
I’ve seen it again and again.
Projects land in Nigeria and start rolling out campaigns in perfect English, explaining “decentralized liquidity,” “modular protocols,” and “non-custodial staking solutions.”
Meanwhile, the person they’re trying to reach is thinking:
“How does this help me buy airtime?”
“Can it protect my savings from inflation?”
“Will it stop the POS guy from overcharging me?”
Web3 doesn’t fail here because people aren’t smart.
It fails because people aren’t seen. And that’s the real insight:
Most products don’t struggle with adoption. They struggle with perception.
Selling Sake in Lagos = Selling Web3 Without Context
Let’s call it what it is:
Trying to drop a global product into an African market without adjusting for culture, language, and lifestyle is like selling Sake in Lagos.
Yes, it’s premium.
Yes, it’s elegant.
But no, it’s not familiar.
You’ll spend more money explaining why people should care than actually getting them to care.
Relevance Is the Strategy
We talk a lot about localization in tech.
We translate landing pages.
We adjust onboarding flows.
We build mobile-first interfaces.
But real localization is not about design tweaks.
It’s about cultural translation.
It’s not just about being understood.
It’s about being felt.
The project that makes someone say “This is for me” will always beat the one that makes them ask “What does this mean?”
Ask This Before You Launch
If this product didn’t exist, would anyone in this market miss it?
How do people currently solve this problem (if they even see it as a problem)?
What platforms do they trust? What language do they use?
What emotion are you speaking to: urgency, fear, aspiration, curiosity?
Africa Is Not Waiting for You. But It’s Open to You
There’s an opportunity here; one of the biggest in the world.
A young population. A hunger for solutions. A willingness to try.
But you don’t win this market with airdrops.
You win it with empathy.
Build globally.
But enter locally.
And please stop trying to sell Sake in Lagos.