Why Most Untapped Markets Should Stay Untapped

A while ago, I heard someone say something in pidgin that has stayed with me ever since: "Gap dey the market. No be say market dey the gap." I laughed because it sounded funny. Then I thought about it for a while and realized it explained one of the biggest mistakes founders make. We assume that because we've identified a gap, customers must be hiding somewhere inside it, patiently waiting for us to show up. But a gap is just a gap. It doesn't come with customers. It doesn't come with demand. It certainly doesn't come with money. Sometimes it's simply an empty space that everybody else wisely ignored.

One of the biggest lies the startup world tells founders is that they should look for untapped markets. It sounds intelligent. It makes you feel like Christopher Columbus of entrepreneurship. Go where nobody has gone before. Build what nobody has built before. Create a category. Blue ocean. First-mover advantage. We've turned originality into a business strategy. The funny thing is that customers don't wake up every morning praying for originality. They wake up trying to solve problems before their first cup of coffee.

Think about how we actually behave as customers. Nobody says, "I hope someone invents a completely new way for me to order lunch today." We simply want lunch to arrive on time. We don't care whether the app uses AI, blockchain, machine learning, quantum computing, or the tears of startup founders. We care that our food doesn't arrive looking like it survived a road accident. Customers rarely reward novelty. They reward convenience. They reward speed. They reward businesses that make life slightly less annoying.

Founders, unfortunately, fall in love with ideas. Customers fall in love with outcomes. That's an expensive mismatch. I've watched founders spend months polishing products nobody was asking for because the idea sounded clever. Somewhere along the journey, the excitement of building replaced the discipline of listening. The startup became an engineering project instead of a business. The founder kept saying, "People will understand eventually." Eventually is one of the most expensive words in entrepreneurship.

Here's something I've started appreciating more than originality: competition. Yes, competition. Strange, isn't it? Most founders see competitors and panic. I see competitors and relax a little. At least somebody is making money. At least customers already understand the problem. At least people are already reaching into their wallets. I'd rather fight for a slice of an existing market than spend three years convincing people the market should exist in the first place.

Imagine opening a suya spot. One street has six suya sellers, all busy every evening. Another street has none. Startup Twitter will probably tell you to choose the second street because there's "less competition." My Nigerian instinct tells me to ask a much simpler question: Why is nobody selling suya there? Maybe there isn't enough foot traffic. Maybe the residents don't buy suya. Maybe everyone there prefers cooking at home. Or maybe every entrepreneur before you already learned that lesson with their own money.

The same thing happens in tech. Founders proudly say things like, "There are no competitors." They expect applause. Personally, I start asking uncomfortable questions. If there are no competitors, how do you know people actually want this? Who is spending money today? What are customers doing instead? Because customers are always doing something. They don't pause their lives waiting for startups to launch. If they have a painful problem, they've probably invented an ugly solution already.

That's why I pay more attention to customer behavior than customer opinions. People say a lot of things. Behavior is harder to fake. If businesses are managing operations with Excel spreadsheets that have seventeen tabs and formulas only one employee understands, that's interesting. If entire companies are coordinating work through WhatsApp voice notes, that's interesting. If someone hires three interns to manually solve a repetitive task, that's even more interesting. Those ugly workarounds are evidence that the pain is real.

Big companies understand this surprisingly well. Contrary to popular belief, most of them didn't invent demand. They noticed it before everyone else did. They observed how people behaved, where they struggled, what shortcuts they created, and what frustrations they tolerated. Then they built something better. Founders often admire companies like Apple or Uber without realizing those businesses didn't succeed simply because they were innovative. They succeeded because they made existing behaviors dramatically easier.

The startup ecosystem rarely celebrates that part, though. It's more exciting to tell founders to "disrupt industries" than to tell them to observe people. Observation isn't glamorous. It doesn't make for exciting LinkedIn posts. Nobody gets thousands of likes for saying, "I spent three months watching how customers currently solve this problem." But that's usually where the best businesses begin—not with genius, but with curiosity.

One thing I've had to unlearn is believing that every good idea deserves a company. It doesn't. Some ideas are fascinating conversations and terrible businesses. Some ideas solve problems that aren't painful enough. Others solve problems that only exist for a tiny group of people. And sometimes, if we're being honest with ourselves, we're solving problems we'd like people to have instead of the ones they actually complain about. Founders are naturally optimistic. The market isn't.

The longer I spend around startups, the less impressed I am by founders who tell me they're building something nobody has ever done before. I'm far more interested in founders who tell me they've spoken to fifty customers and discovered people are already paying for terrible alternatives. That's evidence. That's behavior. That's money changing hands. Those are signals you can build on. Originality is nice. Demand pays salaries.

None of this means you should never build something new. Innovation matters. Every industry needs people willing to challenge the status quo. But there's a difference between building something new and building something nobody needs. Founders should spend less time asking whether an idea is unique and more time asking whether people are already frustrated enough to pay for relief. Frustration is one of the strongest currencies in business. If people are already complaining, you're halfway there.

So here's the lesson I've taken away after my own mistakes, countless conversations with founders, and more startup postmortems than I'd like to admit: stop chasing empty spaces. Chase obvious pain. Chase bad customer experiences. Chase inefficient processes. Chase businesses held together by spreadsheets, WhatsApp chats, and pure determination. Those are markets speaking. And if you listen carefully, they'll usually tell you exactly what to build.

Because at the end of the day, gap dey the market. No be say market dey the gap. That's not just a funny pidgin saying; it's one of the most practical business lessons I've ever heard. A gap is not an opportunity simply because it's empty. The real opportunity is finding people already struggling inside a market, already spending money, already looking for something better. That's where businesses are built. Everything else is just founders falling in love with silence and calling it potential.