From Airtime to AI: Escape Nigeria’s Copycat Trap

Nigerian startups don’t sell airtime because they lack imagination. They sell airtime because the market reliably pays for it.

That’s the uncomfortable lesson behind the recurring joke in local tech circles: “In the end, we all sell airtime.” It’s not really a joke—it’s a survival strategy. Airtime, data, and bill payments are habitual purchases with predictable demand. When growth is slow and investor patience is thin, predictability beats originality.

This matters beyond fintech. It shows up in Nigeria’s creator economy too. Many creators, freelancers, and digital entrepreneurs fund their dreams with “sure things” (brand deals, repost pages, reseller models) while the bigger vision—media IP, direct-to-fan products, niche platforms—waits for runway. The good news: AI can extend that runway and widen what’s economically possible, especially for content businesses.

Why “we all sell airtime” keeps happening

The simplest answer is that airtime is a business model with demand already built in. You’re not persuading users to change behaviour—you’re inserting yourself into behaviour that already exists.

Airtime is:

• Universal: Anyone with a phone needs it.
• Habitual: It’s purchased regularly, often weekly or even daily.
• Predictable: Even on bad months, it doesn’t disappear.
• Easy to explain: No long education cycle.

When a startup hits the market and reality hits back—slow adoption, lower purchasing power, infrastructure gaps, and regulatory uncertainty—founders start prioritising cashflow over novelty. And cashflow often looks like airtime, utility bills, TV subscriptions, or some other “can’t-ignore-it” spend.

Airtime isn’t a failure of innovation. It’s a response to what the ecosystem can currently sustain.

Creators live inside the same constraints. If your audience wants skits, you post skits. If the algorithm rewards short videos, you shorten. If brands only pay for certain niches, creators drift there. It’s not laziness—it’s survival.

The real bottleneck: runway, not ideas

Many founders and creators start with conviction. Then the timeline breaks.

The pattern looks familiar:

1. You build something you believe is needed.
2. Early excitement convinces you traction is “one milestone away.”
3. Funding gets harder; requirements shift from promise to proof.
4. Bills stack up—salaries, tools, rent, production costs.
5. You pivot toward what sells now.

That’s why the line about “the freedom to be stubborn” lands. Stubbornness is only admirable when you can afford it.

And Nigeria is not a forgiving place for long experiments. Even huge success stories took time. For example, Interswitch—after becoming a unicorn—only crossed $100 million revenue in 2024. That’s not poor execution. That’s what scale can look like in a market where infrastructure and purchasing power slow down compounding.

For the creator economy, runway is also the difference between:

• A creator who posts daily just to stay visible, and
• A creator who can invest in a documentary series, a podcast season, an online course, or a product line.

AI doesn’t magically fix infrastructure. But it reduces the cost of experimentation, and that’s a form of runway.

What AI changes for Nigeria’s creator economy (and why it’s not hype)

AI helps creators and digital entrepreneurs escape the copycat trap in a very practical way: it cuts the time and money required to produce, test, and distribute content.

AI reduces the “cost per experiment”

When it’s expensive to try new formats, people stick to proven formulas. AI lowers that cost.

Here’s what works in practice:

• Faster ideation: Generate 30 hooks, pick 5, test 2.
• Cheaper pre-production: Outline scripts, shot lists, interview questions.
• Repurposing at scale: Turn one long video into shorts, captions, threads, newsletter blurbs.
• Better iteration: Analyse retention drops and rewrite intros accordingly.

The outcome isn’t “more content.” It’s more learning per week.

AI makes niche audiences financially viable

Nigeria’s mass market is crowded. The money is increasingly in specific audiences with specific needs: diaspora freelancers, new parents, entry-level data analysts, students prepping for WAEC/JAMB, SME owners learning bookkeeping, and so on.

Niche media has always been hard because it requires consistency and depth. AI makes depth cheaper:

• Summarise complex topics into simple explainers.
• Build glossaries, templates, and playbooks.
• Maintain a weekly newsletter without burning out.

A creator who owns a niche can monetise through:

• paid communities
• sponsorships aligned with that niche
• digital products
• services (consulting, audits, training)

That’s how you stop “selling airtime” (doing whatever pays today) and start building owned value.

“Fintech is saturated” is a warning sign for creators too

The complaint that fintech is oversaturated is less about fintech itself and more about capital and attention flowing to familiar patterns.

In the creator economy, familiarity shows up as:

• everybody chasing the same formats
• the same influencer aesthetics
• the same “mentor” funnels
• the same brand-safe topics

The result is sameness—and sameness compresses earnings. When supply explodes, only the top 1–5% get outsized returns, and everyone else fights over leftovers.

AI can either worsen this (mass-produced generic content) or fix it (more creators producing distinct work). The difference is strategy.

A practical rule: use AI for structure, not for taste

If you ask AI to create your voice, you’ll sound like everyone else. If you use AI to handle the scaffolding, you keep your taste.

Use AI for:

• research summaries
• outlines
• edit suggestions
• repurposing
• versioning (short/medium/long)

Keep human control over:

• opinions
• storytelling
• cultural specificity
• examples from real work
• the final cut

Your taste is the moat.

From airtime economics to creator economics: build a “predictable layer”

Airtime works because it’s predictable. Creators can borrow this idea without literally selling airtime.

The move is to build a predictable revenue layer that funds experimentation.

The predictable layer options (creator-friendly)

Pick one that fits your audience and skills:

1. Retainer services: content editing, design, social media management, UGC production for brands.
2. Templates and toolkits: contract templates, budget sheets, pitch decks, caption banks.
3. A paid newsletter: industry briefs, job leads, grant opportunities, creator business insights.
4. Workshops and cohorts: monthly trainings with clear outcomes.
5. Affiliate partnerships: only where audience trust is already strong.

Then you invest surplus into “risky layer” projects:

• a documentary series
• a niche media brand
• a productised course
• a community platform
• an AI-powered tool for your audience

This is how you keep vision without starving.

What AI does inside this model

AI improves the predictable layer by increasing throughput:

• You can serve more clients without losing quality.
• You can ship templates faster.
• You can run a newsletter with a tighter workflow.

And it improves the risky layer by making experimentation cheaper:

• You can test three content angles in a week.
• You can localise content (pidgin/English; region-specific examples).
• You can prototype a small tool or chatbot before building software.

Where investors and brands can help (without “motivational talk”)

If Nigeria wants more original products—whether fintech, climate tech, health, or creator platforms—then capital must reward timelines that reflect Nigerian realities.

For the creator economy, “patient capital” isn’t only VC. It also includes:

• brands signing longer creator partnerships (3–12 months)
• media buyers funding series, not one-off posts
• platforms supporting creator education and analytics
• grant programs that pay for research, not just output

Creators are businesses. Businesses need predictable cashflow. When the ecosystem only pays for quick virality, it trains everyone to copy what already works.

A simple playbook to break the cycle (even if you’re not funded)

If you’re a creator, freelancer, or early-stage founder in Nigeria, here’s what I’ve found works when you want originality without betting the house.

1) Stop treating “traction” as a single number

Track three separate metrics:

• Attention: views, reach, shares
• Trust: replies, saves, DMs, email signups
• Money: revenue, conversion rate, repeat purchases

AI can help you instrument this with lightweight dashboards and weekly summaries. But you need the discipline to measure.

2) Build one audience asset you control

Algorithms change. Phone data costs fluctuate. Platforms throttle reach.

Pick one:

• email list
• WhatsApp/Telegram community
• website with a clear lead magnet

Your owned channel is the opposite of airtime economics. It’s where you compound.

3) Productise your knowledge before you build software

Most people jump to an app too early. Start with:

• a paid PDF playbook
• a Notion template
• a 2-hour workshop
• a small cohort

Then use AI to support delivery: FAQs, feedback summaries, lesson outlines, customer support scripts.

4) Use AI to localise, not to genericise

Nigeria rewards relevance.

Make your content sharper by adding:

• Naira pricing examples
• local workflow realities (power, device constraints)
• Nigerian buyer objections
• diaspora-specific payment issues

AI can help draft versions, but your lived context is the differentiator.

Nigeria doesn’t lack ideas. It lacks tolerance for slow bets.

The phrase “in the end, we all sell airtime” is a mirror. It reflects what Nigeria’s market consistently pays for—and how quickly founders and creators are forced to prioritise survival.

AI is one of the few tools that can change the equation without waiting for perfect infrastructure or perfect policy. It gives creators and digital entrepreneurs cheaper iteration, faster production cycles, and more shots on goal. Used well, it doesn’t make everyone the same. It gives more people the runway to be distinct.

If this series—How AI Is Powering Nigeria’s Digital Content & Creator Economy—has one underlying message, it’s this: the future belongs to creators who build predictable income, own their audience, and use AI to keep experimenting long after copycats get tired.

So here’s the question I’d sit with: what’s your “airtime” revenue layer—and what original thing will you fund with it over the next 90 days?