Creating A Market Before Selling To It
Enterprise infrastructure in Ethiopia was not a product launch. It was market creation.
Product Manager – Cloud Services & Connectivity
- Telecom
- B2B
- Cloud Infrastructure
- Market Creation
- Annual recurring revenue
- $1.2M+Annual recurring revenueGenerated in year one
- SLA uptime
- 99.5%SLA uptimeDelivered to enterprise customers
- Connectivity ceiling
- 300MbpsConnectivity ceilingFirst open-access FTTH in Ethiopia
- Indirect Provider model
- FirstIndirect Provider modelNegotiated with the regulator
The last closed telecom market in the world opened
Safaricom's entry into Ethiopia opened a market that had operated as a state monopoly for over a century.
As lead for the B2B unit, I was responsible for enterprise cloud and connectivity in a market that had no enterprise cloud ecosystem to enter.
There was no reseller framework, no established buying behaviour, and no internal playbook. Every commercial assumption had to be built rather than inherited.
We were not competing for share of an existing market. We were creating the market.
The product could not exist until the rules did
Multinational banks and universities were willing to buy enterprise infrastructure, but only from a provider that could prove reliability and regulatory standing.
The regulatory landscape had no category for what we wanted to sell. Reseller and indirect provider arrangements that are routine elsewhere had no legal precedent in Ethiopia.
Trust was the second barrier. Anchor clients were being asked to move mission-critical systems to a provider that had been operating in the country for months, not decades.
Regulatory approval was not a compliance step at the end. It was a prerequisite for the roadmap.
We treated market entry as a trust problem, not a portfolio problem.
A complete product catalogue would have meant nothing without regulatory permission to sell it and credible reference customers to validate it.
Regulation before roadmap
Nothing shipped until the commercial model had a legal category to operate in.
Anchor clients before volume
Banking and education were targeted first because their approval carried market-wide credibility.
Reliability before breadth
A narrow portfolio delivered at 99.5% uptime was worth more than a wide one that could not be trusted.
Five judgement calls that turned a blank market into a revenue-generating business
The decisions that mattered were about sequencing. What we chose to build second, and who we chose to sell to first, decided whether any of it worked.
- 01
Negotiate the reseller model before building the product
I led continuous discussions with the Ethiopian Communication Authority to establish the first Indirect Provider and Reseller model in the country, which unlocked the entire partner channel.
- 02
Start with banking, not with volume SMEs
Awash Bank, the largest private bank in Ethiopia, was pursued first for colocation and Backup-as-a-Service because a reference of that weight de-risked every conversation that followed.
- 03
White-label rather than build the orchestration layer
Domain and hosting services shipped on a white-labeled orchestration platform, trading long-term margin for the speed needed to establish presence.
- 04
Sell private pipes, not internet access
Layer 2 and Layer 3 connectivity options gave banks secure data paths that bypassed the public internet, which was the specific reassurance regulated customers needed.
- 05
Commit to a managed service model on day one
A 24/7 assured service up to the Optical Distribution Frame was expensive to staff early, but it was the only way to make an uptime promise credible to a first-time buyer.
Ethiopia's first Indirect Provider framework
Sustained engagement with the Ethiopian Communication Authority produced the first Indirect Provider and Reseller model approved in the country. It created a legal path for partners to sell Safaricom infrastructure, and it became the structure other providers later worked within.
Building the connectivity layer
We launched Fiber-to-the-Home and Data Center Connectivity at speeds up to 300Mbps against a 99.5% SLA.
Layer 2 and Layer 3 options were designed specifically for banks that needed private data paths isolated from the public internet.
This became the first open-access FTTH service in Ethiopia, which made it a national infrastructure milestone rather than a product release.
Cloud, colocation, and digital presence
Enterprise customers received a secure web interface to manage space, power, and environmental monitoring inside Tier III data centres.
An end-to-end orchestration platform covered .et domain registration, professional email, and website builders for smaller businesses.
Unified billing across the stack lowered the entry barrier for SMEs, which aligned the portfolio with the Digital Ethiopia 2025 agenda.
A functioning enterprise market where none existed
Within the first year of operation the B2B unit moved from zero to a recognised digital partner for the Ethiopian economy.
- Annual recurring revenue
- $1.2M+Annual recurring revenueYear one of operation
- SLA uptime
- 99.5%SLA uptimeSustained across enterprise services
- Open-access FTTH
- FirstOpen-access FTTHNational infrastructure milestone
- Indirect Provider model
- FirstIndirect Provider modelApproved by the regulator
The revenue was the visible result. The durable one was that a category of enterprise service now legally exists in Ethiopia, and the businesses that came after us did not have to negotiate it from scratch.
Market creation work is rarely attributed to product management, but in a blank-slate market the boundary between product strategy and regulatory strategy disappears.
In emerging markets you cannot build in a technical vacuum.
Scaling the B2B unit required acting as a bridge between product management, engineering, and regulatory diplomacy.
A product's success is often decided by the boardroom alignments and regulatory frameworks that allow the technology to exist in the first place.
Build the partner channel earlier
The Indirect Provider framework arrived after the direct sales motion was already established. I would invest in partner enablement from the first quarter, because the channel scales reach far faster than a direct enterprise team can in a market this size.