Cooking a Chicken Omelette - Jobtech Alliance

A Recipe for Marketplace Liquidity

Serves: One functioning two-sided marketplace.

Prep time: Longer than your pitch deck claims.

Every jobtech founder has stood in the kitchen of their startup at 6am, whisk in hand, asking the eternal question: what comes first, the chicken or the egg? A marketplace works when both ingredients show up at the same time. Workers won’t crack the eggs if there are no orders. Customers won’t order if no one’s at the pan. You need them whisked together – what we call liquidity.

Ingredients

1 generous helping of supply (workers, providers, talent, merchants)
1 generous helping of demand (customers, clients, the people with money)
A pinch of trust (non-negotiable; do not skimp)

Preparing your ingredients

Before you turn on the heat, figure out which ingredient you’re short on. Are you supply-constrained (low fulfilment, demand walking away because “you can never find anyone”) or demand-constrained (loads of eager workers, but no one is buying these omelettes)? The “hard side” of the market is whichever one is slower, costlier, or more stubborn to activate – and it changes over time. Don’t keep seasoning the easy side.

Method (see detailed instructions in Chicken & Egg Learning Study)

Cook in a small pan first. One geography, one category. A tightly constrained atomic network beats a thin, watery spread across the continent.
Pour your effort into the hard side. That’s where the heat needs to be.
Season with credibility. Customers need to trust the quality; workers need to trust they’ll actually earn. Both, or neither.
Taste constantly. Vanity metrics (signups, GMV) will only disguise your omelette/marketplace getting burned. Track utilisation, fulfilment, match time, repeat usage – the stuff that tells you whether the omelette is actually edible.
Don’t scale until it’s cooked. An MVP in a marketplace isn’t minimum technology – it’s minimum liquidity. Make one omelette properly before you open the franchise.

Oh. And obviously wrap it in a chapati like a great Ugandan rolex!

The full recipe – with founder stories from Shaaré, Instollar, Mavu, EqualReach and more – is in our new Chicken & Egg Learning Study.
It might just be the most practical guide to building a marketplace in Africa, ever.

Dig in.

Until next time,
Chef Chris

📆 What’s on our calendar

Across Africa, millions of micro-enterprises are losing almost as much to everyday operational leaks as they take home in profit. Our new sector scan maps 60+ platforms across Africa building tools to close these gaps. Join us on 18 June for a 75-minute webinar unpacking the findings.

Confirmed speakers:

El Hadj Bah — Chief Policy Economist, African Development Bank Group
Jonathan Donner — Chief Knowledge Officer, Caribou Digital
Nick Markham — Investment Lead,

More speakers to be announced soon.

Three questions sit at the heart of refugee employment:

1. Why is moving displaced people into work harder than it looks?
2. Are refugee skilling programmes preparing people for the work that exists now, and the work emerging next in the age of AI?
3. And what stops employers from moving beyond stated interest into actual hiring?

On June 24–25,and Na’amal are convening Where the Pipeline Breaks, a virtual two-day Summit, to dig into all three. Save the date.

🔧 Built by our members

This month, we chatted with Akinbola Asalu, CEO of Aktivate, a creator economy platform that helps African nano and micro influencers connect with businesses, collaborate on campaigns, and get paid, simply and reliably.

What are you building?

We built the infrastructure that was missing in this market: a place where a business in Lagos or Nairobi can discover creators, run campaigns, and handle payouts without the back-and-forth that kills most influencer deals before they start. On the creator side, it means finding legitimate paid work, getting properly briefed, and receiving payment without the chase.

What are your top 3 insights building Aktivate?

1. Africans hate paying subscriptions – We launched Aktivate with a subscription mode. We’d onboard a client, they’d love the platform, and then the invoice would just disappear into the void. No cancellation, no conversation, just silence. We pivoted to a pay-per-campaign model and everything changed. Clients pay when there’s a campaign to run, which is exactly when they’re already in spending mode.

2. Nano influencers are underestimated everywhere – Everyone chases celebrity endorsements. But a creator with 3,000 followers in Surulere who posts about skincare has more purchasing influence over her audience than a macro influencer with 500K who posts everything. The engagement is real, the trust is personal, and the cost is a fraction. We are beginning to see businesses think like this as well, which is showing focus on data and market maturity.

3. Be flexible on direction, but bullish on vision – At the end of the day, as founders, it’s important to understand user behaviour and adapt to that but still be very knee deep in vision for your company. This vision is what keeps partners, employees, customers, and investors going.

What’s a challenge in your sector that’s often overlooked?

Influencer marketing infrastructure in African markets is still early. Most attribution tools were built for markets with mature e-commerce systems and predictable customer journeys where users click, cart, and checkout in one sitting.

That’s not always how purchasing decisions happen here.

Businesses still struggle to measure which creators are actually driving sales, downloads, or users. Until measurement improves, many brands will continue underinvesting in creator marketing despite strong real-world influence.

📖 Our insights

Ever been in a jobtech conversation where “gig work,” “platform worker,” and “informal economy” get used three different ways in ten minutes? We’ve built the Jobtech Glossary to help; a reference for the terms shaping the sector, with clear definitions, examples, and where we land on the ones still being contested. Have a read.