What Lagos taught us about London

When you build in only one place, you slowly stop noticing the assumptions baked into it. The way payments clear, the way people find work, the way a stranger decides whether to trust you: all of it starts to feel like simply how the world works, rather than one particular way that one particular place happens to work. Building in Lagos and London at the same time took that comfort away from us, and we are grateful it did. Each city turned out to be the clearest possible lens on the other. What follows is some of what Lagos showed us about London, once we finally had somewhere to compare it to.

The first thing Lagos teaches you is that trust is never free and never assumed. In a market where a courier price can swing from one week to the next, and where a buyer has no reason to believe a seller they have never met will actually deliver, you cannot paper over the gap with a friendly interface and hope for the best. You have to build the trust into the product itself. That is the whole idea behind Kwick: money sits safely in escrow until both sides are satisfied, and a buffer absorbs the wild movement in delivery costs, so two strangers can trade without either of them holding their breath. Lagos does not let you treat trust as a nice-to-have you can add in version two. It makes you solve it first, or you do not have a product at all.

We carried that lesson to London expecting it to be irrelevant, because London has all the infrastructure that Lagos has to improvise around. Payments clear. Contracts are enforceable. There are rules, and mostly they work. And yet the trust problem was still sitting there, just wearing a nicer suit. A renter who does not know what the law actually entitles them to. A worker walking into a salary conversation with no idea what the role really pays. The imbalance had not disappeared at all. It had simply gone quiet, tucked inside paperwork and politeness instead of sitting out in the open where you can see it. Lagos had trained us to go looking for the missing trust, so in London we noticed the thing that people who only ever build for London tend to miss: a system can be completely functional and still quietly shut out everyone who does not already know how it works. That is why we built Tenant Right, and it is the same instinct that started in a Lagos marketplace, only pointed at a different kind of locked door.

Lagos also taught us a deep respect for systems that already work perfectly well without us. Rotating savings, the practice a lot of families know as ajo or esusu, has moved money and built trust in communities for generations, long before anyone thought to put it in an app. The mistake so many builders make is to look at an informal system like that and assume its informality is a flaw waiting to be fixed by technology. We came to see it the other way around. When something has quietly moved money and held communities together for generations, the goal is never to replace it with an app that asks everyone to start over. It is to understand why it works, respect what it already does well, and only then ask whether technology can give a proven system slightly better rails without getting in its way. London sharpened that humility, because formal markets are full of products that assume they are the only legitimate way to do a thing, and treat the way people already manage as a problem rather than a starting point.

There is a lesson about pace in here too. Lagos rewards resourcefulness, because the infrastructure will not always be there to catch you, so you learn to ship the version that works today rather than wait for the version that needs everything to be perfect first. London's temptation runs in the opposite direction. When the rails are reliable, it becomes easy to overbuild, to polish, to add process, and to mistake all of that motion for progress. Holding both cities in view at once is what keeps us balanced. Lagos stops us waiting too long, and London stops us shipping something careless.

The deepest thing we have learned is that both cities have people the default was never built for. In Lagos the exclusion is loud and obvious, written in missing infrastructure and systems that openly do not reach you. In London it is quiet and well mannered, written in small print and unspoken norms that you are simply expected to already understand. It is genuinely the same problem, just wearing two very different disguises, and once you have seen it in one place you cannot stop seeing it in the other. That is the real reason we refuse to pick a single market. The diaspora we build for does not live in one country, and neither do the problems. Staying in two places at once is harder, slower, and occasionally maddening, but it is the only way we know to keep from mistaking the local for the universal. If you build in more than one world, you get to check your answers against reality twice, and that is a privilege we have stopped taking for granted.

solveX is a product studio building digital tools for African and diaspora communities across Nigeria and the UK.