Building Lean Startups at the Bottom of the Pyramid (Innovations Case Narrative: YouthBank and Generation Enterprise)

Valley. But Lagos, not San Francisco, is where we went in 2009 when we decided to launch our startup. After years of economic development research, strategy consulting, and engagement with at-risk youth, we, Clara Chow and Lily Rubin, had gone from friends, colleagues, and fellow social enterprise nerds in Washington D.C., to excited (and apprehensive) founders of a youth-run photo studio in Lagos, Nigeria—one of the world’s fastest-growing megacities. Our photo studio not only would develop headshots for aspiring “Nollywood” stars, it would give the street youth of Lagos—the infamous “Area Boys”—work experience, skills training, and, for top performers, access to microfinance, putting them on the path to becoming independent entrepreneurs and socially responsible community leaders. We raised over US $25,000, developed the business model and rotational training program, interviewed some 200 local youth to gather baseline data, and conducted extensive market research. We had a plan. Of course, nothing went according to plan. Years later, on Clara’s first day in Steve Blank’s Lean Launchpad class at Stanford, she’d be reminded that no startup business plan survives its first contact with reality. The only way to find out what works is to get out of the building and test it with real customers. Fail fast and cheaply. And adapt (“pivot” in startup speak) until you hit upon a model that the market wants, and can scale. This is the story of how we tested, failed, learned from our failure, and adapted the model for our youth organization over four years, 40 trips, and thousands of volunteer hours. What started as a quest to help a Nigerian activist bring microfinance to urban youth became a photo studio that provided on-the-job training