The First 72 Hours in a New City

Yango has reclaimed over 2 million hours of commute time across African cities. That number started with a simple question repeated in city after city: can a marketplace work here? Roughly 35 cities in the world have more than 10 million people.¹ Most marketplace businesses will live or die in cities smaller than that. The question is which ones.

I have walked into cities across 30+ markets trying to answer this. The checklist is short. Three things matter in the first 72 hours.

First: how young is the city? Not on paper. On the street. Universities, nightlife, informal commerce around campus gates. Young people try new things. They chase bargains. They tell their friends. Without that, you are marketing to people who already have habits they do not want to change.

Second: what is the natural constraint on supply? For transport, this means one thing — how do vehicles get into this economy? Import levies, local assembly, financing options. If a driver cannot make the math work on a vehicle, the marketplace has no supply. No supply, no business.

Third: is that constraint solvable with capital, or is it structural?

Brazzaville taught me the difference. On paper, the city looks young. Median age checks out. Universities are there. But the government banned 2- and 3-wheelers. That single decision priced the entire young population out of the supply side. Taxis stayed expensive. Utilization stayed low. No affordable entry point for a driver to join. The demand existed. The vehicle economics did not.

Compare that to Lusaka. Young city, growing fast, no ban on affordable vehicle types, import economics that let the unit math work. The supply constraint was solvable with capital — and once we connected transport companies to a financing structure that made the vehicle scoreable, we reached density within months. On a spreadsheet, Brazzaville and Lusaka look similar. On the ground, one had a constraint you could solve with a deal. The other had a wall.

Capital constraints are opportunities. Structural constraints are exits. Knowing which one you are looking at in the first 72 hours saves you years.

Jane Jacobs called cities "problems of organized complexity"² — too many interacting variables for statistics, too structured for randomness. You cannot read a city from a spreadsheet. You read it by walking it, counting what is there, and noticing what is missing. The density dividend a city can produce depends on whether the ground-level conditions — mixed use, short distances, cheap space for new businesses — are actually present. The numbers come after.