I spend a lot of time in rooms full of energy. Students pitching at a demo day. Founders walking me through a deck. Entrepreneurs who quit something safe to chase something theirs. The energy is real - you can feel it before anyone speaks.
Then the idea comes out, and quietly, something deflates. Another delivery app. Another marketplace for a market that already has three. Another utility that a platform will ship as a feature next quarter.
Nobody in the room says it. The pitch gets polite questions, the deck gets notes on the business model, and everyone moves on. But the gap between the energy and the idea stays with me long after.
The energy is never the problem
Here is what has quietly changed in the last decade: the process of building a startup has been democratized. Talk to users, find the pain, iterate toward product-market fit - the path is taught in every accelerator, every YouTube series, every incubator from Lagos to Lisbon. The playbook is free.
What has been democratized far less is the starting point. Where the idea comes from.
Venture capital noticed this long ago. YC regularly publishes its Requests for Startups - a public list of problems it wants founders to attack, a strong signal beamed at anyone still choosing what to build. It is a real answer to that lost energy. But an RFS is primarily - not only - an investor’s signal: this is what we want to fund. It is drawn from theses and term sheets, and it rarely reaches the founder whose best material is a market stall in Bamako or a border crossing that breaks twice an hour. Greenfield borrows that spirit at a much smaller scale: one person’s notebook, written from the street rather than the portfolio.
So most ideas still come from the same few places: what we already use, what the press already covered, what worked elsewhere two years ago - the eternal “X for Africa”. And the results show. When CB Insights ran its famous post-mortem analysis of failed startups, the most telling cause was not running out of money - that is just how startups die, not why. It was no market need: 42%. Nearly half of that energy, poured into something nobody was waiting for.
The crowding is visible at continental scale too. In early 2025, the “Big Four” - Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Egypt - captured around 84% of all African startup funding, and fintech alone took over 40% of the total. Four countries, a handful of sectors, thousands of founders elbowing for the same square meters - on a continent of 54 countries and a billion daily problems.
The ideas hiding in plain sight
Meanwhile, the actual gaps are everywhere. They are just hard to see, because they do not look like startup ideas. They look like ordinary life.
A merchant at a market stall doing flawless mental arithmetic over goods she cannot price in writing. A border crossing where a process visibly breaks twice an hour. A friend’s offhand question over coffee that turns out to have no good answer anywhere.
My own list grows this way - from travel, from daily encounters, from conversations that stay with me. For years these ideas piled up in my notes, each one researched a little, sketched a little, and then shelved. Not because they were weak. Because nobody is competing for them, there is no deck template, no shorthand, no “it’s like Uber but for…” - and so they stay invisible to exactly the people with the energy to build them.
That is the part worth saying carefully. The problem was never a lack of energy. It is that we keep pouring greenfield energy into brownfield ideas.
In software, a greenfield project is one built on untouched land - no legacy systems, no constraints, nothing to displace. Investors use the word the same way: a16z calls it the greenfield strategy - win where there is nothing to dislodge, because acquiring customers de novo is easier than convincing them to switch. The classic ideas are brownfield: crowded, well-mapped, incumbent-owned. The lived-encounter ideas are greenfield: nothing to displace, everything to define.
Hence the name.
What a Greenfield idea looks like
People ask me to share these ideas often enough that this week I finally sat down and finished the first issue. It started exactly the way I described - as a friend’s question: could AI teach market merchants to count?
The premise turned out to be wrong, and the way it was wrong is where the product lives. A vendor who cannot read a single digit will still tell you instantly what 3 bags at 750 CFA cost. She already knows how to count - what she needs is a bridge from oral numeracy to symbolic numeracy: reading a price tag, confirming a mobile money transfer, keeping the carnet de crédit. Researched through, that one conversation became a product wedge, a why-now argument, and a venture-scale thesis about building for trade languages instead of countries.
You can read it here: Greenfield #01 - They already know how to count.
That is the shape every issue will follow: a real encounter, a narrow wedge, an honest why-now, and the reasoning that takes it from anecdote to opportunity.
Why I am giving these away
The honest part first: I will never build most of these. Time is finite, I have my own work, and an idea sitting in my notes helps no one.
Also honest: an idea in a newsletter is not a company. The hard part - the years of execution, the customers, the wrong turns, the mornings of doubt - belongs entirely to whoever builds it. I am handing over the cheapest 1% and I know it.
Some of these ideas will be wrong. Some will be early. Some will need context I do not have - a language I do not speak, a market I have only walked through once. That is fine. An idea published and challenged is worth more than an idea archived and safe.
So challenge them. I am open to honest feedback - reach out on LinkedIn anytime.
The field is open
So, the mechanics, plainly: Greenfield is a newsletter. One idea at a time, researched and reasoned through. Subscribers get every idea by email, one week before it goes public on the site. No spam, no funnels - just the ideas, as they are ready.
If you are one of the people I keep meeting - the energy already there, the field not yet chosen - this is for you.
The ideas are the easy part to share. What happens to them is not mine to decide.