Building a Marketplace in Nigeria's LPG Sector — Lessons from the Field

Nigeria's LPG (cooking gas) market is a $15B opportunity hiding in plain sight. But here's what nobody tells you: it's not a tech problem. It's a trust problem.

I've spent the last year building OGas in Ughelli, Delta State — a digital marketplace connecting verified gas sellers with households and businesses. Not a delivery app. A B2B2C marketplace with Paystack escrow.

What I've learned so far:

1. Regulation is your friend, not your enemy. CAC registration (BN: 9638951) and FIRS TIN verification opened doors that "ideas" never could. DSEZ took us seriously because the paperwork was clean.

2. Escrow changes everything. Cash-on-delivery dominates because buyers don't trust sellers and sellers don't trust buyers. Paystack escrow solved that. Our first live transactions proved the model.

3. LPG isn't just cooking gas. Restaurants, hotels, and bakeries buy in bulk. That's our B2B wholesale layer — and it's 3x the margin of household sales.

4. Infrastructure is the real competitor. Bad roads, erratic power, and fragmented supply chains are harder to beat than any competitor. We're solving it with seller verification and logistics partnerships, not by owning trucks.

What I'm figuring out now:

• Scaling from 1 city to 8 without losing quality

• Raising $200K seed from investors who understand African marketplaces

• Finding a technical co-founder who gets React Native + Firebase

To my fellow Nigerian founders: What's the biggest non-obvious challenge you've faced building in this market? And how did you solve it?

Let's make this forum active. Nigeria's ecosystem deserves its own space here.

Simon Onos
Founder, OGas Ventures
📧 [email protected]
🌐 https://www.ogaslpgmarketplace.com