There is a standard story told about markets with infrastructure gaps. The story goes like this: these markets lag behind. They are years, maybe decades, behind mature markets. The task for entrepreneurs is to close the gap — to help these markets catch up to where London or New York already is. The gap is framed as a deficit to be overcome.
This story is wrong. Or rather, it is incomplete in a way that leads entrepreneurs and investors to consistently underestimate the most interesting markets on earth.
The infrastructure gap is not a deficit. It is a design space. It is the room in which new systems can be built without having to displace old ones. The markets that are fully built have no room. Every new system must fight for territory against an incumbent. Every innovation faces the installed base. The infrastructure gap is the absence of incumbents. It is an invitation.
"The countries with fully built infrastructure have no room left for new systems. The countries still building do. Algeria is still building. That is not a disadvantage — it is the whole point."— N. Bouteraa
What the leapfrog argument gets wrong
The conventional version of this insight is the leapfrog argument: that markets without landline infrastructure can go straight to mobile; that markets without traditional banking can go straight to mobile money. This is true. But it understates the case.
The leapfrog argument treats the gap as a temporary condition — you skip one generation and land where the mature markets are now. But the infrastructure gap is not temporary. It is generative. Markets that go straight to mobile money do not just catch up to Western banking — they produce different kinds of financial behaviour, different institutions, different relationships between savers and capital. They do not become copies of mature markets. They become something new.
Algeria's real estate market illustrates this exactly. The market ran on informal referrals, personal relationships, and oral agreements for decades. It was not a primitive version of a mature property market. It was a different system — one built entirely on social capital rather than institutional infrastructure. Immotify is not trying to make Algeria's property market look like England's. It is trying to give Algeria's existing system the infrastructure it needs to scale — and in doing so, it may produce something quite different from what exists anywhere else.
Three rules for building in a gap market
After six years of building in Algeria's real estate sector, I have arrived at three principles that I apply to every decision in the ecosystem.
First: the infrastructure you build must be genuine infrastructure. It must create value for everyone who builds on top of it, not just for you. A property index that only benefits the company that built it is a product. A property index that allows an entire ecosystem of developers, architects, brokers, and buyers to operate more effectively is infrastructure. The distinction matters because infrastructure attracts ecosystems, while products attract customers. Ecosystems are worth more.
Second: work with the informal systems, not against them. Every gap market has informal systems that work. Algeria's property market runs on word-of-mouth referrals. Sanad's target market runs on the daret circle. These are not primitive versions of formal systems — they are evidence that the need exists and that trust has already been established. The smartest infrastructure adds a layer on top of what already works, rather than trying to replace it.
Third: the gap will close around you. Every infrastructure builder in a gap market faces the same horizon risk: the market will eventually develop, and when it does, well-funded entrants will arrive. The answer is not to move faster — it is to build deeper. The ventures that survive the maturation of a gap market are the ones that became essential infrastructure before the incumbents arrived. That is the race I am running with FnarGroup.
Algeria is not emerging. It is re-emerging.
One word matters enormously here: emerging. The word is used to describe markets that are developing — but it carries a connotation that they were not there before, that they are coming into existence for the first time. This is wrong about Algeria and wrong about most of the markets that carry this label.
Algeria had trade routes that predate the Roman Empire. It had cities when most of Western Europe was forest. It has a literacy tradition, a legal tradition, a commercial tradition, an architectural tradition. What it has lacked — specifically, recently, for reasons that are political and historical rather than civilisational — is the institutional infrastructure that channels these traditions into modern economic activity.
That infrastructure is what I am building. Not because Algeria is emerging. Because Algeria is re-emerging — and the window in which the ground is still open, in which the infrastructure has not yet been built and the incumbents have not yet arrived, is exactly as long as it takes someone to build it.
That is the opportunity. That is why I am here.