UD #00: Age of Deployment

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In 2015, I responded to a tweet from a founder looking to hire ‘geniuses’ and ended up joining hotels.ng. The company was building bookings.com for Nigeria. It offered 'pay on arrival' as a payment method and fulfilled reservations by placing multiple phone calls to both the customer and the hotel. Other than those adjustments, it was essentially replicating the bookings.com model in Nigeria.

At the time I joined Hotels.ng, there were many other companies trying to replicate successful Silicon Valley models in Nigeria. Two groups that most exemplified this approach were Spark and Rocket Internet, which happened to be locked in competition across multiple verticles. At the time, Rocket had launched Carmudi, Lamudi, Jovago, Jumia Food and Jumia, which were marketplaces for cars, apartments, hotels, food, and consumer goods respectively. Spark, on the other hand, had invested in a series of ‘dotng’ businesses that were taking everything online including hotels, apartments, drinks, and buses. These were all online marketplaces of the kind that had already become hugely successful in Silicon Valley. Just like hotels.ng, the primary differences were some sort of cash payment option and a more hands-on order fulfilment system.

These experiments had mixed results. We learned that the adjustments made to the business models were too small to truly account for local realities, yet large enough to introduce significant friction into the customer experience. We also learned that Nigerians are poorer, less educated, and have less access to the internet than our peers in other developed markets and that this affects how we engage with digital products (Quelle surprise!).

The Nigeria tech sector in 2021 looks very different from the one I joined in 2015. For starters, there are fewer companies using ‘dotng’ domain names. But more importantly, companies are starting to realise that providing a digital layer on top of a broken value chain is not enough, you often have to go deep and fix large parts of the value chain.

Carmudi (now rebranded as part of Jumia Deals) was launced in 2013 and is primarily a classified website for connecting buyers ...