DealDey

» see dealdey.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

DealDey's peak years line up almost exactly with mine as a working engineer, and the category it belonged to did reach Turkey in the same window. Everybody got a version of this. A site that emails you one discount a day, always with a countdown clock on it, for a restaurant you would never otherwise have walked into. So I recognize the shape of DealDey completely and know nothing whatsoever about the specific one, because the whole business was local by construction. A deal is a coupon for a place you can physically walk into.

Sim Shagaya started it in 2011 in Lagos. He is the same person behind Konga, which was the other large Nigerian e-commerce name of that decade, and later behind uLesson. DealDey ran the Groupon model without much modification: negotiate a discount with a merchant, sell the voucher, take a cut, move on to tomorrow. By 2015 it was one of the biggest e-commerce operations in the country by traffic.

That was also the year Kinnevik, the Swedish investment group with money spread across most of the African internet at the time, put five million dollars in. What followed was not expansion. The company laid off around sixty percent of its staff not long afterward, which is the sort of thing that happens when new money arrives and immediately gets spent on discovering what the old numbers actually meant.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cracks ~

The daily-deals model failed everywhere it was tried, and it failed for reasons that had nothing to do with Nigeria. Merchants signed up once, got flooded with customers who would only ever pay the discounted price, and did not sign up again. Groupon itself spent a decade shrinking away from the thing it invented. There was no version of this business that worked at scale, which means DealDey's real problem was arriving early to a party that turned out to be a trap.

Local conditions made it worse. Nigerian e-commerce in those years was fighting card penetration and delivery addresses at the same time, and the survivors were the two companies willing to build their own logistics and absorb enormous losses. A voucher business has no logistics to build and nothing to absorb losses with. It is a thin layer of software sitting between two parties who can find each other without it.

~ the quiet exit ~

In 2016 Ringier Africa Deals Group bought DealDey for five million dollars. The reported opening ask had been seventy-five million. That gap is the entire story of African tech valuations between 2014 and 2016, compressed into one line of a term sheet.

Two years later it stopped. The last post on its social accounts went up on 7 december 2018, the offices were closed during that week, and staff were let go. No announcement, no farewell page, no explanation of what happened to outstanding vouchers. Confirmation came from journalists in january 2019 who noticed the site was not coming back and went looking. A company that had spent seven years sending people a daily email could not manage one final one.

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