Efritin.com

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

~ the last words ~

I have no contact with this one, but the thing that killed it is a number I can read directly. Efritin died because getting online in Nigeria cost too much per megabyte for the browsing habit a classifieds site needs. My own first four years online were billed by the minute over a modem, and the question of whether you could afford to be connected right now was a live one in the house. so the shape of this death is familiar even though the country is not.

The company behind it was Saltside Technologies, out of Stockholm, which ran the same classifieds template across several emerging markets under different names. Efritin launched in Nigeria in august 2015. Somebody posts a thing, somebody else turns up with cash. it is the oldest reliable business on the internet and it does not need much of a product, which is exactly why everyone tries it.

They did not go in quietly. There was a Lagos office and a managing director who turned up in every Nigerian tech publication of the period, with enough spend behind it that the local press treated Efritin as one of the two names that mattered in the category. The other one was Jiji, and Jiji is the reason there is a grave here and not a duopoly.

~ the record ~

~ the pitch ~

The Nigerian bet in 2015 was straightforward and, on paper, obvious. Nigeria has a very large and very young population, and phones were arriving faster than anything else in the economy. Draw the line forward and you get a marketplace with tens of millions of users inside a few years.

What the line forward does not capture is what a phone actually costs to use once you own it. A device is a one-time purchase somebody will make. A browsing session is a recurring one, and in a country where data was sold in small bundles at a real fraction of a day's earnings, people did not spend it scrolling through listings for a used fridge. They spent it on messaging. Classifieds are a browsing product, and browsing was the expensive part.

~ the day it died ~

On 9 january 2017 Saltside shut the Nigerian operation down. The staff went and the head office in Ikeja was vacated, with the office property reported as heading to auction. CEO Nils Hammar's public explanation was that the returns were not there, and that data costs and the recession then running through the Nigerian economy were the reasons why.

The odd part is what happened next, which is nothing, for nine months. The website stayed up. It was not being run. It was just still resolving, an unmaintained marketplace people could keep landing on. The final closure came on 6 october 2017, when the site stopped answering and the app came off the Play Store. Two death dates then. One for the company and one for the domain, most of a year apart.

~ what got buried with it ~

Efritin is worth a marker because of who was wrong rather than who was right. This was not an underfunded local attempt beaten by a better-funded foreign one. It was the foreign money, a Swedish operator with a working template and a real budget, losing to a competitor that read the same market and priced its product for what people could actually afford to load.

The lesson keeps having to be relearned by whoever flies in next. A market is not the number of people who own a phone. it is the number of people who can afford to keep the phone talking to you for free, for as long as it takes them to find what they came for.

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