Zimbabwe’s daily deals startup dhiri.co.zw suspended sending out daily deals last Friday, apparently so they can ‘regroup’ and come back stronger. The startup sent out a tweet and a Facebook update on Friday advising it’s followers they were taking a short break that will last a couple of weeks.
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/dhirizw/status/167887189143855104″]
The Dhiri site itself has a “back soon” message but still accepts signups for daily deals. Existing Dhiris are still active for redemption.
We contacted Dhiri for comment on here is what they said:
We decided to take a little break to regroup. We have learned lots of lessons, have an idea of what has worked, and what hasn’t worked, and are re-evaluating our strategy to ensure we’re matching merchants with subscribers.
The daily deals service launched on 1 December last year and was active the past two and a half months sending out deals daily via email and sms. Deals sent out in the two months include those for pizzas, burgers, cinema tickets, photo shoots, business cards, paint, car polish, clothes and fresh veggies.
The company behind Dhiri is a local (and Australian at the same time) web design and development firm called C2 Media.
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8 comments
regroup and restrategise
Im in love with their site and yes you can tell its not from home but home 😉
Umm,i think they are not making any money
Agreed, I’ve seen this type of thing happen in AUS as well
Zim businesses are now used to huge ridiculous margins while paying nothing for whatever services they get (remember burning). So start-ups are hard-pressed to either join the club and charge high prices (and ultimately fail) or accept low prices from shrewd business operators. All this coupled with the struggling Zim economy with its attendant low disposable incomes and low consumer uptake… its eish for all you start-ups!
I was surprised to stop receiving daily text alerts from dhiri and thought maybe something I had done, glad that isn’t the case. I think sms’s are very much over priced in our country and adding value to them is extremely difficult task to accomplish. Lets face reality for a while hardly anyone does anything without mass consensus i.e. is anyone else do it and so much harder to achieve in the arena of tech. Well done to the guys at dhiri, I liked the idea of receiving unsolicited texts from the part of the companies engaging dhiri and it wasn’t spammy at all. I can imagine what the cost was to send sms’s to people who aren’t paying a cent to receive them for a prolonged period cant be easy at all. I think mobile adverts are actually a novel idea that can only get better with time, the simplicity of a text message should not be taken for granted.
hmmm, i told u so
There’s more to this business than slapping on a website. From my understanding the chances of this business model succeeding in Zimbabwe are minimal. But if they want to give this a go I’m willing to be proved wrong