CAIRO: GoNabIt, the Arab region's first group-buying website, is set to fully integrate into LivingSocial and operate under its brand name in the near future, following its acquisition by the US deal-of-the-day giant last month. Becoming a LivingSocial company will enable GoNabIt to “leverage a growth platform to become bigger than it would be otherwise,” Dan Stuart, CEO and co-founder of GoNabIt explained to Daily News Egypt. “Our acquisition by LivingSocial has really strengthened our ability and resolve to continue being the best group-buying website in the region,” Sohrab Jahanbani, the company's other co-founder added in a statement released following the deal. While operating in a relatively new industry in the MENA region, GoNabIt has already managed to witness impressive growth following its 2010 founding by Stuart and Jahanbani. According to Stuart, both he and his partner sought to capitalize on the “gap in the eco-system” by providing more efficient ways to bring consumers to companies and cost-saving deals to customers. GoNabIt, he added, leveraged the demand from “businesses in this region that wanted to advertize online” but couldn't find efficient channels to reach or offer deals to consumers. Headquarters in Dubai and offering coupons in Arabic and English that save customers between 50 to 90 percent, GoNabIt has branch offices and operations in Abu Dhabi, Beirut, Amman, Kuwait, and Cairo, and has hundreds of thousands of registered users. One of the reasons why the company was able post impressive growth within such a short amount of time, Stuart went on to explain, was due to the “very specific and transparent business model involving several key drivers that produced immediate feedback.” “It's simple really, you put a deal up on the website, and people either buy it or they don't.” Turning to the Egyptian marketplace, Stuart explained that GoNabIt currently offers two deals per week, but has plans to “ramp that up significantly in the next 60 days” across a variety of different types of businesses looking to offer deals to consumers. The branch office in Egypt was initially established in late 2010 and planned to offer its first deal by February, but for “obvious reasons those plans were put on hold,” according to Stuart. Eventually, he continued, they managed to get back up and running following the mass protests earlier this year, offering their first deal by the end of March, and building up a registered-user base of over 140,000 today, GoNabIt's second-largest in the region. However, one challenge of offering an online deal-of-the-day service in Egypt is that not many people have credit cards, and GoNabIt seeks to be a “100 percent credit card only purchasing” platform. “Normally we try to do things like co-marketing with banks in order to directly target credit card holders, but in Egypt we'll have to experiment with alternative payment methods and try to find a balance between efficiency and technology. Thus, Egypt might be the one place where we'll offer cash-on-delivery payment options.” In regards to the types of coupons offered to Egyptian consumers, GoNabIt offers the “standard mix, including food and beverage deals, and health and fitness coupons.” However, Stuart believes there is much more room for growth in Egypt for GoNabIt's travel deals. “One thing we haven't tapped yet is travel-products, which we'll introduce through LivingSocial. And also, it's a pretty good time to do so because the tourism and travel industry needs a kick-start in Egypt. I think travel will outweigh other segments in Egypt.” Another customization for the Egyptian marketplace involves treating Cairo as if it is “three to six markets in itself, as opposed to one,” he added. “Cairo is a huge place, not necessarily geographically, but in regards to travel times from one side of the city to the other. We are working on segmenting the market to make deals more locally relevant and accessible.” Speaking on the acquisition of his company, Stuart explained that they chose to partner with LivingSocial due to the “close alignment” between the two companies. For his part, LivingSocial CEO Tim O'Shaughnessy said in a statement released after the acquisition, “As with previous acquisitions, LivingSocial has again chosen to align with a local company that possesses similar values and ways of doing business. We are excited to enter the dynamic Middle East market and further strengthen our strategic global efforts to bring LivingSocial values to members across the globe.”
