Two Years in The Trenches Building Hotels.ng

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Two Years in The Trenches Building Hotels.ng

Mark Essien is the Founder of the multi-million dollars Hotels.ng. In this narrative, he wrote on how his business started. This narrative is culled with permission of the author.

Hotels.ng is about two years old now. In the first year, it was just a website - no business built around it. It started off by me purchasing lists of hotels. The entirety of hotels that were available in any known dataset that was available in public or in any government archive was about 1500 in Nigeria. I listed them all on the site and put the site up. Only 100 of those hotels had pictures. The pictures were scraped from the hotel websites.

In October 2012 I moved to Nigeria to try to build a business out of this hotel booking website. I landed, rented a flat in Calabar and convinced a friend of mine, Charles, to join the project. I and Charles hit the streets of Calabar and started snapping photos of the hotels in Calabar. Soon we had the largest online list of hotels in Calabar. But none was yet bookable.

We coded a booking form one day and bought a company phone. We turned on the booking form and put the phone number on the site. We received 20 bookings for hotels in various parts of Nigeria that day, and had 100 missed calls on the phone. We could not book the hotels yet and we barely had time to address all the queries we received, so we took the number back off. We kept the booking form, but nothing would happen when people booked.

Some time later, Jason Njoku wrote me a message on Facebook that he was starting an investment company called Spark and that he wanted to invest in Hotels.ng. I went to Lagos, we had a 30 minute meeting on a hot balcony together with Bastian, then I returned to Calabar. The next day, they made an offer. A bit of negotiation and in January 2013 Hotels.ng received funds from Spark.

In the last one year, I used the investment money to build Hotels.ng into a company. We have 15 full-time staff, five contract staff and more than 70 ad-hoc staff. Those 70 people went everywhere in Nigeria and got hotels on our site. We now have 5080 hotels on the site. We have full pictures for 4000+ of all those hotels. We have addresses and driving instructions for all these hotels - we have massively accelerated the move of an African industry online.

The total value of the bookings that we have done for hotels in Nigeria on our website alone is currently 2.3 million USD. That value was generated without spending any money marketing the site. By its very existence, it is useful and people patronize it without us needing to tell them to use it.

By the end of the year 2013 we hit $40k in monthly revenue. I will follow up this post with other posts detailing how the process has been.

For more of this story, click on www.entrepreneurshipmag.blogspot.com