Startups

The case for Ouredenlife

The most difficult job in the Nigerian Consumer Space

Ouredenlife: the Provider of tech-enabled concierge service intended to buy back time for a more enriching lifestyle.

As someone who usually sees consumer apps as a difficult entity, I’ve found myself surprisingly excited about this one. Everyone has had the idea of creating and solving consumer problems for the household. Most of them never seem to find the balance between cloning from Masa’s Time wheel and being too unique.

To many, Ouredenlife looks like just another Servicing app, but what’s special about Eden isn’t one particular feature — it’s about how it bundles everything together.

Like a Laundry, Ouredenlife helps you wear clean clothes with an amazing feeling, like a restaurant and takeout, it helps you eat healthy like back when people ate balanced diets. Like a cleaning Company, it lets you come home to a wonderful environment. And like a social product, it lets you stay connected with your friends and communities in an intimate way.

Ouredenlife as a service seems straightforward. Find high-quality service businesses & plug….them to customers on a subscription basis. In theory, this makes sense & very simple. This is the regular format for every service company and one of the reasons I was a bit sceptical about Eden.

The problem with that method is that you are at the mercy of the businesses you plug your customers into. In practice, a lot of Nigerian services just care about profits. Great & quality customer service is non-existent.

So, instead of relying on bad services from providers, they set out to build their in-house model. The internal model is difficult, but at least your fate is in your hands. They also get to control their margins and reduce CAC when launching new products.

Ouredenlife hits all the marks it needs on the product side, but what I find most compelling is the new user behaviours it creates.

The attention to detail is present not only in the food you eat but in the in-person experiences you have while using the app. You get to choose what you want, where and when. You even have a personal manager who helps in putting your life in order.

New behaviours like this are important for creating affinity. When you pair these new behaviours with network effects and retention hacks — your food/cleaning/laundry comes at the same time decided by you — you start to form habits in your users’ daily lives.

Without the complete rails, logistics and having to face all these problems in new cities, it would take a while to replicate the successes of Lagos, but the light at the end of the tunnel is too bright.

Once they get the framework, it would be easier to replicate. To be honest, Ouredenlife can only get better.

Building software companies is hard. Building a software + hardware + people biz in a Country with No rails and infrastructure to help takes a lot of balls.

I don’t think it’d be unreasonable to call Ouredenlife the best attempt I’ve seen in the past few years to build a perfect service app. It’s no surprise given the founder’s knack for taking on challenges.

It’s authentic, thoughtful, intimate, and puts a unique spin on things people were already doing in the first place while saving the most precious commodity “Time”

Follow me on Twitter at @idamezhim.