Egypt’s Odiggo expands to Dubai, with Riyadh, rest of GCC to follow

The start-up, which connects car owners with automotive parts and services, was launched in Egypt towards the end of 2019 and entered the UAE market on Wednesday.

Its co-founders Ahmed Nasser and Ahmed Omar (who is also the CEO) told Arabian Business a launch in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, is soon to follow and that they have their eyes set on a GCC wide expansion in the medium term, followed by global growth in the future.

In a wide-reaching interview, the duo explained that their business model would work well in the UAE where people are accustomed to taking care of their daily needs online. They also talked about the surprisingly positive impact of Covid-19 on their business.

What market need does Odiggo answer?

We answer a market need by connecting the best fitting suppliers and car service providers to the car owners, saving the latter precious time and effort.

Odiggo receives the supply from the vendors, so our prices are cheaper than the market price.

Car owners, especially in the UAE, have always found it difficult and time consuming to take care of their cars. People spend hours looking for a car part or a good quality and trusted service provider to fix their cars.

Our value proposition statement is “car-services in minutes ” and so we are very focused on being the fastest option for the customer.

Can you describe your business model?

We charge suppliers a small fee on every transaction that they receive through our platform.

This works for the suppliers or car services providers because it helps them to increase their sales and reach more customers effectively.

In return, we provide suppliers with a 24/7 branch covering all the country of operation with no marketing expenses.

What are your expansion plans?

We first launched in Cairo, but are now expanding to Dubai followed by Riyadh, Saudi Arabia very soon.

We are mainly focusing on the GCC for now as it is still a huge market untapped market.

The automotive parts and accessories is a $61bn (AED224bn) industry in the Middle East and Africa alone which is a brilliant opportunity for Odiggo to use our e-commerce expertise to transcend the market and become the leading company in the industry.

Down the line, we will continue to expand within Africa and North Africa before we take our company global.

How did the pandemic impact your start-up? and how did you adapt to that?

What happened for Odiggo turned out to be the complete opposite to any of our expectations. The pandemic had a very positive impact on us as a start-up as people unfortunately were unable to purchase their car parts in store or directly from a car garage as those were closed due to the Covid-19 lockdown measures.

Due to this, for the first time ever for some people, they started to look for online alternatives and at that point they found a safe marketplace that catered to all of their car needs in one place without them having to leave their homes.

In fact, during the first lockdown of the pandemic, we had our highest day ever in terms sales, then after four days that number doubled.

We found ourselves unable to handle the huge unexpected growth and subsequently had some issues with the operations as it was much more than our initially forecasted volumes. However, we rose to the challenge and luckily it paid off.

How did you secure initial funding? Did you face any challenges in this aspect?

We received our first round of funding from angel investors.

However, as we started to expand rapidly, we started looking for investment to improve our product and be more scalable in each dimension of the business.

We are now extremely happy to have a number of globally recognised board members, including Essa Al-Saleh (ex-CEO of agility logistics and current CEO of electric trucks manufacturer Volta trucks) to Agitero OG.

Who is your target market?

We are currently targeting the Business to Consumer market so any car owner. We will also be looking at the Business to Business market, meaning any businesses that deal with cars including, car rental companies or logistics businesses.

What advice would you give future entrepreneurs? 

There are three specific points which we believe are critical to any entrepreneur starting out.

1. In order for a business to be successful you need to pick a big problem and solve it.
2. You need to be very customer centric instead of competitor-centric so don’t spend a lot of energy tracking competition but put all of it into understanding your customers’ needs.
3. Having the right team is very critical to any start-up because you will be facing big challenges for certain and if your team is not made up of the right people, you will fail to overcome them.