Dudubaya goes Free

After a steady stream of requests to make postings free, I have decided to make posting on dudubaya completely free. I sent out an update email to all users who have ever posted to the site and its amazing how many email addresses are stale. Almost 10% of the emails have bounced.

For those that don’t know, Dudubaya is one of the little side experiments I started about 2 years ago to figure out the state of the Kenyan internet market and to help out my Mum. Initially I made some categories free and for all other categories, you need a PIN that can be purchased by obtaining a dudubaya scratchcard (shown below).

My rationale behind this was based on 2 things:

• Mobile phone prepaid scratchcards have spread like wildfire. Safaricom and Celtel (the 2 kenya telco’s) have almost every business as a reseller; the commisions these resellers get is measly. The card I would offer would have significantly higher commisions.
• Making the postings free would not help Kenyans out. There are a lot of enterprising Kenyans for whom this could become a full time job.

However contrary to my expectations, the whole scratchcard thing just didn’t pick up – I knew this from the first couple of months of feedback from the team on the ground. It took me this long to make the system free because a number of people had bought a years subscription worth of classifieds – it wouldn’t be fair to them.

Despite this, its been quite an interesting journey – from getting the team on the ground organized and building the site to getting a number 1 listing on google and yahoo – I have learnt a lot. I’ll share this over the next couple of months.