Lagos, the commercial city of Nigeria is home to about 14 million people. It is also the largest city in sub-Saharan Africa. Due to traffic congestion, hectic works schedules, and long working hours, the working class finds it overwhelming to cope with mundane tasks such as laundry, cooking, and home cleaning. Although laundromats, restaurants and domestic cleaning companies/staff provide these services for people who want to outsource these tasks, they are not making much impact. Therefore, the market is still open for providers who can offer better services and quality.
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Eden life has positioned itself, as the platform to use when you want to order food, do laundry and clean your home. Simply put, Eden life is a tech-enabled service provider that puts your home’s chores on autopilot. Think of it as a “ tech-based househelp” that helps you in sorting home chores. It was co –Founded and tagged “the concierge of comfort by Nadayar Enegesi, Prosper, Otemuyiwa, and Silm Momoh in 2019.
It raised a $600,000 family and friends pre-seed round and launched its application to target busy Lagos professionals who are often pressed for time due to long working hours and struggle to source and coordinate reliable, efficient and trustworthy home services providers. This application also targets those in the tech space that work as executives, developers, and freelancers.
The platform offers customers three home services which include food, laundry, and cleaning via a mobile application. Anyone can now subscribe to one or more of these services depending on what he/she needs. The startup also raised a $1.4 million seed round to deepen its market share in October 2021. The round was LocalGlobe, a U.K.-based venture capital firm with participation from Africa-focused VCs Samurai Incubate, Future Africa, Village Global, Rising Tide Africa, and Enza Capital. This brings Eden Life’s total investment to date to $2 million following pre-seed backing from all of Andela’s original co-founders and additional accelerator support.
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At the onset, the platform used a basic distribution model for its food service option where it delivered food selected by customers from a wide range of third-party service providers. This process was challenging for the company due to the issue of quality. The third-party vendors they used usually don’t have the necessary tools or equipment to deliver nor do they train their staff. They also didn’t have the right business processes to let them output the same level of quality every time.
In the quest to provide the best experience to its customers Eden initiated and launched its kitchen. It now produces meals thereby enhancing food quality and experience for customers. For its laundry services, Eden works with established laundromats in various locations in Lagos and owns a network of cleaners that it trains quarterly to run the home cleaning segment. The logistics company Gokada handles the company’s delivery of food and laundry.
More than 600 people have used one to three of their services. An average customer uses two services five times per week. Customers pay an average subscription of $100 monthly, a fee that can cater to a daily food plan or a weekly cleaning and bi-weekly laundry plan. These plans are overseen by trained professionals called gardeners who constantly communicate with Eden users to give prompts and accept feedback. A quick calculation of its customer base and average subscription shows Eden makes more than $60,000 in monthly revenue.
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As of October 2021, Eden Life has delivered over 60,000 services in Lagos alone. Currently, it has delivered 150000 services across three offerings. The company is not yet making expansion plans to move into other markets in Nigeria and will not deploy the $1.4 million funding for that as well. Instead, Eden will put it toward building its in-house technology, scaling its team, food production facilities, and operational hubs for distribution. Its focus is to smoothen its operation and deepen its market share in Lagos before having conversations about where to expand next.
The decision not to expand yet may seem plausible but in the long run, can be detrimental. Prominent Nigerian cities like Abuja, Enugu, Port Harcourt, Benin, Ibadan, etc are markets that can be lost if other startups decide to make a debut. A good course of action would be to attempt to conquer the Nigerian market as a whole, not just Lagos. Eden is available for download at Google Play Store and the IOS app store.
Featured Image Source: TechPoint Africa
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