It's been a little over three years since we exited and subsequently folded JadoPado into Noon. I recently did a longish Twitter thread looking back on what once was. This is a post for posterity.

1/ ⚡️ It’s been a touch three years since we folded @JadoPado into @noon. So much has changed, but much has also stayed the same. A thread looking back at what once was :)

Kicking off with a design concept from late September 2016, that went live very late in December vs @noon’s current UI

2/ Our first building block was @halarewich’s incredibly nice PHP based cart software, Lemonstand. We grabbed a license for $210, rolled up our sleeves and got cracking

3/ A sampling of our late 2010 UI 🙈

4/ Oh and that footer 😍

5/ As a related aside, Lemonstand themselves were quietly acquired by @Mailchimp as part of their growing ambition to take on @Shopify,

By late December 2013, the product had evolved into a SaaS offering, and was sadly shut down on the 5th of July 2019

6/ The very first category we attempted was grocery, where we partnered and shared a warehouse with Jaleel Holdings, who’ve quietly gone on to become one of the largest cash & carry businesses in the UAE

7/ That early experiment died a swift death, as we started to get initial traction by launching as the iPad 2 went to market in late March 2011

8/ Our initial model was to hold everything in inventory 💆🏻‍♂️, together with our own delivery fleet 🚐 for same day delivery in a few hours ⏱

We then spent the next six and a bit years building, and then unwinding the model, eventually ending up as a pure play marketplace platform 🥳

9/ Same Day Delivery 2011 vs 2020

10/ In terms of Engineering, we went from near comical discoveries of the inner workings of PHP, what exactly git was, why choosing the right infrastructure matters, through to building APIs, apps, and many other interesting things

11/ One my favourite moments was discovering React Native for the first time in late 2015. Up until that point we’d struggled to get apps out the door as we just didn’t have the resources to hire native engineers. React Native changed all that, and our decision lives on @noon today

12/ In late 2015 a brutal outage @linode (you broke my 💔), our infrastructure provider at the time, resulted in a..

13/  …decision to pull the trigger on @GCPcloud, which lives on today 🙌

Also, @noon’s pre-launch @AWS bills were downright scary. There’s some irony in there somewhere..

14/ One more bit of engineering nostalgia

15/ And this shipping dashboard 😍

16/ We were @algolia’s first customer in the region. When I first stumbled across them I was blown away by how good their early product was. We immediately pulled the plug on our internal search efforts and signed up

17/ My lame lone attempt at getting into @algolia’s cap table via @dessaigne sadly didn’t go anywhere, but many congratulations to the entire team as they start lining up the pieces to get them to what should be a much vaunted IPO 👏

18/ Some of the other vendors that we worked with including @CloudFlare (thank you for saving us from many a DDoS!), @Cloudinary, and @TestFreaks, all remain part of @noon’s stack today.

Borderline off-the-cuff startup decisions made years ago, echoing well into the future

19/ As our understanding of both engineering and e-commerce evolved, so did our offering. In March 2015, we turned ourselves into a marketplace and six months later killed off both our inventory model as well as our fleet

20/ Our focus on sellers was something that I was particularly proud of. Seller Tools was something we loved building, was streets ahead of our competition, and was way cooler than @noon’s Seller Lab 😎. We also briefly evolved it into a @shopify style offering called Hotcake..

21/ A few other interesting bits that we played with included a Super Stores programme, various badges, and a complex auto discounting feature together with a crazy haggle feature that didn’t end up seeing the light of day

22/ @aamirkassim (he’s younger..) initially ran operations and then used his far superior people skills to attract and build a crazy good team and culture

Some continue to fight the good fight @BiGsAm, @averagejuju & @SeidonAlexis, whilst others have gone on to build many new things

23/ Any thread today wouldn’t be complete without discussing remote working! We wrote about some of our early attempts in an October 2016 piece for @EntMagazineME

24/ When I’m feeling nostalgic I wonder what may have been if we’d been able to raise the capital necessary to compete against the likes of Souq (@AmazonAE today) or if we’d walked down a different path.. @mudassirsheikha 👋

25/ And I’ll leave you with this gem

26/ That was fun, thank you for reading! 🚀

I recently put together a Twitter thread on my take on the current state of banking and telco in the UAE and I'm turning it into a post for posterity.

—

Banking and telco is broken in the UAE. So much so that it is hurting our economy.

A thread

1/17

Two weeks ago, I used five different services on a single day for calls with various people around the world.

I wasn’t planning any nefarious activities nor attempting to skirt around paying my fair share, just talking to vendors as part of my work on a new venture

2/17

The only way this was possible was to use a carrier such as @googleFi, as roaming will throw you over to your home carrier's network, allowing you to exit out to the Internet with a non-UAE IP

3/17

Last week, I had a magical, buttery smooth @zoom_us call whilst barrelling down SZR - though I wasn’t driving 😉

4/17

The #VoIPban and last year’s VPN crackdown, effectively means that I (and many others like me) need to circumvent around our local carriers in order to be able to legitimately carry out our business

5/17

The world has moved on - jumping on a magical internet-powered call, sharing one’s screen or having a team video call is commonplace. No one uses good ol’ POTS anymore

6/17

And let’s please not talk about our attempts to build alternatives, all of which should be carefully dismantled and thrown into a glorious bonfire 🔥

7/17

Our protectionist approach to sustaining revenues at our duopoly and easily fallible arguments of security are hurting rather than fostering the necessary evolution of our economy

8/17

—

Twelve days ago, @EmiratesNBD_AE gave us thirty days notice that they will be shutting an account for one of our businesses - a precious metals trading entity - as they’ve decided to “exit the sector”

9/17

This is a business that dates back to 2005 in its current form and has been banking with ENBD for more than 12 years. They’re happy to keep our other accounts alive, but have decided to shut this one. AFAIK not much, if anything has changed in our underlying business

10/17

We’re very lucky in being able to have multiple banking relationships across our business, but the jarring nature of these changes make it extremely challenging to operate

11/17

Local banks aren’t alone in their predilection for chaos. We changed the names on a couple of non-UAE entities (names only, no other changes whatsoever) and it has taken @Citibank_UAE over six months and mountains of new paperwork to change it on their systems 🤯

12/17

I am far from alone in my experiences of the sad state of a banking industry that was once based on speed, service and a gung-ho attitude to making money

13/17

So much so that there are startups who operate in the UAE but don’t do any banking here, choosing instead to use the likes of @SVB_Financial, @EburyUK and others to circumvent around our banking system and opt out of a future laden with NOCs and other nightmarish things

14/17

If you were to fly into the UAE today minus any existing relationships, navigate our bizarre maze of fifty free-zones (!), and a bunch of state administered onshore jurisdictions (a whole other story)..

15/17

..I’d be willing to bet that it’ll take you three to five days to set up a business, but at least four to six months to set up a bank account - if you’re lucky

16/17

Our value proposition as a neutral, easy, and efficient place to trade, provide services, and address the region is at stake.

/end

17/17

After hearing that Careem's wild exit to Uber was around the corner, I dived into some research and spent a bit of time trying to model Careem's cap table. This was meant to be a longer post prior to the acquisition being announced, but ended up turning into a Twitter thread, which I broke somewhat awkwardly after a polite phone call requested that some bits be killed due to their personally sensitive nature.

I've reproduced the thread in the right order for posterity:

1. ⚡️I spent a bucket load of time recently trying to model @careem's cap table. It was a super interesting, wild ride wading through all sorts of company articles, public financials etc. I was writing a piece, but I think a Twitter thread may work better

2. 🤝 Careem was formally incorporated as Careem Inc, a BVI entity on the 12th of July 2012. @MudassirSheikha and Magnus split the business on a 60:40 basis, issuing 15,000 and 10,000 shares to themselves respectively

3. ✍️ In the summer of 2013, the company's articles were adjusted to allow up to 20m shares, a precursor to the Seed round. The original shares were cancelled and on the 19th of July 2013, new shares were issued, cementing a $50K investment each.

4. 🌱 @careem’s seed round was led by @stcventures and included 14 individuals. One notable investor was Ankur Shah, who invested $50K and went on to become Careem’s Chief Finance & Strategy Officer.

5. 👻 Seed also introduced standard conditions such as a 1x liquidation pref (sigh), drag-along, tag-along, a long list of reserved matters, and the first mention of an ESOP.

6. One notably addition was a two year vesting clause for the founders, forcing a possible sale of shares even if a founder’s employment was terminated without cause 😵

7. 🚕 Series B (or really Series A) was led by @altayyaronline who invested via a $4m convertible note. This later converted to 3,263,985 Class C shares at a price of $1.379 per share. Notably, AlTayyar’s CEO Abdullah Dawood made a personal investment of $750K at the same price 🤑

8. ⚡️ @stcventures also invested via a convertible loan together with a senior partner at McKinsey, later converting to 1,196,245 and 4,944 Class B shares

9. 🚀 Series B also saw the entry of @BECOCapital, who came in via buying out a number of secondaries including from @stcventures, the founders, Ankur, and six individuals. One individual exited fully netting a 4.5x gain in 17 months!

10. 💥 I estimate @BECOCapital’s terminal value to be in the range of $32m (subject to secondaries, of which I think there may have been at least one), a 22x return and handily returning 64% of BECO’s first $50m fund, finally proving out the thesis for the MENA VC ecosystem 👏

11. 🔥 Series C was led by @abraajgroup on the 13th of October 2015 at a price of $ 7.0825 per share, using the now ironically named Abraaj Generous SPV, a stake that they sold to @kingdom_khc in June 2017

12. 🏦 Jahangir Siddiqui & Company Limited, a Pakistan based investment firm, also provided a convertible loan to Careem Pakistan, potentially convertible to Class D shares. Previously unreported AFAIK.

13. 💙 Series D, 17th January 2017, and Series E, 13th June 2017 were both led by Sparrowhawk Partners, a fully owned affiliate of @RakutenToday, whilst Series F, 28th October 2018, was led by Rakuten Europe, who at the end of 2017 reported that they owned a 19.56% stake in @careem

I also took a crack at estimating the terminal value of the transaction, trying to arrive at multiples for each investor. My analysis is limited by the information available.

Whilst much ink and airtime has recently been dedicated to what this may mean for the MENA region's technology space, I'm personally hopeful that it marks a true inflection point and is the beginning of the next wave of ideas, entrepreneurs and change brought on by digital – I can't wait.

On the 19th of February 2019, MomentumWorks, a VC firm based out of Singapore wrote a scathing piece in Mandarin about the challenges faced by Fetchr, a regional logistics and delivery startup, bringing to the fore insinuations that have been discussed extensively in private, after the business faced a nightmare Black Friday weekend.

When someone pinged me a link to the piece a week later, I did what I do all the time: read, screenshot and share. If it doesn’t fall foul of local law, is information that appears reliable and may trigger debate, it's fair game.

What followed was a flurry of phone calls and WhatsApp messages. Rather than responsibly engage and attempt to respond to the claims in the piece, I was instead asked to delete the tweet, questioned why I was “bringing it to the ecosystem”, was told it was “net-negative” and would cause “harm to both them (Fetchr) and the wider ecosystem”.

A classic case of shoot the messenger.

Why are we unable to be open and honest with ourselves, our customers, our employees, our investors, and just say it like it is? Own that you screwed something up, apologise profusely and move on. It always plays out better than you'd imagine, and more importantly lets you draw a line in the sand.

A Crypto Exchange Lawyers Up

After writing a piece about the challenges that BitOasis, a pioneering crypto exchange in the Middle East, were having with keeping their banking channels open (who wasn’t), a journalist and their publication found themselves sandbagged with a legal notice claiming defamation and threats to take further action.

When describing the incident to me, the journalist stated in unequivocal terms that they actively reached out to BitOasis seeking comment for a number of weeks. Not having heard back – borderline startup suicide in my book –  the piece was written without comment.

On realising that the article didn't play well, subsequent engagement with an evasive email and a legal notice four days later through your high priced lawyers is almost a scene out of HBO's Silicon Valley.

Why would you actively choose not to be part of a story about your business? As a startup founder, if you've got one job, it's the unrelenting telling (and selling) of your story – who better to do that with the men and women who've dedicated their lives to writing them?

A Dubai Eye Radio Ban

A few hours after announcing that JadoPado was to be no more, a friend and former producer for Dubai Eye's Business Breakfast show reached out with an invite to explain:

I politely declined stating that we weren't making any further comment at this time, but got back in touch ten days later, after Reuters broke the news that we'd been acquired by noon (which is a whole other story). We agreed a time for the upcoming Sunday and got on with our weekends.

On Saturday, I got a strange call saying that the station had to pull the interview. I recall a profuse apology and general confusion over what had happened. It was pretty clear in my mind that someone had called in a favour, but to what end remains a mystery to me to this day.

I reached out a couple of months later on realising that Dubai Eye was running an e-commerce special:

August happened:

September rolled around:

Through summer 2015 and early 2016 I stumbled into a weekly technology contributor slot that took place during Dubai Eye's mid-afternoon show, The Ticket. I'd spend a few hours each week researching what was new in tech, try to relate it to the travel space when I could, and spend a good half hour chatting about it on the radio. With just north of twenty five episodes under my belt, I was totally ready to take on podcasting!

In October, one of the presenters on The Ticket reached out asking whether I'd be up for a one off:

I naturally said yes, given that I had taken the summer off and was more than happy to get back into actually doing things.

Notes done:

An hour before airtime:

A few hours later:

At some point I stopped taking it personally and decided to leave it be. I do however wonder how insecure one must be to silence an entrepreneur from discussing the very business that you acquired from him.

In the region, many of us self-censor and most of us know where to draw the line, but when we decide to use the very same lines to attempt to hide the truth, mute discussion, and squash necessary discourse about the challenges that our businesses face – we not only do ourselves a disservice, but hurt our fragile ecosystem and the kindling opportunities set to play a growing role in the future of our economies.

It’s easy to point a finger at the region's political preference for conformity rather than debate, but the reality is that we're afraid of being judged and the consequences of failure.

The sooner we work up the courage to speak up – we failed, we broke it, the economy is in a recession, we made a mistake, we shouldn't have done it that way – the faster we learn, evolve, and earn the experience required to be able to build globally competitive enterprises.

We’re excited to announce that we’ve been working on a small side project for a few months called Lunatap, that recently got hunted on Product Hunt 📯

From Fitness to Payments
In July 2017, my younger brother and our COO, Aamir decided to kick off a fitness related startup, which unfortunately didn’t go as planned, but did result in the idea that was to become Lunatap.

Aamir wanted a super easy way to allow a coach or fitness instructor to be able to accept a payment on the go using their iPhone or Android device, whilst using his existing Stripe account. A number of simple solutions to this problem exist on both the App and Play Stores, but we found them to be expensive (in most cases adding 1% or more on top of Stripe’s standard fee structure) and not iterating significantly if at all after launch.

Enter Lunatap
We designed and built Lunatap to be a beautifully easy way to take your Stripe account on the road. We like to think that we’re at the beginnings of creating a tiny software based POS machine that’s on your phone rather than being an ugly bit of extra hardware that you need to charge and lug about. Lunatap does multi-currency, accepts input via type or scan, and is competitively priced at 0.1% on top of Stripe’s standard fees.

Iteration
We recently added support for Spanish, French and German, making it the first time that we’ve built a product in a set of languages where we have no native speakers on the team (yet!). Definitely an interesting challenge when running QA.

We also signed up to Stripe’s new partner programme and became a Stripe Verified Partner, giving us a really nice listing in the Work’s With Stripe directory and an even nicer co-branded marketing page right on Stripe’s site!

What’s Next
We’ve had a bunch of feedback about adding support to accept card input via NFC, which is likely to become our next big feature. Whilst definitely doable on Android, iOS’s CoreNFC framework currently only supports reading NFC tags in NDEF format which sadly rules out being able to read credit cards for the time being.

We’ve also had feature requests to bring more of Stripe’s native functionality such as pre-authorisations and refunds to Lunatap together with support for card readers and tablets, all of which we’re considering as areas to work on next.

We’re also debating adding support for other payment providers, but we’re big fans of Stripe, so this remains a hotly debated topic internally.

With almost 600 customers connected up and approaching half a million dollars in payment volume processed, we’re excited that about the potential of a small side project turning into an interesting product!

We really appreciate feedback, questions and comments or if you’d like to just get in touch, it’s best to do so via our support form.

🚀

Earlier this year we announced that we were ambitiously embarking on building BitPado, a crypto exchange and OTC (over-the-counter) play for the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

After having spent a number of months researching and working on an early product, we have unfortunately decided to park any further development of BitPado, given a myriad of regulatory and banking challenges in a number of the markets that we were looking to target.

From the outset it was clear that we needed to solve for product, regulation, and banking. Whilst no one expected it to be an easy ride, the depth of resistance in cracking through some of the key problems has been far greater than we initially anticipated.

Regulatory
With India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar effectively banning the use of virtual currencies in their respective economies, the struggle for legitimacy and acceptance has become an attritional uphill battle.

Both Bahrain and the UAE have been more progressive in their collective approaches. The Central Bank of Bahrain has granted a number of regulatory sandbox licenses to start-up exchanges both in the region as well as elsewhere, whilst in the UAE, DMCC (a popular free trade zone) introduced a license for prop trading in crypto in December 2017, and saw a deluge of applications through early 2018, but stopped short of issuing more than a handful of licenses due to AML and banking concerns. In late June 2018, ADGM (a financial free trade zone out of Abu Dhabi) announced the availability of a crypto asset regulatory framework, to regulate spot crypto activities including exchanges, custodians and other intermediaries. However, the UAE Central Bank and the Securities & Commodities Authority, both onshore regulators in the UAE, have voiced concern about the space.

Regulatory uncertainty together with significant price deflation (aka “popping of the bubble”) through 2018, had led to both consumers and institutions taking a significantly more cautious wait and see approach.

Banking
In a post-2008 financial crisis world, banks are increasingly ruled by compliance teams and a complex bevy of regulatory action. As some of our potential peers have found, getting access to and keeping banking relationships up and running is no mean feat.

Our view on solving banking was to leverage a number of long-standing relationships, which manifested themselves in the form of a bank account, but one that came with conditions that made it infeasible for operational use. Casting the net wider brought the realisation that this was a global problem and any potential options were often in the reputationally inappropriate bucket.

If one is able to get access to and maintain a viable banking relationship, an even greater challenge comes knocking in the form of banks recognising crypto venues and actively preventing their customers from transacting with said venues. This propels the banking challenge to a level that is near unsolvable without appropriate regulatory support.

It’s challenging enough building a new business. Doing it without access to the banking system eventually leads to the logical conclusion that there are far easier (and perhaps more fun) ways to earn a living.

Hindsight is 20/20
Crypto is at a cross roads. Followers of the space broadly fall into two polarising camps, those who believe that the space will transform financial services and markets as we know them, and those who think this has been one of the greatest asset bubbles in the history of humanity and a space that one should avoid at all cost. I suspect that the true impact will be somewhere in the middle — crypto is likely to have a longer term effect on some asset classes and markets, but is highly unlikely to replace one of the fundamental reasons for being of sovereign nations — the ability to issue currency — one protected since the beginning of time by weapons, armies and war.

We’re happy to be proven wrong.

As a team, we started off as skeptics, became enthralled and enamoured by the allure of a solution proposing native value transfer on the Internet, only to return to a state of disillusionment a few months later. In hindsight, we should have spent significantly more time thinking deeply about the space before making a new product announcement.

Whilst we sincerely appreciate the support of the almost two thousand individuals that signed up to our mailing list — before we pulled the plug on it in late April, we’re going to sit this one out. We continue to keep half an eye on development in the space, but we’re formally moving back over to consumer tech and its ilk 🚀

With the post-acquisition drama of noon finally in our rear view mirror, it feels like it’s time to reflect briefly and outline what we’re doing next.

I always felt that JadoPado had a shot at relevancy on the back of the product and the experience that we attempted to build alongside it. It didn’t matter that we were under resourced or outgunned when it came to capital, we figured that we would eventually make it happen. Through sheer persistence of will if not anything else.

Then the big shift happened.

The make up of the e-commerce landscape in the region fundamentally shifted over the course of the summer of 2016. Rumours started to swirl that Alibaba, Rakuten and Amazon were taking a serious look at Souq, whilst evidence started to mount that noon was in the works with funding amounting to $1 billion being available from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund as well as the Abu Dhabi government.

As we left summer behind it became clear that we had to take a strategic call on our business. Either go out and raise the capital required ($50m or more) or find a home where we could leverage the competencies that we’d built. Given the challenging fundraising environment in the region — whilst change is afoot our ecosystem remains woefully undercapitalised — it was clear that the latter option was the only realistic one.

We ramped up outreach and over the next few months found ourselves speaking with anyone who we thought may be a good fit and in a number of cases, senior figures in retail, many of whom who shared their last name with that of their business. Whilst progress is never as fast as you’d like it to be, we eventually whittled it down to a short list that had expressed interest, some in retail, some in the broader tech space and others looking to build out pure play e-commerce.

There’s been a range of speculation around the actual transaction. Some insist that we were acquihired whilst others speculate that the number was in the significant millions. Frankly, it was neither. There was a fair amount of money, but more importantly there was a great outcome for the team and the product that we built.

Deciding to exit, no matter the circumstances is always a tough decision. Occasionally when I find myself automagically typing “@jadopado.com”, I feel a twinge of nostalgia, but mostly I feel relief that we survived the first experiment and lived to kick off the next one.

Esanjo originates from combining the “e” from electronic and “asanjo” which is a Memon (a small globally dispersed community originating from the state of Gujarat, India) word that means “ours”, to become “electronically ours” which in our eyes is everything that the Internet brought to the world — an open, permission-less, collective ownership of the future.

Our initial idea was to build a real estate asset management business on the Ethereum blockchain. If you’ve not come across them, REITs are a listed equity like vehicle that enable easier real estate ownership, but are inefficient to put together in terms of required asset size, listing requirements as well as cost. We figured that unbundling REITs onto a blockchain — ideally one that already had liquidity could be an idea that had legs.

After spending a number of months together with our engineering team exploring today’s blockchain space, it feels like our timing is off. Whilst blockchains remain a fundamentally interesting piece of technology, the rapid iteration — whilst inherently a good thing, makes it difficult to build a stable product. Hard forks don’t got hand in hand with the backward compatible stability that some businesses require. Add that everyone and their dog is seemingly doing a blockchain project, the level of noise and proliferation of projects that don’t actually need a blockchain is drowning out legitimate plays.

Don’t even get me started on the craziness of ICOs.

We’re keeping a keen eye on how Ethereum and related blockchain projects evolve, but for now we’re parking this idea.

Our iterated approach is to create, build and invest in interesting technology businesses.

Creating
We’re kicking around some ideas in payments, classifieds, fitness and food. These are broadly new from-scratch opportunities where we own both the product and experience.

Earlier this summer Aamir Kassim and Rohan Date co-founded SudorFit, an idea that we’re incubating within Esanjo. It’s evolved from personal training to offering boxing and mixed martial arts sessions at local schools with an ongoing debate about wading into the corporate market. Whilst far removed from tech, we’re exploring interesting consumer categories where we think technology could play a greater role in creating new and enhancing existing lines of business. Fitness Tech is definitely one of those spaces.

Building
We’re also getting involved in building interesting product for others. Some of our early projects include:

• A multi platform mobile e-commerce offering for the largest mid-market franchise fashion retailer in the region
• An e-commerce play for one of the largest tyre distributors in the United Arab Emirates. An incredibly interesting space
• Advisory, leadership and product management for a new line of business at the fastest growing ride hailing startup in the region

Whilst we currently have very limited capacity, we’re always happy to have a chat.

Investing
We’ve made a small investment in an interesting blockchain startup called Verify and are looking at a handful of other opportunities.

We’re definitely not a VC building a portfolio, nor are we a seed stage spray and pray. If anything we’re fairly cautious investors and over the years we’ve found that it’s relatively rare for us to find the magical combination of right team, idea and market. We’re also conscious of ensuring that our approach is Sharia compliant and therefore turn down opportunities in some sectors.

Our ideal today is to find simple internet businesses ($3m to $30m in revenues) that have high margins, are profitable or are fast approaching that point, are growing steadily and are run by a great team. We’ve taken a leaf from and love Tiny’s philosophy and approach, but we’re not ready to buy businesses outright just yet.

As with most things that we do, our approach is iterative, always evolving and with many an experiment throw in for good measure.

Our vision for Esanjo is to build an interesting, steady growth, profitable, technology business. We want to be a great place to do interesting work with incredible people, off the wall ideas and plenty of room for experimentation. We have no interest in taking on funding nor turning into the next unicorn.

If any of this sounds appealing, we’re hiring.

🚀

It isn't every day that a $1 billion dollar startup launches in the Middle East, let alone in the e-commerce space. Following on from my post in September 2016 I've been keeping an eye on noon's domain and infrastructure to see what pops up.

On the 2nd of November 2016, a few days prior to noon's big public announcement, I spotted that beta.noon.com had started to resolve, sitting behind an nginx powered, HTTPs basic authentication window.

I've been putting this post off for a while as my initial idea was to dive as deeply as I could into noon's stack by looking at what was sitting at various levels from DNS downwards. However, noon's beta recently popped up publicly for a short while, giving me an opportunity to poke around and take an early look at their upcoming product.

Here's what I've seen so far:

Homepage

You land on a responsive page where a large hero banner greets you. Up top you'll find from left to right a toggle for Arabic, a magnifying glass icon to access search, which is popped open by default. If you're signed in, the default help text in the search bar will greet you with your name and the time of day. A nice touch.

The top navigation bar continues with the noon logo which always brings you back home, followed by a very prominent Track Order button.

Clicking on the button results in an on-screen overlay that provides a view of upcoming shipments. Given the prominence of the button and the fact that it results in a pop up rather than taking you to another page, suggests that noon is working on some form of speedy delivery with (live?) tracking built in.

Next along is a Chat button, which isn't functional at this time. Taken together with Track Order, it feels like noon has squarely set its sights on an immediate, highly responsive, real-time like experience.

The top navigation ends with an icon representing a person which takes you to your account followed by a cart icon, which takes you to your cart!

Below the top navigation is a slim black navigation bar with links to top categories. This is visible on initial load, but disappears as your scroll. The top navigation bar retains a permanently fixed position.

The rest of the homepage is broken into a variety of banners and sections such as best sellers. Standard fare for an e-commerce offering.

Wrapping up the home page we arrive at the footer, which is double height and is split into a black area highlighting key categories with icons, whilst a call to action takes you to an all categories page that I wasn't able to access. The second half of the footer is a shade of dark grey and includes two lists of categories, a set of links to other areas of the noon site as well as the usual social icons, app icons and contact information.

Categories

Category landing pages differ in terms of layout based on which category you've selected.

The Electronics category landing page has a row of rotating subcategory banners followed by an area that highlights specific individual products.

As you scroll further, the page gets a little bit more interesting with a mixture of text links highlighting products within a subcategory, a section for best sellers and more text links leading off to other subcategories.

The Health and Beauty category has a slightly different layout, including a set of narrow banners and accompanying text leading off to subcategories, a list of best sellers, followed by a hero banner image.

It is natural for primary category landing page to vary a fair amount, as they will tend to get traffic from SEO, PPC as well as direct, making them key merchandising opportunities. Over time, they'll turn into real estate that brands and sellers will be willing to pay for.

Product

noon's product page compromises of a large hero image, a product information box that includes a product title, price, a quantity drop down and two call to actions. It is notable that the Buy now button is yellow and is highly visible whilst the Add to Cart button is white and blends into the page. This again points to noon's experience being built around immediacy versus your typical e-commerce experience. The Buy now button wasn't functional, but the Add to Cart button added a single quantity to my cart.

The other bit to note here is the text that states "Sold and Fulfilled by noon". My understanding is that noon will procure inventory as well as take it on consignment from those who are willing to give it to them. Suppliers have been asked to ship inventory to noon's warehouse, from where all fulfilment will take place.

The rest of the content on the product page compromises of a description, which at a quick glance looks like it is brand, manufacturer or publisher copy. Some products include technical details, with attributes varying by category. A couple of widgets that provide bundling opportunities and display related products were also visible.

Sign Up and Account

Sign up can take place via a mobile number, email address or the usual triumvirate of Google, Facebook and Twitter. I was able to sign in with the same credentials that I use with a test seller account.

noon's account area is broken up into Orders, Returns & Exchanges (sic), Address book, My Wallet and My Profile. Each area has default landing text and appropriate call to actions if no data is available yet.

It is very encouraging to see that returns handling has been thought through and has an area dedicated to it. Unfortunately this has tended to be a bit of an after thought in the region.

I'm not sure who this handsome Emirati man is, but I assume that he'll be replaced with your own image if you sign up or sign in with a social service that provides access to a profile image. The Address Book page is the most colourful that I came across and matches noon's pre-launch landing page. It's an interesting detail that the Emirates Airline graphic has been carried over.

The last area of interest is My Wallet, which provides transaction history as well as a way to manage your saved cards. I tested this using test card numbers from CyberSource and added a Visa as well as an Amex card. This seems to confirm the rumour that noonPay will initially be a wrapper on top of CyberSource, but I've been told that these card numbers work with other payments gateways as well.

Cart and Checkout

Hitting the cart icon in the top navigation bar took me to a cart page, summarising my order and giving me two call to actions, one which allows you to continue shopping and the other which takes you to checkout. The payment icons on the page notably don't include an icon for Cash on Delivery.

A line of text notes that delivery starts at AED 14. Assuming that this number is not a filler value, it lines up with local delivery costs in Dubai and if anything is a touch cheaper than other carriers.

I incremented the number of items that I had in my cart and managed to rapidly increase the item count as well as the corresponding AED value. It did not feel like this was connected to noon's ERP system as I went well beyond a reasonable in-stock count for the SKU I tested with.

Hitting the Checkout button, I moved to the first step of checkout. noon's checkout is not enclosed, which is a know industry best practice to remove unnecessary elements to minimise distraction and help customers journey efficiently through the purchase funnel. The top navigation bar remain visible and allows navigation elsewhere using any of its icons.

The delivery method is titled "Personal delivery" with what looks like a noon truck icon perhaps indicating that noon may have its own fleet up and running at launch. The delivery cost stated an overly reasonable AED 15 with a bunch of items in my cart, making me question if an actual calculation was yet to take place.

I hit the "Add or change" link which took me to a select your address screen, where I hit the Add new address button.

I arrived at what for all intents looks like a search bar. I typed in city names, country names and all sorts of other things before trying the Done button, which eventually took me to a standard address form.

I was able to fill out every value on the form save for the Country and City field which would always take me back to the search bar. It took me a while and a look at developer tools to figure out why this was taking place. While it wasn't loading up, this particular page was attempting to load Google Maps and assumedly use the search bar to narrow the viewable area to one that was more relevant.

A Google Maps API key (hopefully one that isn't going to create a security incident) is visible as is a set of latitude and longitude GPS coordinates. The two in my screenshot point at the first interchange on Sheikh Zayed Road, which is where Google Maps places its Dubai label. Centring the map at this point may indicate noon's use of geo IP information to get a broad city location.

The use of Google Maps to capture GPS coordinates again points to noon's intent to build an experience around immediacy.

As I was unable to manually fill out the Country or City field, this prevented me from unfortunately getting any further in the checkout process.

Terms of Sale

noon's Terms of Sale is a long document, so I won't go into all of it. It does however make for interesting reading and provides more insight into their business model.

2.3 states that they only accept Visa and MasterCard versus the Amex logo on the cart page together with being able to add an Amex test card to my account. It does however confirm that Cash on Delivery will be available.

The final bit of 2.7 c) is interesting in that it states "collect from us". I wonder if this indicates that pick up points or the ability to pick up directly from retailers is in the works for the near future.

3.4 indicates that noon may work with suppliers that aren't located locally potentially moving away from a fully stocked model in the future. This makes sense given the sheer size of the catalogue that they're aiming to carry. At some point, it won't be commercially viable to carry every single SKU in stock (whether you own it or not), as the depth of demand will not match markets such as the US. Also the Pareto principle applies.

4.1 states that noon will offer a thirty (30) day return policy on almost every category, save those where a longer return policy may apply.

4.8 indicates that noon will not cover the cost of outbound shipping when a refund is calculated, but will cover the cost of return shipping in some cases.

4.10 states that a re-stocking fee of up to 30% will apply on certain product categories, if a return doesn't meet the conditions stated in 4.5 or if the return is outside the return window, opening up the possibility of returns beyond the thirty day window.

Clause 5 states that noon will provide a warranty on a number of different product categories. This indicates a willingness to source product flexibly (read: grey market), allowing pricing power versus the desire of principals and distributors to maintain price parity across channels.

Notes

A few thoughts and observations to wrap:

1. Chat & Scalability

I didn't spot a contact form or an email address through which I could reach noon's support team. This indicates that chat will be the primary support mechanism. While it allows support to be very responsive, chat doesn't scale as efficiently as email and if anything is very akin to offering phone support. Conversations take longer to get to the point, taking up more time than they should, whilst support teams tend not to be as good juggling multiple chat conversations as they are at dealing with multiple email cases.

Keep the customer waiting in a chat conversation and the support experience declines rapidly in minutes versus respond to a customer's email within a couple of hours and you'll get a pat on the back for being incredibly responsive.

2. Thirty Day Return Policy

Incredibly positive for potential customers but I'd question the commercial feasibility especially for categories such as Electronics.

3. Mapping in Checkout

I can understand the use of mapping on mobile devices where a GPS sensor is readily available to provide accurate location data (if permissions  allow one to do so), but getting location data is significantly harder on tablet and desktop devices very few of which have access to a GPS sensor, forcing the user to manually input their location. Not an easy ask.

4. I tried noon's 800 number, but it didn't ring.

5. I didn't see any options for other currencies or the ability to toggle to other countries. What I've seen so far feels very UAE specific and I wonder if and how customers in Saudi Arabia will be served at launch.

Following on from my last update on noon and all the drama that came after, someone likely in error, dropped me a line with what looks to be noon's latest and possibly final seller pitch deck before they go live.

The deck goes into a fair amount of depth versus material seen previously and makes for interesting reading for anyone in or considering entering the region's e-commerce space.

As an aside, I found a couple of the slides to be curiously similar to some of my prior work at JadoPado.

If rumour and Reddit be true, noon is set to go live on the 15th of August 2017.

Inspired by Zack Kanter's epic read on Why Amazon is eating the world, earlier this summer I put together a hypothetical deck on the future of Majid Al Futtaim, one of the Middle East's largest mall, retail and leisure operators.

This post originally appeared on the JadoPado Blog and has been re-produced here to preserve the JadoPado historical record.

Dear JadoPadoers,

Our grand experiment is at an end after 2420 days.

We’re incredibly happy to announce that JadoPado has been acquired by a large regional business. While we’d love to give you more details, we’ve been sworn to secrecy.

The JadoPado team will be moving into executing great new work, and this unfortunately means that we’ll be closing down the JadoPado marketplace as well as JadoPado hotcake.

If you’ve experienced JadoPado as a customer, thank you for gracing us with your business, for taking a chance on us when others wouldn’t, for speaking with us, for giving us feedback, for all your tweets, for your emails and for generally bearing with us.

If you’re a seller on the JadoPado marketplace, thank you for allowing us to be of service, for trusting us with your business, and for pushing us to keep building. Your access to JadoPado hotcake will remain available until Thursday May 25th 2017. If you may have payments that are due to you, please request a payout and rest assured that your funds will be remitted to you. If you are currently on a plan, your subscription will be cancelled over the next couple of days and any balance for the period left over will be refunded to you.

To my team, my colleagues, my friends, it’s been an honour. I look forward to doing more incredible work with all of you in the near future.

Onward and upwards.

Kind Regards,

Omar

🚀

This post originally appeared on the JadoPado Blog and has been re-produced here to preserve the JadoPado historical record.

We’re incredibly excited to announce that we have raised $1 billion from cornerstone investors in the region, including a who’s who of sovereign wealth funds to build the world’s newest largest mall. Located next to Dubai’s imminent Expo 2020 site, the JadoPado Mall will be home to revolutionary new features that will transform the world’s shopping experience.

“This move is crucial in our long-term growth strategy and outflanks a well-known mall operator's attempts to buy our closest competitor”, says Omar Kassim, founder and CEO of JadoPado. “We are taking the next quantum leap by making JadoPado Mall the world's newest largest mall”.

With a structure spanning over 26 million square feet, the mall will house over 4750 stores featuring some of the biggest and best brands across the globe. Visitors will enjoy unparalleled dining options, including exclusive gourmet food experiences, multiple multi-storey food courts and the world’s largest food truck park.

The JadoPado Mall is a revolutionary idea that will for the very first time truly mesh digital and physical in a triumphant coming together of e-commerce and traditional shopping experiences. “We’re conceptualising and building new technology including an exclusive RCFC (really close field communication) app that will provide shoppers with access, seamless browsing and a stunning payments experience at the JadoPado Mall”, said Mr Kassim. “In our beta, the mall will be accessible only to Apple iPhone and Apple Watch users with Android and Android Wear access rolling out in the near future”.

The JadoPado Mall will be a visa-free, free zone, and will be integrated into the world’s soon-to-be largest airport, Al Maktoum International Airport, to provide travellers direct access to the mall without the need to enter the city of Dubai. With key learnings from the aviation industry, JadoPado is also developing the world’s first conveyor system to pioneer the concept of store to boot. “We’re really excited about this”, commented Mr Kassim. “No more bags or inexcusably designed shopping trolleys. Your purchases will go from store straight to your boot. The exemplary baggage handling and sorting systems at Dubai Airports have been a major influence in our strategy”.

In keeping with the luxury shopping sector of the Middle East, the JadoPado Mall’s VVVIP service has partnered with a leading electric automotive manufacturer to offer shoppers a fully integrated self-driving, driver-less experience to the mall and back. “Forget the traditional taxi-rank. Our autonomous fleet of self-driving cars will change how you shop, travel and dine in the near future”, stated Mr. Kassim.

The JadoPado Mall is coming soon, and is expected to launch on time in January 2020.

Updated 3rd April 2017: Happy April Fool’s Day!

On the 14th of March 2017, a Souq.com subsidiary, Q Tech General Trading LLC's trade license looked like this:

A day later an action took place to remove the Emirati individual who owns 51% of the business and replace him with Links Regional Commercial Brokers LLC.

Similar actions have taken place for a number of Souq's other subsidiaries, including Q Express and Helpbit:

Helpbit

Q Express

To an observer who has been through a fundraising exercise, it is pretty clear that multiple changes in quick succession to the underlying corporate structure of an organisation are indicative that a clean up process is taking place to close out conditions precedent, or CPs in industry parlance. Essentially, events that need to take place before a transaction can close.

The Links Group are a well known corporate service provider who provide nominee ownership structures to entities that need stability and continuity in an operating environment that demands that a local partner own a simple majority of any onshore, non-freezone operating business.

It is common practice for trade licenses to be set up with informal or loosely formal contracts together with an Emirati individual who consents to act as the local partner for a fixed fee and no other rights. However, regardless of the existence of side agreements (which are very unlikely to hold up in court), the local partner has the same rights over a business as any other shareholder would, including the proceeds of a sale, dividends and other forms of payout.

When a transaction takes place, it is equally common for these arrangements to be thoroughly scrutinised and then amended in order to provide assurance and comfort to a potential buyer that the deal their signing is watertight, will protect their economic rights and will not result in future legal actions demanding damages or payouts.

If Souq were being taken over by Emirati or GCC based shareholders, a corporate nominee owner would not be required and the equity of any subsidiary could be owned outright by a parent entity who would de facto be considered to be Emirati or from the GCC. Whilst unlikely, the Emirati or GCC shareholders could alternatively assume direct control over each subsidiary and not need nor incur the cost of a corporate nominee.

For example, take a look at one of Emaar's subsidiaries, Emaar Technologies LLC:

The entity is owned 99% by Emaar Dubai LLC and 1% by Emaar Properties LLC. You can continue to trace this structure upwards until you get to Emaar Properties PJSC, which is Emaar's primary entity listed on the Dubai Financial Market (DFM).

Similarly, if we look at a Majid Al Futtaim subsidary, Majid Al Futtaim Retail LLC:

The entity is owned 99% by Majid Al Futtaim Holding LLC and 1% by Majid Al Futtaim Ventures LLC. Again, you can continue to trace this structure upwards until you get to a set of shareholders.

The logical conclusion is that Amazon (or a non-UAE or GCC entity, if you remain sceptical) has taken over Souq and the transaction is in its final stages of closing, regardless of any last ditch attempts.

P.S. The transaction, widely estimated to be in the $650 million range is equivalent to 0.16% of Amazon's market cap today. It is arguable that there isn't a need for for Amazon to publicly announce that a transaction has taken place, as the size won't have a material affect on their share price. Let that sink in for a bit. The largest technology exit in the region will barely register a blip globally. We've got a long long way to go.

🚀

This post originally appeared on the JadoPado Blog and has been re-produced here to preserve the JadoPado historical record.

On the 23rd of February, one of our service providers, Cloudflare reported that a memory leak had been caused by a bug in its HTML parser which was initially detected by Tavis Ormandy from Google’s Project Zero on the 16th of February. Tavis worked with the Cloudflare team over the next few days to mitigate the issue to the greatest extent possible, before announcing it publicly.

Cloudflare explains that “our edge servers were running past the end of a buffer and returning memory that contained private information such as HTTP cookies, authentication tokens, HTTP POST bodies, and other sensitive data. And some of that data had been cached by search engines.”

Cloudflare’s initial mitigation took 47 minutes, and a global fix was in place in under 7 hours whilst they continued to work with Google and other search engines to remove any cached HTTP responses.

Based on information that we’ve received from Cloudflare, we have not been affected, but as a precaution, we responded swiftly on the 24th of February, by invalidating all user sessions, cookies and authentication tokens including API keys. At this time, we do not believe that forcing a reset of user credentials is necessary.

Additional measures that you can take

We strongly encourage that all users reset their passwords across all services affected by Cloudbleed, and continue to advocate that absolutely everyone should use a password manager.

This post originally appeared on the JadoPado Blog, written by our colleague Sidra Tariq, and has been re-produced here to preserve the JadoPado historical record.

Over the past few months, we’ve been super busy trying to build incredible buyer and seller experiences. Across the board, our teams have been working long days and many nights to ship new product ideas to enhance your experience from the millisecond you load up the JadoPado platform, through to the instantly gratifying moment you use the product that you’ve purchased.

We’re super excited to announce a bunch of things that we’ve rolled out recently:

JadoPado Joy

One of our major goals is to make sure that every purchase begins and ends with delight, fueling our decision to launch our buyer protection programme. Lovingly coined JadoPado Joy, the programme provides the security and confidence that you need when you shop online.

Every product on JadoPado is protected with our promise of 100% of your money back, should you face a genuine problem and aren’t able to resolve your issue with the seller. Whether the seller fails to deliver your order or the product you receive doesn’t function the way the manufacturer intended, the programme ensures that you receive the correct product or get a full refund. It also protects you in case you receive the wrong product or if it doesn’t match the seller’s description.

JadoPado Joy ties tightly into our Case Resolution System. Open a case against the seller to attempt to directly resolve the issue and if you aren’t able to reach a satisfying conclusion, escalate the case to a dispute and allow us to step in, assess the situation and issue a balanced decision. Learn more about how JadoPado Joy protects you.

Seller Performance

If you’re a regular at JadoPado (46% of you repeat each month!), you may have noticed the new Super Store and Trusted Store badges appearing next to seller names on product and store pages. We’ve added these to help you identify great sellers as part of our new Seller Performance programme.

Seller Performance has been designed and built to create exceptional buying experiences by encouraging sellers to deliver consistently high levels of service when fulfilling orders and engaging with buyers. The programme evaluates performance to ensure that sellers deliver orders on time, respond to buyers quickly, improve their buyer feedback rating, don’t cancel or refuse any orders and work diligently to resolve any cases before they’re escalated. A seller’s Performance Score is the accumulation of points across the different metrics.

The Super Store badge is awarded as a symbol of excellence and reliability to sellers that consistently provide outstanding service and maintain a Performance Score of 90 points or above. The Trusted Store badge is awarded to sellers that maintain a score between 60 to 89 points as a reflection of their great service and credibility. The two badges will help guide you towards sellers that’ll deliver consistently exceptional experiences when you purchase next.

Re-committing to our belief that great service builds great businesses, an important component of Seller Performance is to recognise and reward great sellers. Aside from the awesome badge, Super Stores enjoy a 25% reduction in commissions, more exposure across the platform and four free payouts every month. If a seller isn’t quite there in terms of performance, we give them time to course-correct, improve their performance and climb the ladder towards greatness.

We’ve also added a dynamic dashboard to Seller Tools where sellers can monitor their performance and identify areas for improvement. Here’s what it looks like:

Mobile App for Buyers

We launched our beautifully-designed (if we may say so ourselves!) mobile app. Yes, we’ve been a bit behind the curve (it was a resources and focus thing!), but we’re finally here. With an easy-on-the-eyes interface, customisable search and a seamless checkout process, you can go from browsing to checked out in seconds, with a few joyful taps on your screen.

With multiple rounds of testing on different platforms and devices as well as both encouraging and bone-crunching feedback from the team, we pushed out a public beta to the JadoPado community. It was a tremendously helpful process, with detailed feedback allowing us to squash pesky bugs, and tweak both UI and functionality. A few weeks later we released the app in all its glory and continue to improve and add to its feature set.

These are some of the improvements that we rolled out last week:

• We improved search by adding recommendations, popular products as well as previous searches to allow you to effortlessly browse through over 5900 categories and daily deals!
• On iOS, we enabled iOS Spotlight Search integration. You’ll now see search history right inside iOS search so that you don’t miss out on great deals.
• We added dedicated areas for JP’s Deals, New Arrivals and Best Sellers, to enable better and more discovery. Dig deeper into each section to explore more trending products and deals.

We’re seeing super-promising early install numbers and in the 41 days since launch, the app is driving 34.83% of our daily sales, as averaged over the last seven days. We’re hoping that more buyers will enjoy some of the incredible tools that we’re building.

Here’s a look at the app:

But you really should go download it here: Android or iOS. Did we mention that we’re currently doing 10% off on your first order from the app? Go. Now.

JadoPado in Arabic Beta

Many ages ago we had what wasn’t a very well-put-together version of JadoPado in Arabic. We eventually laid it to rest, vowing that we’d come back bigger and better — and here it is! We are incredibly thrilled to announce that we went from hiring Naila to lead our localisation team to launching our Arabic beta in 99 days. Seriously.

While localisation remains a work in progress, we’re at a place where you can smoothly go from browsing, searching and mulling over, through to checkout, completely in Arabic. Friends in Saudi, Egypt and the rest of the GCC, we’ve got you covered!

أصدقاؤنا في السعودية ومصر وبقية دول مجلس التعاون الخليجي، نحن في خدمتكم!

We have a (very) long road to travel to offer a fully localised Arabic experience. Back in the good ol’ days of JadoPado Direct, we sold 8000+ unique SKUs, while today we list 344,921 SKUs, in a catalogue that continues to grow at an exceptional rate. We face the somewhat unenviable task of localising millions of words, together with marketing collateral as well as other content properties. However, we thrive on challenges and enabling buyers to go from browsing to checkout in their preferred language is something we want to get right.

We’re growing our team by hiring localisation specialists to passionately drive this project forward. Sign up! It should be even more fun when we bring on more regional languages in the near future!

We’re seeing strong uptake in buyers using the Arabic beta for their purchases and expect it to become a mainstay of our product in the near future. Here’s what the Arabic beta looks like today:

We have a bucket load of new features, enhancements and tweaks in our product and engineering pipelines that we’re incredibly excited about. Onwards towards delivering more incredible experiences!