Unhandled Exceptions: Anything.lk

Unhandled Exceptions is a (soon to be) weekly web video series where each week a company, an individual or several individuals who are trying to do something different or interesting in Sri Lanka are interviewed. The types of people interviewed here range from startups to nonprofit organizations and even people in various disciplines such as sports or drama. This is done to give some much needed exposure to those who are interviewed and to promote innovation in post war Sri Lanka. If you are, or if you know of a business or individual(s) who can really benefit from this, please contact Adnan Issadeen via adnan.issadeen@live.comor via mobile (0773833241) or leave a message on the Facebook page www.facebook.com/techrumble. You can find out more about Adnan at @area51research or http://identyme.com/adnanissadeen

Summary - In this edition of unhandled exceptions we take a look at one of the hottest web startups in the Sri Lankan scene which is Anything.lk and question into how they operate and how they plan to keep moving forward.

The daily deals market is one of the hottest spaces in the tech world globally with companies like Groupon (essentially the ones who started the whole ball rolling) and Living Social getting enormous valuations and a lot of attention. With all the hype that has surrounded these companies it was only a matter of time before the rest of the world decided to bring in the same business model to their respective countries creating a wave of Groupon clones. Living Social was in fact one of these clones which in fact is reported to be doing better than Groupon themselves. More on that in another article.

For the uninitiated, most daily deals businesses work as follows. Each day the business offers several deals on its site, much like credit card offers, except for the most part the deals are 50%, or more, off the original price. Studies have shown that this is a tipping point in human psychology for people to find the incentive to buy in to the deal. Once the deal is bought the money is split between the merchant and the daily deals business according to a percentage agreed upon previously. What does the merchant get in return? Exposure. Lots of it.

So how did Anything come into this business? Starting out with a completely different and unrelated business model, Anything was, much later, contacted by Ensogo Thailand which basically owns the daily deals market there. Ensogo showed interest in getting a Sri Lankan firm to start up a daily deals business here and having gotten in touch with Reza (now CEO of Anything) they then chose to work with Anything and after several meetings with their investors they were ready to move in. Just to add a bit of extra knowledge to this, Ensogo Thailand was recently acquired by Living Social which goes to show the level of expertise and experience being pumped into Anything.

Interestingly enough, during this time Anything came to know that they weren’t the only ones who were readying themselves in this arena. In fact when I met them shortly after their first deal launched they surprised me by saying that they expected 6 more daily deals businesses to launch in the near future. Sure enough they were right and as of now the daily deals space is fairly heated up with Groupganum, Great Deals, Maaradeals, Group Up (seemingly inactive), Deals Market, Smart Pola and possibly more that I have simply lost track of. Instead of rushing to make plans to deal with the competition directly, the company maintains an interesting perspective on the situation where they say that they welcome competition as it helps educate the market in this new space. The irony of this might be that given Anything’s head start, some companies might in fact be hoping to ride on the waves the company is creating in the daily deals space. However, the early to the market advantage as well as the massive amount of investment of money and experience (both are absolutely vital) seems to be paying off with the site seeing a daily gain in deals popularity. Along with a very well received online presence and several recent sell outs of deals Anything seems to be outpacing the rest of the market significantly. This observation was made by looking at corresponding performances of the other companies where most fall way behind when comparing each one’s first two weeks of operations.

The interview is an hour long and I fully recommend watching every bit of it as it is packed with information and insight that you will never find anywhere else.