Munkly.com - a hyperlocal promos services

Products
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This is a complex borne out of misinformed assumptions. There is no “cabal”, just a bunch of people who have been actively contributing to discussions on the forum over time.

Now, that comparison with Nokia is just absurd. If you called your company Ikorodu now, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Your strategy however is one that assumes you can convince everyone that placename.com.ng is a deals site. The long term ramifications of that assumption are quite obvious - and it includes owning every placename.com.ng domain out there.

I’m not going to question your ability to buy up every available domain name out there - because your warchest is your business. However, I’m pretty sure yaba.com.ng isn’t owned by you. What happens when you try to expand your business to Yaba? How do you convince some guy selling pants online on sokoto.com.ng that you have more rights to the name than he does? These are the questions we are asking. These are the questions you are yet to answer.

p.s. I would have loved to make a joke about how procuring challenge.com.ng (an actual place in Ibadan) might be challenging… but the domain name is up for grabs at the moment.

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Radar is often seen as a bashtown - where most ideas or business models get bashed. This is essentially not the intention of contributors like you rightly mentioned. Even if the advice/suggestions sound hurtful, guys just need to understand that competitors (and of course other market dynamics) won’t be that nice to them. Sigh

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Everyone here, wants Ribena when they post their product.

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@Nosa_O
Thank you so much and we really appreciate it.

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No, Not Ribena, we all need HOLY COMMUNION and the wine that represent the blood.

It seems we do not understand each other.

Please, ask your questions @xolubi, @akindolu like the way @PapaOlabode always ask.

Thanks to all and by the way, @akindolu, i know you do not like it “SPECIAL THANKS TO YOU” for the apology.

Realone


Today is a Gift, Make the best of it.

26

You need to learn how to endure criticism; praises let’s boost morale, criticism helps you re-strategise. Wish you success.

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@Ayobami_Ogundiran
Thank you so much for the advice and we really appreciate it.

I must confessed one thing we had learned in this forum is that, those “early questions” from @akindolu, @Yinka and @xolubi really made us to remember most of the things we had in our minds but we fail to write down. Those questions really question our ideology base on our strategies and we really love them for that and we are eager to answer more and also explain and clarify why we are using these strategies.

But later on, “later questions” from @akindolu, turn “personal and forceful” and we wonder whether these questions were related to our product or our personality.

But really, i personally love to have RIBENA with @akindolu (Joking)

Finally, I totally and 100% agree with you that “criticism helps you re-strategies” and that is the basis of our learning.

Thank you,
Realone


Today is a Gift, Make the best of it.

28

You may want to look at http://moweibafo.com.ng which is what I think @xolubi and @akindolu were suggesting.

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@Realone, I strongly urge your team to embrace this advice.

You clearly feel the geo-domain-theme will brilliantly express your business purpose or niche, and even improve your branding and reputation! Well; you don’t have to limit yourself with domain extensions. Your emphasis should be on promoting user actions.

Thousands of Nigerians ordinarily would use a search engine to surf for locations,destination map or a brief profile of a particular area in order to have an idea of how hospitable that area is. This promo service might not span-out well on the long run. BTW; do you want to restrict your idea to just Lagos State?

You could do the following which I believe would earn you a preferred conversion rate.
Simply have a responsive and beautifully designed Landing Page at Munkly.
Have the ‘About Service’ written briefly and convenient for a lay-man to understand.
Then have a drop down menu that’ll re-direct a site-guest to individual pages addressing the hyperlocal promos.

Something like the following:

munkly dummy.png1363×744 47.3 KB

PS. The already bought domain names can still serve a purpose. Infact it can assist with SEO. But don’t go buying more domains.

I agree this idea is a real-one. Very viable. Your approach is however questionable.
Godspeed; Munkly.com
Our advice are only but a gift, Make the best of it.

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@Fola_Moses,
Thank you. But people will always have different perception for each cityname.com.ng because each cityname.com.ng will always have Authority over it own. We try to control people perception that is why we offer the same “promo services” on all our citynames.com.ng Networks. Also NIRA monitors names under them and they will not tolerate any porn sites. Also please, read our reasons below, thanks.

@MrASulaiman
Thank you so much for this. This is exactly what we have in mind for Munkly.com in the later future but with a little twist. we really appreciated it, thanks.

@okeziestanley,@87_chuks,@Fola_Moses,@akindolu,@Yinka,@xolubi,@easibor,@Nosa_O,@Ayobami_Ogundiran
Please, i must stress this, “onedomain.com/cityname” strategy is the best way to do this and we do not believe your advice is wrong but please read why we strongly believed our strategy cityname.com.ng will work for us.

OUR REASONS PLEASE

When this idea first came, we had a lot of things we want to offer on the site but it must be something unique for city and we later streamline it to “Promos Services” because we want something that create “URGENCY”. Our first strategy was “onedomain.com/cityname”. Then we decided to do a research base on what we want to offer.

First, we market to a few set of merchants in different cities and stressed our “USP that we focus on their city, we are B2C and we do verification” and using name like;

  1. Promoname.com - but we found out that they could not different us from the competitor and asking us whether we represent the leading competitor.

  2. propername.com - using this, they said we are not known and keep asking us to repeat our propername.com each time we visit them. Also they could not even give us their information.

Then we thought why not use their cityname.com.ng and focusing on some highly business viable locations. This made everything thing changed and perception also changed.

There on, when ever we visit them, it seem as if they had known us for years and they will call us the name of the their city. But we always remind them we represent propername.com, but this they do not remember.

Since we do not have money to advertise or do serious marketing for our propername.com or Promoname.com and we also consider competitors. We decided to use this strategy…but something stop us.

We decided to check the internet if somebody had use this strategy before but what we found out really amazed us.

A company call “orderup.com” formally known as Localup.com used this strategy when they are just starting up using branded name like (i.e. Santa Barbara’s LocalUp site is branded as SBmenus.com) for each city.

  1. LocalUp Wants To Be A Hyper-Local Grubhub For Smaller Cities And Neighborhoods - by TECHCRUNCH

  2. OrderUp Raises $7M To Build Its Food Delivery Network For Non-Urbanites - by TECHCRUNCH

  3. Groupon Acquires OrderUp Food Delivery Service - by TECHCRUNCH

We also dig further and found that the majority of the most important America (USA) city dot-coms today are in just three hands;

  1. Boulevards New Media
  2. Information Centers, Inc (owned by skip Hoagland)
  3. Castello Cities Internet Network Inc (Headed by David and Michael Castello)

Please Check Boulevards list of sites (dallas.com, seattle.com, WashingtonDC.com and others), i believe this is what @akindolu and @xolubi was suggesting we offer on ikeja.com.ng and others.

We concluded that, since we are relatively small and we have no money to do serious advertisement and in the future many POWERFUL competitors might come into this field.

The only way for us is to make an impact one city at a time by focusing ONLY on highly business viable locations.

@MrASulaiman
Our Focus are top locations in Lagos state and capital cities in Nigeria (especially highly business viable capital cities)

At present We have 24 citynames.com.ng in Lagos State and 5 capital cities citynames.com.ng and we are not planning to get more names for now because our focus is already set (we had gotten 99% of names we want).

All your advice are gifts and a rear gem and we will always make the best of it.

Thank you,
Realone


Today is a Gift, Make the best of it.

31

It is obvious you are confident of your strategy, but I my opinion, buying many domains is not equal to viability or otherwise. I only love to ask the question below:

How will that your strategy influence someone (who has something to promote) to do business with you, especially in Nigeria?

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You have certainly done your research and you have everything all worked out. Your conviction about your strategy is very strong so keep doing what you are doing. Good luck

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Ikorodu.com.ng and Ikorodudeals.com.ng are two different things though. The latter is very specific.

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@Ayobami_Ogundiran
If the focus of the person is “location” especially Lagos and top capital cities in Nigeria then we will use this below and also part of the things we had written on this forum (radar) to convince that person;

  1. About Us

@princehumphrey
Thank you so much and we really appreciated it.

@xolubi
Ikorodudeals.com.ng will be “limiting” and to us it has violated the laws of branding or marketing.
Also, most Blog companies that stand out are not the one that has “blog” in their name. Besides, that is why it is;
Groupon, not dailydeals.com
Yelp, not reviews.com
Tumblr, not blogs.com
Zappos, not shoes.com
Facebook, not socialmedia.com
Zillow, not realestate.com
Foursquare, not checkin.com
Ebay, not auctions.com
that stand out.

To us it is not good to use a brand name that define the category. You can only do that if you had the resources to create a monopoly.

Thanks
Realone


Today is a Gift, Make the best of it.

35

You just don’t seem to get it. But never mind, you should do you, man.

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@akindolu
I REST MY CASE.

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You should just stop giving examples because you shoot yourself in the foot each time.

You tried defending yourself with sbmenus.com, so why not ikorodudeals?
Then you turn around to say groupon, not dailydeals.com… so why not just munkly?
You say something something has violated the “laws” of branding which is pretty much what I started out with.

Like @akindolu has said, its pretty much pointless carrying on with this back and forth. You have your mind set, so… okay bruv.

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@xolubi
WE REST OUR CASE.

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Simply put…make ikorodu.com.ng an info portal about ikorodu environ including deals, what to do, curate experiences, listings and then even data like street names, favorite hang out spots so its a data portal for anyone who may want to know the town to use in biz decisions which provides u a stronger USP for munkly hyper promotions.

For your Munkly idea how r u going to mk a brand make money without spamming people via SMS, mails or activations that dnt convert?

There is a potential but work on USP, as it is now its clearly not going to work because you would need a 500-600 group to gather info rather than opt for a crowd sourced module.

Again Brands will only come in if they see user adoption meaning content and unique visitors.

Even if youre going the deal route are u thinking P2P e-commerce like Jiji n co or wat exactly? you now add security as another headache you will find out your core company Munkly would not have any focus time from you because youre pushing city names more, so best you just use city names as an info portal to drive Munkly.

its time to sell us wat makes Munkly different to a brand? Dashboard to select areas and see only interested folks via curated mining? What exactly.

I dn give you Expo tire…anyways back to observe mode.

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