How Quiqup Rebuilt From Dubai

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Quiqup has one of the more remarkable founder stories in the region, although it didn’t start here.

Bassel El Koussa and his co-founders launched the company in London in 2014 around a simple idea: use a mobile app to let people get almost anything delivered in under an hour.

Over the years that followed, Quiqup raised tens of millions of dollars, worked with some of the world’s biggest retailers and found itself competing in one of the most aggressively funded corners of technology.

Then Uber Eats arrived in London, and the environment around the company changed remarkably quickly.

Bassel talks in the episode about going from fundraising processes that could produce term sheets within weeks to spending months on the road trying to raise capital, while increasingly confronting the reality that the business they had set out to build in the UK might no longer make sense.

What followed was a series of decisions that would eventually take Quiqup from London to Dubai and fundamentally change what the company was building.

Some were forced on them, others were very deliberate.

In 2022, Quiqup made perhaps the most counterintuitive of all, walking away from on-demand food and grocery delivery and cutting its revenue by 50% in the process.

Today, the company looks very different from the one Bassel started more than a decade ago, with Quiqup increasingly positioning itself as the infrastructure behind a new generation of e-commerce brands building across the GCC.

But the reason I enjoyed this episode so much isn’t really the logistics (although it is jam-packed full of terrific insights on this too).

The truth is most of the time there’s only so much a host can do to make a podcast conversation “good.” You can do the research, understand the company and hopefully ask the right questions, but eventually yo’re reliant on the person sitting opposite you being willing to be open about what actually happened.

Bassel was, and as a result this is honestly my favourite conversation we’ve recorded on the podcast so far.

There are very few conversations where you gradually forget that there are cameras and lights around you and end up simply shooting the breeze. This felt like one of those.

Bassel is extraordinarily candid about what it has taken to keep Quiqup alive through more than a decade of changes, including the decisions that didn’t work, the periods when the odds appeared firmly stacked against the company, and what repeatedly having to rebuild has done to him as both a founder and a leader.

At one point, we get into the period immediately after the move to Dubai, when four co-founders and two other members of the team were effectively working out of a tiny two-bedroom apartment while trying to figure out what came next.

And somehow, Bassel remembers them still joking.

There was, he says, a shared sense of duty to take the more difficult path.

“It’s gonna be a better story to tell. I’m here to tell it.”

If you're going to listen to one episode of the podcast, I think this is an excellent place to start!

00:00 Intro
01:00 How Quiqup started in London
06:00 What Uber Eats changed
10:00 Leaving London for the UAE
21:00 The 2022 reset and cutting revenue by 50%
26:00 Building the customer experience backwards
31:00 How fast can delivery actually get?
43:00 D2C, AI and the future of Quiqup
52:00 Saudi Arabia and building for regional brands
55:00 How Bassel’s leadership changed
59:00 Why resilience can’t be brute-forced
01:05:00 Rebuilding from a two-bedroom apartment

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Independent reporting, deep dives and analysis on the companies, investors and markets shaping technology across the Middle East and North Africa