Mark Anthony Essien is a Nigerian entrepreneur, software developer and startup investor. He was born 18 December, 1980.
He is the founder and CEO of Hotels.ng, one of Nigeria’s first online hotel reservation websites. Â Essien had previously established a file sharing software called Gnumm (bought by Snoopstar.com), followed by a language study firm named Ingolingo.
What is Hotels.ng?
Hotels.ng is a Nigerian internet hotel booking service that debuted in 2013. Mark Essien, from Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria, founded the portal, which claims to feature over 7,138 hotels in 320 Nigerian cities.
History of Hotels.ng
Mark Essien took an interest in Nigerian technology while studying for his MSc. in Computer Science at the Free University of Berlin in Germany in 2012. His research revealed that a travel/tourism startup would be the most effective in an emerging market like Nigeria. After researching the models of well-established hotel booking businesses in South America and Asia, Mark developed a hotel listing platform. He bought a domain name and a list of hotels to post on the website.
This website generated enough traffic to persuade Mark to return to Nigeria from Germany.
He continues to list hotels in Calabar. He formed a partnership with a buddy and began photographing hotels and signed agreements with as many hotels in Calabar as they could locate.
Bookings were authorized on Hotels.ng as soon as they had enough hotels listed. According to Mark, users began making reservations the day bookings were enabled.
Mark published a few press stories shortly after the launch of Hotels.ng, which piqued the interest of Iroko TV’s founder, Jason Njoku. Jason was starting a startup fund (Spark.ng) and seeking for strong online businesses to invest in at the time.
Following talks, Spark.ng made a $75,000 first investment in Hotels.ng, prompting Mark to relocate to Lagos to establish the platform. A few months following the initial investment, the Spark fund made another $150,000 investment.
Hotels.ng secured $1.2 million in startup funding on May 26, 2015Â from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network and the EchoVC Pan-African fund.
The funding comes on the heels of Hotels.ng’s statement of a lucrative 2014, in which the platform allegedly produced $40,000 in monthly income in the second part of the year.
Hotels.ng established Hotel.africa and Fly.africa in January 2018 as part of its African development goals.
Essien was named one of Africa’s 30 youngest entrepreneurs by Forbes in 2015. He has also been nominated for other prizes, including the Nigeria Future Awards.
