The was once a WhatsApp service called Duta that shut up shop on WhatsApp in late 2019. This service was particularly useful because you could get sports news and many other updates through it. When it went away it left a void in the market that needed filling and up stepped Hotbox which has been going from strength to strength and now has 300K users.
Hotbox allows you to do much the same as Duta (news & sports updates) with a few additions as well as:
- Eduzone where you can get access to educational resources and past papers
- A Marketplace for all sorts of goods and services
- Job Vacancies
- Emergency short codes
The last Hotbox milestone we reported on was in September, when the WhatsApp chatbot had just gone over 100K users. And it isn’t too surprising to see them doing this well. As we have said here ad nauseam, WhatsApp is the internet in Zimbabwe.
Most people’s first exposure to internet services is through WhatsApp because general data bundles are very expensive. A service like Hotbox makes it so that you can have access to a number of “wider internet services” in a chat.
And with the pandemic still with us and more people going online. I doubt it’ll be too long before we hear that Hotbox has added a couple more hundred thousand users to the 300K it currently has.
You can check out Hotbox for yourself on WhatsApp with the number +263776656972