Influential Iranian Women: Nazanin Daneshvar (1983-)

Nazanin Daneshvar is the founder of Takhfifan (“Discounts”), the first online discount shopping center in Iran, which offers large discounts in more than 10 categories, from restaurants, coffee shops and groceries to theater tickets, educational courses and healthcare services. It has more than one million subscribers. Daneshvar and her sales team have more than 10,000 merchants on board.

Daneshvar launched this business with the help of her sister Negin in a tiny office, selling one deal a week but, as she says, the venture  became profitable within three months, something that does not happen to many start-ups.

Daneshvar was born in Tehran in December 1983. After graduating from Tehran’s Amir Kabir University in information technology, she landed a job in London as a developer for a start-up company trying to break into the Iranian market. But Daneshvar says economic sanctions killed any chances of that happening. So she returned to Iran and launched Maidunak, the first online supermarket in Iran.

“Our flat was on the third floor, so my Mom was always carrying the groceries up the stairs, because we didn't have an elevator, so I had this idea which was online grocery shopping,” she told Forbes magazine in 2014. A great idea but the business went bust even though the volume of orders kept increasing: “All the media wrote about it — TV, radio, The Guardian, everybody wrote about it.  As a result of the publicity, we got like 3,000 orders in one hour.  And with the traffic in Tehran, and delivery issues in this massive city, we couldn't really cope with it.”

Daneshvar went to Berlin to work for a daily deal website, where she got to know and understand the business model intimately. In 2011, she moved back to Tehran with a new idea for an internet start-up, after having learned from the failure of her first venture and from her experience in Germany.

With the help of her sister and using her own savings, she launched Takhfifan. She wanted to promote the project but she had not foreseen that being a woman entrepreneur would have its own strange twists and turns in Iran: “I was 26. I had an appointment to see the manager and he looked at the website and was super impressed and said: ‘Where's your manager?’ I said ‘I am the manager!’ He said ‘I'm talking about the manager, the manager.’  He said ‘Go and come back with your manager.’  So I had to take my Dad along for the first year. I took him everywhere.  It was like ‘This is the manager, now talk to me.’ It was the age, and being a woman.”

Nevertheless, this time she was successful beyond anybody’s dreams because she was aware of the reality that she had to deal with: “We are solving a problem. Advertising is so expensive, and there is a financial crunch, so we say to merchants: ‘Just give us a discount, and we will get customers for you and bring a lot of PR. Disposable income is limited, so if you can double the performance you can get out of that. Why wouldn't you?” We only sell as many deals as the businesses can handle.”

Takhfifan earns a variable commission on the sale of each coupon for discounted services. It also bulk-buys wholesale products that are sold through the same site and shipped all over the country.

In 2017, Daneshvar was invited to speak at the 4th annual Global Female Leaders’ Summit in Berlin, where she told her story of succeeding as a female in the tech world.

Eventually, Daneshvar and her sister succeeded in breaking one glass ceiling. She was selected as Iran’s representative to the 32nd session of Confederation of Asia-Pacific Chambers of Commerce and Industry (CACCI), a regional non-governmental association principally composed of the national chambers or associations of commerce and industry. The same year, CACCI presented the Young Entrepreneur Award to Daneshvar “for her entrepreneurial and business leadership, contribution to the social wellbeing of the local community, practice of good business ethics, and support of the chamber movement in the region.”

In September 2019, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) announced seven "eTrade for Women Advocates" from the developing world, and Daneshvar was one of them. “Nazanin Daneshvar is an avid supporter of the Iranian start-up movement, through which she mentors women who are making a mark in e-commerce,” UNCTAD said in a statement.