Episodes
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Waleed Tuffaha is one of the founding engineers at Jawaker — Jordan's latest success story. Jawaker, a developer of mobile card games was acquired for 205M USD in Sep 2021. Since day one, the company's leadership team has focused on profitability and long-term sustainability. They have only raised a small seed funding round in 2011.
Waleed joined Jawaker in 2009 and helped build and launch the first iteration of the product. Today Waleed leads and manages the product and tech team at the company. On the episode, we walk through the journey of Jawaker, reflecting on how they built things back in 2009 and how they steadily and organically grew their user base throughout the years. We also chat about their progressive product development process, the impact of cool-down periods, and how they were able to recreate the social experience of playing cards in the app. Finally, Waleed highlights the big role culture and leadership has played in retaining and developing their team all throughout the years.
00:51 - 03:01 Waleed's career path & early days at Jawaker
03:01 - 03:46 What Jawaker looked like in 2009
03:46 - 06:37 Acquiring early adopters
06:37 - 10:04 Replicating the social experience of playing cards on the app
10:04 - 15:37 Focus on profitability over growth since day 1
15:37 - 17:39 How and when did the team grow
17:39 - 23:03 The impact of cool-down periods between development cycles
23:03 - 26:36 Listening to customers & prioritizing requests
26:36 - 29:47 Determining your own speed of growth
29:47 - 31:29 Current structure of product and tech teams
31:29 - 33:45 What the future holds for Jawaker
33:45 - 39:33 What made the company a success
Let's Talk Product is brought to you by Propeller, a seed-stage venture capital firm based out of Jordan. If you're building software out of MENA, get in touch, we'd love to talk!
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Iyad Aldalooj is the co-founder and CEO of Penny software, an end-to-end procurement solution for enterprises. Prior to founding Penny in 2020, Iyad was the General Manager & Marketing Director at Careem in Saudi Arabia. On the episode we learn more about Iyad's journey and delve into the steps they're taking in building a global SaaS product.
01:19 - Iyad's first startup & role at Careem
12:40 - What is penny software?
15:00 - The evolution from a B2B marketplace to procurement software
18:47 - Building for the global market from day 1
22:16 - Why the focus on KSA for now
26:57 - When's the right time to scale enterprise software?
28:27 - MRVP (R for repeatable), not MVP, in B2B
33:18 - Prioritizing problems to solve in B2C vs B2B
35:34 - Managing requests from prospect customers
38:52 - Launching in an emerging vs mature market first?
43:26 - Hiring top talentLet's Talk Product is brought to you by Propeller, a seed-stage venture capital firm based out of Jordan. If your MENA-based startup is looking for an investor, get in touch, we'd love to talk!
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Episodes manquant?
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Walid Daniel Dib, co-founder and CEO of Hala (previously Addenda) has taken several turns to get to where he is today. Back in 2018, him and his brother started off by building a blockchain solution to streamline workflows between insurance companies. A year or so later, the brothers had went through several pivots but were still not seeing any significant traction. In essence they were building solutions in search of a problem.
Today, Hala is insurtech that is building a subscription-based ‘lifestyle’ insurance to cover your car, home, and personal belongings. They made a wise and final pivot to B2C and have only been growing ever since.
On the episode we get into the details of the big and final pivot and the lessons learnt along the way. We also talk about how they’re making insurance a tolerable and pleasant experience for consumers in the Middle East.
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Jonathan Steingiesser is Head of Design at Property Finder, where he divides his time between leading the design team, design strategy, customer research and service design improvements.
With over 17 years of design experience at startups across various sectors including retail and education, Jonathan has fostered a deep passion for design innovation and continuous improvement. He applies his passion to guide research, design and product processes in order to create innovative experiences across all of Property Finder’s products and services. He also advised startups in San Francisco, Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, Abu Dhabi and Dubai.
On the episode, we cover the foundations of product design — from what to look for when hiring your first product designer, to the research processes and methods that enable continuous product innovation.
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Yousef Wadi is a Computer Engineer who has been building online products for well over 10 years. He’s worked with global organizations (Microsoft and Yahoo!) and startups (Arabia Weather and Nestrom). Yousef founded Nestrom in 2016 to solve field management issues for the agricultural industry. Today Nestrom is a QHSE management platform serving enterprise customers in manufacturing, construction, agriculture and more. These include Al-Futtaim Group, Nabil and Fine Hygienic Holding.
On the episode, we talk about Nestrom’s pivot and get into the details of building software for large enterprise customers in the Middle East. We discuss personas, sales, pricing and managing feature requests.
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Nabil Mohamed is the VP of Product at Instabug, one of the MENA region’s fastest growing SaaS companies. He was previously Senior Product Manager at Amazon Seattle for 4 years and worked with Microsoft on their Skype enterprise product prior to that. He is currently managing the Product, UX Design, and Brand Design teams at Instabug, in an exciting attempt to build Egypt's first SaaS unicorn. On the episode, we delve into how he makes decisions around balancing the need for speed vs quality in product development, and what he looks for when hiring exceptional talent.
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Yasmine Helmy is a growth and product marketer with 7+ years of experience in product marketing, growth leadership, demand generation, and SaaS strategies. She has built and scaled Instabug's self-serve growth engine to more than 30,000 mobile teams around the globe and is currently head of global growth at Trella, another fast-growing Egyptian startup.
On this episode, Yasmine explains what product marketing is and shares the fundamental frameworks for establishing a product's positioning and developing a go-to-market plan.
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Did you know that over 50% of features in software products are never used. How can we help users realize the full value of our products? What can we do to increase product adoption throughout the entire journey? Yazan Sehwail is the co-founder and CEO of Userpilot, a user engagement tool that helps software teams increase user adoption with better product experiences. On this episode, Yazan walks us through the steps of guiding users at each stage of the journey - from the Aha! moment, to activation and secondary feature adoption. He also sets the foundational frameworks to tracking user behaviors and finally talks about how onboarding is different in simple self-serve SaaS products and more complex enterprise software.
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Ahmed El Assy is the co-founder and CPO at Gameball, a customer engagement SaaS platform that uses gamification and loyalty mechanisms to help brands retain and engage their customers. The young Egyptian startup has secured over 1000 online merchants from 50 countries through their self-service product. We speak to Ahmed about the company's journey to date and what it takes to build a global self-serve B2B product where customers deploy and use the product on their own. We also dive into how Ahmed thinks about product metrics; how they measure customer engagement and what have they done to reduce churn.
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Customer discovery is all about making sure you build something customers actually want from the very start. The goal of customer discovery is to figure out who your customers are and whether the problem you believe you are solving is important to them. Tariq Seksek, co-founder and Head of Product at Alma Health, a recently launched health-tech startup in the UAE, is responsible for exactly that. Tariq has previously held product management roles at renowned companies like Dubizzle and Starzplay.
On the episode he explains how he's been carrying out customer discovery to ensure the company is building a product that will truly transform lives. Before building anything, he and his team spent the first few months speaking to over 450 potential customers. He shares with us how they did that and how their solution has completely evolved throughout the process.
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Reham elHusseiny is a Growth Product Manager at Trella, a YC-backed, Cairo-based tech platform that connects shippers to carriers. Prior to joining Trella, Reham worked as a product manager at Veezeta and at Talabat (Delivery Hero). She joined Trella as their first product manager and was responsible for building and scaling the product function. Since her joining 1 year ago, Trella has expanded their user base into 3 countries and multiple verticals. On this episode, we walk through each step Reham took to build the product function from scratch. We also talk about how they customize the product and features to meet the different needs of each new market (KSA & Pakistan). And finally, we touch up on the structure of their product team and the top product metrics they track.
Let's Talk Product is brought to you by Propeller, a seed-stage venture capital firm based out Jordan. If your MENA-based startup is looking for an investor, get in touch, we'd love to talk!
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Talal Bayaa and his school friend, now co-founder Brian Habibi, started Bayzat after sensing an opportunity in the financial products market back in 2011. Since then the duo led Bayzat to where it is today; a widely known UAE-based technology start-up that empowers businesses with smart insurance & HR solutions. Today Bayzat is a 200+ person company with around $30M in funding.
On this episode Talal talks to us about how they build product at Bayzat; sharing insights about their early pivot, how they think about differentiation, how they test and launch new products or features, getting to product-market fit and much more.
Let's Talk Product is brought to you by Propeller, a seed-stage venture capital firm based out Jordan. If your MENA-based startup is looking for an investor, get in touch, we'd love to talk!
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Fouad Jeryes, co-founder of Maqsam, the friendliest cloud-telephony solution for SMEs in MENA, walks us through his journey of entrepreneurship. Over the past decade Fouad has built and launched a variety of tech-focused products in the payments, data, e-commerce, logistics and communications spaces, most notably of which are CashBasha and Maqsam. With a number of successes and much more to learn from failures, Fouad shares how he and his co-founder validate, launch and scale products; covering how they identify new opportunities, how they test their MVPs, how they acquire their first 100 customers, and how they make the tough decisions to stay focused. If you're an early-stage founder or someone thinking of starting your own company, Fouad's got a decade of lessons for you.
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Tony is a product leader with more than 10 years of experience with some of the biggest tech companies in the world, including Google and Careem. He started his career as a software engineer and then joined Google for 7 years where he helped launch some of the most used products on the planet, including Google Sign in/Sign up.
In 2017 he moved back to the Middle East where he led the Careem Marketplace team and is currently Senior Product Director for Consumer and Ads at Talabat.
Tony is passionate about creating and cultivating healthy tech cultures and helping companies build innovative global products out of the Middle East.
On today’s episode Tony shares his experience and role in transforming Talabat, a 15-year old company, to a product-led organization and cultivating a collaborative, customer-centric culture. He shares his successful personal experiences and many practical tactics to influencing change. -
Yazan Masafah has been working in product management for over 15 years now. He starting his career in engineering and then moved into product marketing and product management. He has managed product teams of various sizes, both at enterprises, including Huawei and Orange, and at startups. He served as VP of Products at Unifonic for 5 years before founding his own startup, businesschat.io.
Yazan does not settle for mediocre. His high sense of self-awareness and hunger for growth have gotten him to where he is today. On this episode, Yazan shares his tremendous experience in building and managing engineering teams responsible for products that have generated tens of million of dollars in the Middle East.
We talk about the structure and role of the product team, setting product and performance metrics, alignment with management and the importance of autonomy and trust for an effective workflow.
Let's Talk Product is brought to you by Propeller, a seed-stage venture capital firm based out of Amman, Jordan. If your MENA-based startup is looking for an investor, get in touch, we'd love to talk!
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Amjad Masad is the co-founder and CEO of Replit, an online coding platform that lowers the barriers of entry for building and shipping software. Amjad has been working on programming and creative tools for his entire career. His journey in building Repl.it started in his hometown Amman, back when he was a computer science student at university.
Amjad's first-hand experience and frustration with the existing coding environments at that time sparked in him the need to build a cloud-based code editor. After spending several years at Code Academy and Facebook, Repl.it was brought back to life and has grown to become a leading global product backed by top-tier VCs including Y Combinator and Andreessen Horowitz.
On this episode Amjad shares his incredibly tenacious story of turning his old vision into a leading company despite the detours along the way. He also shares his philosophy on building technology products and how they are constantly improving Repl.it.
Let's Talk Product is brought to you by Propeller, a seed-stage venture capital firm based out of Amman, Jordan. If your MENA-based startup is looking for an investor, get in touch, we'd love to talk!
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On this episode Elie takes us back to the early days of launching Anghami and shares the journey of building, what now is, the leading music streaming app in the Middle East. Today Anghami has over 85 million users, streaming a billion tracks each month. The founders' strong product vision and focus is what got the company to where it is today.
Elie comes from a technical background and has founded 4 companies before Anghami. He led engineering and product teams of various sizes and has tremendous knowledge to share. On this episode, he shares great insights and learnings on everything related to building tech products; from product development and differentiation to culture and tools.
Let's Talk Product is brought to you by Propeller, a seed-stage venture capital firm based out of Amman, Jordan. If your MENA-based startup is looking for an investor, get in touch, we'd love to talk!
