In a casual setting at Innoventures’ Office, we had our first and long awaited meetup for Egypt Startups, technology entrepreneurs (anybody with vision or product for web or mobile), online experts, gurus as well as entrepreneurship supporters like mentors & consultants to discuss the current entrepreneurial challenges in Egypt that slows down entrepreneurial inventions.
Therefore, to meet your challenges event started with successful entrepreneurial cases through inspirational mini-speeches by 3 entrepreneurs who managed their way through those challenges. Those mentors were Abdellatif Olama, CEO of Dear’n’Deal, Abdelrahman Wahba, CEO of Iqraaly and Hady Ahmed, CEO of Tabshoura that are three successful businesses in the Egyptian market that started with an entrepreneurial initiativve.Then, we had a group game for identifying the challenges, announced a mini-contest of “Meetup tweetmaster” and finally had Q&A session with open discussion.
Every small Business meets some obstacles at their Baby-phase, where you are now. That’s not because you lack experience but may be because you miss the know-how. Sometimes you waste your time trying start the whole business from scratch while you can save your time, energy, resources and creativity to adding10% to a 90% that already exists out there. This 90/10 rule was explained by Olama who said that the asset is where you end not where you start. So, one can borrow 90% from an already-existing idea and add to it his/her 10% that take already to a completely different level.
Peer and family pressures telling you, “you are young, you can’t do it”, shan’t be listened to. For, Hady all surrounders weren’t supportive but weren’t believing his young age, 21 years, can do him any help. However, he didn’t give attention to that and established his successful “Tabshoura”, middle-man market linking designers to designers’ hiring agencies.
The main 5 challenges discussed were the funding, business planning, marketing activities, sales management, and lack of resources. To reach a fair focus for the meetup, a game was run to indicate the main common challenge that met the majority of Startups. The game was as follows; 5 boards were hung on the wall with a challenge written on each, sticky notes were distributed on participants to stick their problem to the problem-related challenge. The conclusion was that funding and business planning contributed to the majority of challenges.
To guarantee broader reach of coach-needy entrepreneurs, the meetup was also live streamed and live tweeted by Interact, attendees and online followers, who asked questions and interact shared their questions within the meetup and tweeted them back the answers. By the end of the meetup, we announced 3 winners for our mini-contest “Meetup Tweetmaster”, who won an exclusive training session for entrepreneurial skills. To gain more benefit and broader vision over entrepreneurs in Egypt, you can see the event’s pictures and watch interviews with the speakers.