Hustle, Heart, and Haraj: The Unfiltered Startup journey with Rekaz

The Road Less Traveled: Unveiling the Triumphs and Trials of a Saudi Startup

Testing our first paid invoice 🚀

The first 90 days

For the last five years, I've worked with startups that successfully navigated post-Product Market Fit (PMF) challenges. My role primarily involved tackling growth, scalability, and optimization issues. This experience was intensely challenging, akin to navigating an F1 Formula car through a complex maze of obstacles and sharp turns. However, when we launched our startup, Rekaz, the experience was strikingly different.

The Hustle 

Embarking on the Rekaz journey harkens back to my original days, eight years ago, when I was developing indie apps, launching them, and then employing growth hacking strategies for expansion. This experience diverges vastly from the adrenaline-fueled role of leading product teams at late-stage startups, which felt like racing in an F1 car. In contrast, working on Rekaz is akin to pushing a broken 2000s sedan up a hill. Lacking a robust team, abundant resources, or clear-cut solutions, we operate in a realm of uncertainty. The bulk of the workload falls on my co-founder and me, involving manual, non-scalable tasks. Nonetheless, following the wisdom of legendary startup strategist Paul Graham, we focus initially on customer acquisition and activities that don't scale.

The Grind

I firmly believe that heeding the wrong signals can misleadingly steer any product. Identifying what constitutes noise versus valuable feedback is key. My experience has shown that in B2B services, offering free services to garner early feedback or convert users into paying customers often proves unproductive. More often than not, non-paying users engage with the service out of courtesy, leading to biased feedback. Such users are inclined to provide feedback that aligns with what you want to hear, lacking any real investment in the product. This issue is deeply explored in 'The Mom Test,' a must-read book on product development. In contrast, paying users, having invested and thus having a stake, offer frank, demanding feedback as they seek tangible value for their expenditure.

The MVP

Behold the MVP!

As day 90 days since inception approached, I couldn't help but feel immense pride in our technical team. Their dedication was nothing short of extraordinary, launching 20 core features and ironing out over 70 bugs in such a short time. It's incredible to see a small team achieve in a quarter what big companies take a year to do, and often with less finesse. What really warmed my heart was seeing the barriers between our engineers and users vanish. They worked directly with users, understanding their needs firsthand, proving that true UX comes from genuine connections, not just dry research or comparing ourselves to global giants. Abdulaziz, my co-founder and CTO, poured his soul into this project, spending countless nights coding and then meeting users during the day. His dedication did magic for us – our users saw his effort and knew that any issue would be fixed fast and flawlessly.

The first customers 

There's a tempting ease in handing out free samples of your service, postponing the moment you actually start selling and receiving real payments. But we were convinced that wasn't our path. For us, even the smallest amount of collected checks is the ultimate stamp of validation.

Haraj out of all places 

Haraj, of all places - yes, you read that right. Haraj, the online marketplace that's like the Craigslist or eBay of Saudi Arabia, became our unexpected goldmine. We knew our target audience, small and medium-sized businesses, frequented Haraj. To our amazement, we stumbled upon a post from a private school owner desperate for custom software to manage recurring invoices. He soon realized that getting a decent software house to create something tailored would cost him a whopping 100k-200k SAR. That's when we jumped in, offering our SaaS solution at just a fraction of that price. gotta love SaaS – it's the ultimate democratizer-. And now, that school has used Rekaz to handle invoicing for their students, generating over 60k SAR in GMV. 

Cold Messaging

As a business owner, I'm well aware of the annoyance caused by unsolicited messages from various software providers. Many sales managers in the MENA region have written off cold messaging as ineffective, claiming it's dead. However, I believe it fails primarily due to its impersonal, spammy nature. We decided to take a different approach. First, we identified potential segments that might need our solution, particularly those struggling with invoice management. Then, we manually gathered information from Google Maps to pinpoint our leads. With this data in hand, we crafted personalized WhatsApp messages, tailoring each one to the business's specific needs. Our messages were concise, highlighting two key points: how we could precisely address their pain points and emphasizing that we are a local Saudi company, offering solutions by the region, for the region – not an offshore software house peddling subpar service.

One key lesson we've absorbed over the years is that in Saudi Arabia, merchants 'buy with their eyes, not their ears.' It's nearly impossible to persuade someone to pay for a service based solely on hearing about it; they need to experience it firsthand. This realization shaped our approach to cold messaging and phone calls. Our objective wasn't to directly sell, but to encourage potential customers to join a demo Zoom call. There, we could not only showcase our product but also listen to the customers' pain points and demonstrate how our solution addresses them. From around 50 cold leads, we managed to get 8 to join a Zoom call, and out of those, 2 became paying customers. Not too shabby for a new product, if I do say so myself!

Conclusion 

To us, this journey is just getting started. We have our sights set on optimizing Time to Value (TTV) and meticulously measuring customer satisfaction. It's crucial to continuously iterate based on customer feedback and refine our solutions to better meet their needs. Our unwavering obsession with customer satisfaction is, in my opinion, our ultimate edge over the more resource-rich competitors. It's not just a strategy; it's our core philosophy that keeps us a step ahead.