I still remember every single detail about that journey 5 years ago. Coming up with the idea, forming the team, filling the application, writing the plan, traveling to Beirut for a bootcamp, then to Dubai for the award ceremony! It was such an amazing experience. Luckily we ended up with an award at that time

This year it was in Qatar, and I was super happy that I got the opportunity to attend 2 full days of the week-long program last week at Katara Cultural Village, and mingle with the ambitious entrepreneurs who came from almost every arab country. This time it was bigger: 72 teams of twos or threes were there!! Being with such a group of people in one room just boosts your positive energy!!

For the sake of continuous enhancement, I will include in this post few points that were raised by the participants hoping that it will be well received by the organizers.

First of all, there were more than 70 mentors, investors and successful entrepreneurs who came to help, so why not to engage them in selecting the top 10 finalists or maybe in selecting the top 3 winners as well! Why only 6 judges were entitled to pick the finalists and the winners?!

Second, participants were asking for more transparency in the top 10 selection process. They asked for the scores to go public on the venue’s screen, specially that some of the judges were actually investors in participating startups. To avoid any perceived conflict of interest, the process should be more transparent.

Third, there was a confusion in the startup vs. idea segments. Everyone thought that they will be totally separate groups competing for different awards. But that was not the case, startups and ideas were competing for the same 3 cash awards.

People were suggesting an app for mentors, investors, and successful entrepreneurs to vote for or score the top 10 finalists and then the scores will be shown on the spot.

Anyway, no one returned home empty handed. Everyone won something. Some won cash awards, but some won friends, mentors, clients, investors, and invaluable feedback and advices…… and above all, everyone won a life changing experience.

The way Bahjat puts it is that all the stories of Sindibad voyages were originally business trips to bring the best goods from around the world and sell them in Arabia.

This sounded like a perfect match for the concept of Sinbad Ventures, were we wanted to find the best startups/entrepreneurs from Arabia (Sinbads) and help them make adventures in the globe to pursue International capital. I also changed my personal blog name to: Sinbad The VC, to reflect this same concept.

The thing is that Bahjat has already started a company using this brand for business news and reports, and when I started Sinbad Ventures he was worried about confusing people with two brands having the same story.

He was right, and I think it’s time to give him back the control of his own brand, and change mine. I also would like to apologize to him for not taking his worries into consideration which resulted in confusing his company’s clients and readers.

So I will soon inshallah change my company’s name, and my personal blog’s name as well to a new brand. I will also change my twitter handle, and of course the name of the video show I started few weeks ago.

I have not decided yet on the new name, but it will come inshallah

“Wheel Express” was expected to be one of the top Jordanian startups in the e-Commerce industry. It all started as “DVD On Wheels”, which reached the break-even point very quickly then achieved monthly profits of JD 12K-15K! Then for legal issues, the founders pivoted to Wheels Express, which also reached the break-even point again very quickly, but needed investments to scale.

That’s when the founders started to explore the investment world. At that time, Wheels Express was the first startup to join the first acceleration program in Jordan, Oasis500, and it was the first graduate to receive Angel investments right after the demo day! Unfortunately, 18 months after graduating, the company was shut down.

In the video below, Ibrahim Manna is sharing with us details about what went wrong, and the lessons he and his co-founders learned the hard way. All Arab entrepreneurs in e-Commerce MUST watch this! 

Below the video you can find an index of the interview where you can jump to specific discussions for your convenience*

I would like to thank Ibrahim for being our guest at Tech Majles. It was a great and wonderful experience to share. He is now working on a new startup called ehdee.com (more details about it in the video as well). 

I would also like to thank our sponsor Vadwen, and of course special thanks to Batata Media team for the amazing work, and to the director of the show Mohammad Jaradat (@Neo7th)

Please follow me on Twitter (@VCpreneur) for updates on the next episodes, and please use the Hashtag #TechMajles to suggest new guests and to ask questions in next episodes inshallah.

Here is the link to the video on YouTube in case the below video don’t work for you: http://youtu.be/TYtA1wYrAlY 

*Video Index:

00:00:44

• - First steps into entrepreneurship as a DVD shop right after school, 
• - “DVD on Wheels” story, with a JD 12K-15K as monthly profits, and a capital of JD 3K! 
• - Then why it was shut down.

00:05:45

• - Discussing the pivot to “Wheels Express”, 
• - Discussing how they generated all these profits without any investment of entrepreneurship training. 
• - The “Profits Equation” in e-Commerce.

00:09:47

• - Re-starting with “Wheels Express”, 
• - Including more products and services, 
• - The logistics challenge and its effects on the profit margins, 

00:12:20

• - First investment after the pivot, why and how? 
• - Discussing the concept of a partner vs. angel investor, 
• - Talking about the initial marketing activities, 
• - Number of customers and number of offered items and services 

00:16:15

• - Approaching professional investors for the first time 
• - Discovering the world of entrepreneurship in Amman 
• - The need for bigger investments to scale the company 
• - The deal with Oasis500 
• - Why to choose Oasis500 at a time where the company was already established? 

00:22:57

• - The advantages of Oasis500 acceleration program 

00:27:54

• - The disadvantages of Oasis500 acceleration program 
• - The angel round and it’s amount 
• -How the mentor turned into an angel investor in the company 

00:34:45

• - The plan after getting the angel investment
• - How much time would the company survive with the angel round? 
• - Activities during the first 6 months after graduating from the accelerator 

00:37:02

• - The red flag of the cash flow! 
• - Trying to raise a VC round for a year 
• - Downsizing and number of employees before and after the acceleration 
• - Challenges to increase revenues and bootstrap 
• - Innovation to compete with copycats and new comers 

00:42:18

• - How did they survive for one more year after while trying to raise the VC round without any other investments? 
• - Injecting cash into the company without asking for more equity! 

00:44:50

• - What made you decide to shut down the company? 
• - What happened to your “Profit Equation”? 
• - The glorious world of several rounds of investments! 
• - Were there any merger scenarios? 
• - Grow fast or Go home strategy 
• - Spending all the personal savings to try to rescue the company and how it should have been done earlier! 
• - Why some startups should shut down quickly? 
• - Talking about cracking the wrong market and invalidating the assumption that Amman was a testing ground 
• - Being optimist vs. being stubborn 

00:52:44

• - Lessons learned and general advices to Arab/Jordanian entrepreneurs 
• - Depending on the profit equation vs. depending on continuous investment rounds 
• - We have no Series A investors 
• - Be realistic in your plans and numbers 
• - Know your investors very well and ask them, very early on, to participate in the next rounds to encourage new investors to invest 
• - Most VC and Angel rounds take much longer time that you expect 

00:57:47

• - Talking about the co-founders relationship before, during and after Wheel Express
• - Discussing the co-founders added value and the equity structure 

01:00:24

• - Why do you think you couldn’t raise the money? 
• - Raising while you’re desperate to raise the money! 
• - Logistics challenge in Arabia and how Souq, Namshi and MarkaVIP are all trying to solve this issue! 

01:02:27

• - Now what? What did you do after shutting down Wheels Express 
• - Joining Jeeran for 6 months 
• - Creating a new startup again (ehdee.com) in e-commrce too!! 
• - Why to work on starting another company again?! 
• - The new startup team and investment 
• - Going the Lean Startup Model this time

I have written about such a meetup earlier which was: Amman’s Mini MBA, where we meet to discuss selective business case studies.

Now I am happy to share with you my experience at a new similar meetup: The Arab Mobile Apps Meetup or TAMAM, started by Osama Alshurafa (@oalshu) and  Noora Sharrab (@noora888). Here are TAMAM Page on Facebook and TAMAM Twitter Account @TamamApps.

Simply put, we gather to talk about new mobile apps. So whoever wants to talk about an app that he/she likes or uses, comes and introduces the app for 5 minutes. Next he/she answers questions about it. Simple but very informative!

Last week, I attended the second TAMAM meetup at Wild Jordan Cafe. The first was at Cafe Gourmand in Taj Mall. Because it’s a relatively small gathering, it can be done in a corner of a big cafe! This makes it more fun and casual, so you get to meet/talk with almost every participant, and engage in all discussions, unlike big events with speakers and panels.

Although I thought I know about the latest apps, I learned about some new cool apps there! This time, participants among the group talked about: MailBox, Action Movie FX, Blux, UMANO, Couple, Avocado, and Kick The Boss 2. I loved Blux and UMANO!!! I didn’t know about them before. We also talked about how MailBox is doing all this buzz with amazing UX, and we discussed why it was acquired so quickly by DropBox.

On the other hand, you get to meet very interesting people! For example, I met Maher Zidan (@ooenomel2003) who comes from the pharmaceutical industry. He learned how to develop mobile apps on his own as a hobby, and then started to create apps for his own use to solve his own problems. He decided later to publish them on the app stores and now his apps have a good user base! One of his apps was created to make it easier to buy parking tickets in Dubai via SMS, because it was hard to remember the parking codes! Check it out on iTunes: Dubai Park.

Samsung has kindly sponsored the event by providing their latest Smart TV to be used by the presenters. It’s worth mentioning that they did not send a marketing guy to talk about it, they sent a great technical guy who was transparent in talking about the TV and its TV Apps, and the drawbacks they’re working on. He also informed us about Samsung’s program to support developers financially if they want to develop apps for Samsung Smart TV.

Can’t wait for the next TAMAM

Wizards was expected to be one of the top Jordanian startups in the online/mobile games industry, it was funded by angel and VC investors, but unfortunately it was shut down earlier this year. Sohaib wrote about 11 Lessons learned after 4 years at Wizards Productions on his blog, and we just wanted to learn more details about him, about this journey, and about what went wrong.

Below the video you can find an index of the interview where you can jump to specific discussions for your convenience*.

I would like to thank @SohaibThiab for being our first guest ever at Tech Majles. It was a great and wonderful experience to share, and it was fun!

I would like to thank all the sponsors for their support to produce a great first episode: Dardasa, Vadwen, Elaf, and of course special thanks to Batata team for the amazing work, and to the director of the show @Neo7th

Please follow me on Twitter (@VCpreneur) for updates on the next episodes, and please use the Hashtag #TechMajles to suggest new guests and to ask questions in next episodes inshallah.

Here is the link on YouTube in case the below video don’t work for you: http://youtu.be/o1q2JiCT_Pg

*Video Index:

• - 00:01:20 – Before Wizards, several experiments, one websites sold, and two acquihires!
• - 00:05:05 – The decision to leave Maktoob and the promised stock options and start Sahara/Wizards and why to focus on the Arabian market. Also taking about funding the seed stage of Wizards, the first few games, and their business model.
• - 00:15:55 – Ready to raise the next round, the details of raising the first VC round, why to raise VC funding, how long it took, how did they use the proceeds, and the startup’s pivots.
• - 00:21:40 – The board, governance and the third round of investment.
• - 00:23:16 – Discussing the lessons learned in the blog post in details with lots of examples and insights.
• - 00:53:15 – The last week of Wizards, how the decision was taken, and the struggle to raise another round.
• - 00:57:50 – The relationship between the co-founders and investors and their updates after shutting down the company, why to take a break of entrepreneurship for a while, and why to join a startup company again.
• - 01:05:16 – How would you do it differently?
• - 01:06:07 – Why to blog about this?
• - 01:08:05 – Is the investment a main reason for a startup to succeed? How would you approach investment differently? What do you think of the ecosystem in Jordan and Arabia in general? How many failures does it take to enhance our ecosystem? and how did your experiment help others?

Well, here it is: TechMajles. It’s all about startup stories,investments, lessons learned, and what’s happening. I hope it adds value.

You can ask the guests via #TechMajles hashtag on Twitter, and you can comment on the shows YouTube Channel to give us feedback, suggestions and new ideas.

Please follow me on Twitter @VCpreneur for updates about our guests, and when to send your questions.

The few first episodes are presented to you in cooperation with Batata Media by Mohammad Jaradat @Neo7th who is directing the show and helping with all the needed video editing.

Here is the teaser video, I hope you like it:

Tech Majles

وهو فكرة راودتني منذ فترة طويلة وقد حان الوقت للعمل عليها بشكل جدّي إن شاء الله

سيقدم لكم البرنامج بإذن الله مقابلات مع رياديين ومستثمرين للتعرف على قصصهم والدروس المستفادة من خبراتهم المتنوعة. وسيقدم أيضا أحاديث ونقاشات عن بعض الشركات العالمية وآخر أخبارها

ويمكنكم أيضا توجيه أسئلة للضيوف عبر تويتر على

#TechMajles

   لمعرفة ضيوف الحلقات ولإرسال أسئلتكم يرجى متابعتي عبر تويتر على

الحلقات الأولى تقدم لكم بالتعاون مع شركة بطاطا للإعلام ومؤسسها محمد جرادات مخرج البرنامج

@Neo7th

أرجو أن ينال البرنامج اعجابكم

In Summary:

The new Sinbad Ventures is all about featuring Top Startups to Invest-In for Angel Investors and Crowdfunders recommended and reviewed by Venture Advisors.

Why To Do This Now?

Equity crowdfunding is becoming legal in several countries around the world. Technology news sites in USA are talking about more than 50 crowd funding platforms lined up and ready to take the license.

While people are crazily competing on who will become the hottest crowd-funding platform, the most important question later on will be: Who are the hottest startups to invest-in? Then funders or crowd investors will go to where they are listed and invest in them. So there will be a need for a place to find such hot startups.

But who will recommend startups?! I think that more and more VCs will be shifting to the early/growth stages while leaving the the seed stage investments to angel investors, crowd investors and to the accelerators (who I think will cooperate more with crowd funding platforms soon).

This means that VCs will be willing to recommend startups for the crowds to invest in, acting like “Venture Advisors”. So that they can follow up on these investments later on in the next rounds if they succeed, i.e. this will be a win-win cooperation between VCs and Angel or Crowd Investors.

Investment transactions can be done on any equity crowd funding website such as: AngelList, CircleUp, CrowdValley, SeedInvest, etc… So that Sinbad Ventures will only be a Recommendation Community.

In Details:

Sinbad Ventures is an Investment Recommendation Community for Angel and Crowdfunding Investors by Venture Advisors.

- Venture Advisors:

Venture Advisors can create their own “Startup Lists” where they list top startups to invest-in, and post their reviews about these startups.

Venture Advisors may offer free and/or paid services. Free services will simply be recommending and reviewing startups in Lists. Paid services may include: selecting, processing, managing, and/or monitoring startups performance.

Venture Advisors have their own profiles, with details about their investment thesis, track records and offered services. They get paid by Investors with monthly subscription fees. Different Venture Advisors offer different value-add services, thus, they set different monthly subscription fees to access their own deals lists and services.

- Angel Investors and Equity Crowdfunding Investors:

Investors can follow specific “Venture Advisors” and/or specific “Startup Lists” to receive updates and notifications. Investors may browse lists for free, and contact startups directly.

Alternatively, Investors can pay subscription fees for specific Venture Advisors (based on their profiles, track record, investment thesis and value-add services) to access their deals lists and their services.

This way, Investors will be treated as if they are LPs, but without committing to traditional fund structures, and without sharing the upsides of their investments with fund managers.

MVP:

To test the concept in the market, we will start with a minimal viable product. There will be only free lists. No value-add services and no subscriptions. If there are enough Venture Advisors and lists, and if there are enough Investors following those Venture Advisors, then we will go to the next step.

Wireframes:

Here is the draft vision of the website. Please let me know your initial feedback about the concept and the website functions.

In general, it was great. It was positive. We discussed success and failure. We talked about the past and the future. We went through the startup and investment scene in Jordan over the past few years. In this post, I am trying to summarize the main suggestions that came out of this meeting.

There was a debate in the meeting about how structured or crowd-based such activities should be. For me, I think it should NOT be highly structured!! I mean why?!! Let whoever wants to do good for the community just do it, in his/her own way! Who builds ecosystems anyway?

Well, I think ecosystems are seeded by the community not by governments (who only react to what’s going on in the community). I think it’s a button up effort, not a top down one. In such endeavors, I really believe in un-organized community-based or even individual-based initiatives, lots of them, as opposed to few big organizations controlling or sometimes limiting such initiatives.

Everyone in the meeting emphasized on the need to share. Share knowledge, lessons learned, and expertise. They mentioned that most of the startups fail for the same reasons. So lets share these failure reasons for new comers not to repeat them. This can be done on personal blogs, or on a new simple website that can be created for this purpose.

Some suggested a new Facebook group. There are few Facebook groups for Jordanian entrepreneurs, so I was resisting this idea at first. But then they explained that it will not be for a specific event, nor it will be controlled by a specific company or association. It will be for entrepreneurs to share articles and to ask for help or advice when needed. It sounds like a really good idea.

Others suggested a closed cooperation club (a periodic meeting and/or a mailing list) by invitation only. So it starts small, then new members can be added later on after agreeing on specific rules or a kind of “code of conduct” that is built on sharing and helping as much as possible.

There can also be long video interviews with entrepreneurs who would like to share their stories, including what went right and what went wrong. These interviews can be shared privately in the club or publicly on a blog, or even on a show website similar to ThisWeekIn shows.

Attendees also suggested to have more cooperation within the community by sharing resources. Some of the attending entrepreneurs have generously offered their studios and their offices at cost for whoever needs such help.

At the end, we all agreed to suggest an AmmanTT edition about failed Jordanian startups, if their founders are willing to share their stories on stage. This would help us all know more about what went wrong in details.

There is a great book about building healthy startup communities called: “Startup Communities“. Its worth reading. I am quoting from the book description: “It explores what it takes to create an entrepreneurial community in any city, at any time. Along the way, it offers valuable insights into increasing the breadth and depth of the entrepreneurial ecosystem by multiplying connections among entrepreneurs and mentors, improving access to entrepreneurial education, and much more.”

Maybe we should all read it and discuss in that same AmmanTT session as well.

If you have any other suggestions, or if I forgot to mention any of the ones mentioned in the meeting, please add them in the comments section below.

We talked about Facebook Games, Zynga, Angry Birds, Draw Something, etc… and we were discussing the games life-cycle, different strategies to launch a good social game that may actually last for a long time, and how we can learn from other people’s experience.

The guys were really passionate about this and they have really good concepts, but they are perfectionists!!! They wanted to finalize a full featured game, a perfect game, before launching it! They have been working for months on their concepts, but nothing is out there yet!

I can understand and appreciate their passion for creating the next big game, but it just doesn’t come this way, or at least I believe so. I believe that they have to run quick and simple experiments for several reasons. What if people don’t like the full featured game? What if people don’t like the whole concept?! What if another startup comes and launches a similar concept before them? What if they couldn’t distribute or promote the game well? What if, What if, What if?!?!

So I was only suggesting creating a very simple, light and free version of the game, that can be launched in few days and then submit it to the app stores. They will get into marketing, they will get user feedback on the basic concept, they can also run tests on user experience, pivot when needed, build a user base for the next game, get some numbers to analyze, learn more about their target users, etc….

You need this if you want investments. VCs will require data about your ability to attract users, data about your ability to analyze your users’ behavior, a proof that you are able to change and modify your games based on user feedback, a proof that you can retain users, a proof that you can get users addicted to your games, and of course a proof that your games are so good so that few of the users actually paid for it, etc…. All this will encourage VCs to invest with you the amount that you need to create the next big game that needs a bigger team and more resources.

Some are afraid of uncovering the great concept they are working on. But I am sure that people can’t easily drop everything they’re working on just to copy your game concept and do it before you! However, if you are too afraid, why don’t you be innovative and create few simple games around your new concept without uncovering it?! I mean it’s all about innovation!

Anyway, while talking, I suggested a very simple “Test-Game” that I wish to see someone doing and sharing the lessons learned week by week as a practical example. Not for the game itself, but for the learning that we all can get out of it.

So below I am listing preliminary versions/experiments for a game concept that will start very simple and then get more features as we go. Of course this might not be how the game will or should end, because it should be open to change and pivot based on the user feedback. By the way, I am not proposing a new concept, it was (or maybe still) there. It’s just the experiment that I am interested in and the data mentioned above that can be gathered.

Version One:

I take a photo of my friend using my mobile phone, the photo will appear in a cartoonish style, then I hit or punch the face in that photo to create a funny picture of him/her and post it on Facebook.

Version Two:

We add more cartoon style filters and more tools to punch or add more effects to the face.

Version Three:

We add a social layer to it! I invite other friends to punch that friend photo with me! Then when the picture is added to Facebook, the profile pictures of all gang members will appear next to that funny picture saying that we are the ones who did it.

Version Four:

We add a social competition to it. So we will see who will get more friends to punch the other one’s photo, who is able to get a bigger gang, and who will also get more likes after it.

Version Five:

We add virtual currency to it!! The more friends you get on your side the more tools you unlock, alternatively, you can purchase those tool. Or you can purchase special filters and special funny looks instead of waiting to gather a bigger gang around you!

Then maybe we can add stages that include putting that friend in a funny situation, or maybe we add group playing like gangs against each other, etc…. Again, this should be open for any changes derived from user feedback.

This is just an example.

Now think about your own game concept and how you can simplify it so that you can launch it tomorrow!!

Then learn and develop as you go.