Insights from Mix n' Mentor Cairo: What You Missed
This Saturday, we kicked off our 2013 roadshow by hosting Mix n’ Mentor Cairo,
which brought around 300 of Egypt’s leading entrepreneurs and
mentors together under the Egyptian sun in Giza for intensive chats
about the topics that trouble entrepreneurs the most.
Against a backdrop of palm trees and greenery, at Cairo’s Swiss
Club in Giza, entrepreneurs and mentors gathered around small
tables, lounging on beanbags under umbrellas, debating team
building, sales and marketing, and fundraising.
After several hours of discussions, we came together at the end for
a fun, interactive fireside chat with four entrepreneurs and
mentors. As we bounced questions back and forth from the crowd and
asked crowd members for their opinion, it made for a fun final
session with plenty to absorb.
Here are three of our main conclusions:
- There’s a lot of energy around starting up companies in
Egypt. On the whole, this is a positive, but sometimes it
leads to large co-founding teams. Co-founding can be a great way to
get talent motivated and engaged in building the company from the
ground up, as co-founders will be far less motivated to leave, and
yet for some, it had become a challenge to designate roles and
creating hierarchies.
Tip: Make sure that you try to complement skills between co-founders and align on the vision. Teams of 2 or 3 tend to be more productive.
- Entrepreneurs in Egypt are facing challenges finding
investment beyond the seed round. The current political
climate isn’t helping their case, yet the amounts they were asking
for were generally far less than those in other ecosystems.
However, many reported not having enough options for follow-on
funding once they graduated from accelerators. For those
struggling, a good look at how to pitch what differentiates their
idea and makes it an idea of the moment, as well as their
product-market fit, might solve the problem.
Tip: Be sure to assess your product-market fit before pitching to investors, and give accurate breakdowns of how the money will be spent. Don’t forget to reach out to investors in the rest of the Arab world if you can’t find funding locally.
- Egyptian entrepreneurs have strong technical skills,
and access to a large market. For most of these
entrepreneurs, there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity. One of
the downsides is that, with such a large domestic market (80
million overall and 30 million online), some are missing the
regional opportunity in a push to go local or global. The
ecosystem’s emphasis on tech has left some startups with less of
focus on marketing, but a bit more development of their marketing
angles would help some of these startups scale quickly.
Tip: Don’t forget that sales and distribution are as important as building a good product. Decide to track metrics that make you disciplined about hitting your sales goals when it comes to reaching users and clients.
We’ll be creating tutorials on Wamda soon to elaborate on some
of the biggest challenges we saw. For more on the ecosystem in
Egypt, also read our overview of the e-commerce sector.
For more, check out the tweets on #mixnmentor. To attend a Mix n’ Mentor in your city, go to www.wamda.com/mixnmentor.