By Mahmoud Bushehri
DEAD SEA, Jordan, April 13 (KUNA) -- Kuwait has all requirements for launching a successful startup, especially in IT sector, a Kuwait-based Egyptian entrepreneur, whose newsfeed app Nabd appeared twice on the World Economic Forum's list of top 100 Arab startups.
"We chose Kuwait to launch our startup due to its market stability and availability of all requirements for founding and marketing startups, especially in the technology sector," Abdulrahman Al-Sayyed told KUNA.
Al-Sayyed is the co-founder of the Kuwait-based Waveline Media company and the developer of widely-used newsfeed application (Nabd) which was named by the World Economic Forum as one of the top 100 promising startups in Arab World in 2019 and 2017.
"We have proven that a global company can be launched from Kuwait," he said.
"Today, we have offices in four Arab countries in addition to the head office in Kuwait." Nabd is a personalized Arabic content platform, used by millions of Arabs across the world on a daily basis to stay up-to-date with their favorite news, videos and content.
He suggested that the high connectivity of Kuwaiti people was instrumental to the success of the IT startups in Kuwait.
"The Kuwaiti society is highly connected - in reality through Diwaniyas, social gathering places, and virtually via social networking sites," Al-Sayyed stated, adding that the easy access to internet had facilitated marketing of applications.
He cited other examples of the outstanding startups initiated by young entrepreneurs in Kuwait ad left hallmarks at the Arab world and beyond including Carriage; Q8.car; Talabat and For Sale.
Al-Sayyed noted that Nabd was not the first successful application he launched from Kuwait.
Yabila application, an ad platform enables advertisers to reach local consumers seeking offers, discounts, and new arrivals, was launched in 2011, one year before Nabd.
It has attracted more than 100,000 users in a short time and managed to retrieve its costs in just five months, he boasted.
He elaborated that the company did not allocate any budget to market the application, "but we shared it through social networking sites and communications applications such WhatsApp, which attracted over 100,000 downloads in a short time".
Al-Sayyed said that this success of Yibila prompted the company's executives to think about a larger project directed to the Kuwaiti market first, then the Gulf region and the entire world, which led to the launching of Nabd application in 2012.
On the remarkable success of Nabd, which has 15 million users from across the world, Al-Sayyed said the prime reason was adhering to the objective of introducing an application that "enriches Arab content on the Internet".
He added that the application helped smart phone users follow up news from its reliable sources once they occur.
"It allows the user to choose favorite news sources," he said.
Al-Sayyed stated that the WEF recognition of their startup would "encourages us to do more to offer more value added products to the Arab societies".
He called for more efforts to be done to streamline government procedures, especially speeding up paperwork, and reforming investment laws to encourage young entrepreneurs and attract investors. (end) mjb.ibi