Emtyaz Dr

Well it's going pretty well so far but I think this calls for some reflection.

I've learned a tremendous amount from this startup so far. I often think back to the days before my first paying customer. I was so close to giving up. Being a solo founder is tough, you don't have teammates to talk to or a co-founder to give you that moral boost when things are sour. It's often been my family that have pushed me through when I've been close to quitting this startup. The weekly group sessions on startupschool.org were also a source of inspiration. The earliest sessions were invigorating and I always came out with new ideas for the startup.

Perhaps the greatest motivator was speaking to beta users. They loved the product and their feedback gave me hope that I was really onto something.

I don't know if this startup is where I will be in the next 5 years. After medical school I want to try something super ambitious - I want to fix healthcare. Someone needs to shake up the industry a bit. Traditional hospitals are slow and wildly inefficient. Something needs to change.

Crypto evolved from banks being too slow and not innovative enough. The internet needed its own currency and soon enough cryptocurrency became that thing.

How does this apply to healthcare? The lack of innovation of traditional hospitals will lead to something more decentralised. The internet needs its own true healthcare system and I don't think current telemedicine is the answer.

Blockchain in healthcare? I don't know, my ideas are still rough and unpolished. What I do know is, I'm willing to spend my life trying to figure this out.

Anyway, those are just some of my thoughts and reflections at the moment.

14:52 - 23 November 2020

Spending the majority of my time selling now. Trying to get the word out and the flywheel spinning.

What I've noticed: Whatsapp and Instagram seem to be the best way of spreading the word here in Egypt 🇪🇬. For some reason email just isn't that big over here.

No paid ads, pure word of mouth so far!

What. A. Feeling.

All that hard work, early morning and late nights and finally it's paid off. I guess this is what it feels like to be an entrepreneur.

I could get used to this 😉

Spent the majority of today actually fixing the payment flow, the user purchased access to the question bank yet then didn't have access hahaha. So it was a pretty eventful. Eventually I managed to fix it and I made sure to let the user know!

Well, this is only the beginning!

Basically just sent the site URL to a couple of my medical student friends via WhatsApp.
Almost immediately my email inbox started blowing up with people signing up. Currently have 25 signed up users resulting from a few WhatsApp messages to mates 🤯.
Pretty decent ROI if you ask me 😉.

I spent the day personally emailing everyone that signed up. In the email I thanked them for signing up and outlined some of the content that I intent to upload to the site in the near future.

I got my brother to handle all the customer support. Probably would have been a good idea to test the user registration feature before releasing the MVP hahaha. I forgot to do that. Turned out that registering to the site was a very difficult and rather unintuitive process. I eventually managed to hack together some code to streamline it a bit.

Although, what surprised me was that people were still signing up - despite such an awfully and just-about-working registration system.

The final thing to do is upload some free questions for users to try out! For some reason, the wordpress plugin that I am using (learndash) to upload the question bank only accepts XML files. So I'm just trying to figure out how to convert my excel files to XML. Unfortunately it's not as simple as just using an online CSV ➝ XML convertor 😢

Egypt is crying out for quality software. Despite having a very entrepreneurial population, it is still very traditional. Not much is digitalised. The companies that have taken the leap and invested in software have become market leaders and gained an irrationally loyal customer base. Fawry (https://fawry.com/) and Breadfast (https://www.breadfast.com/) are a testament to that.

Breadfast raised over $2 million via Y combinator and Fawry generated over $54 million in revenue in 2019. Well, that's what happens when you provide great software to a population in desperate need. These are just a few Egyptian companies emphasising the stark and ever-present reminder that Egypt is truly in need of better software.

I hope and pray that Emtyaz Dr follows in their footsteps and dominates the medical education space in Egypt. It has the potential to. And I am willing to make every sacrifice for that to happen. Watch. This. Space.