Abdellatif's best advice on startups

Abdellatif Abdelfattah is a seasoned software engineer & founder with a strong background in AI. He previously co-founded Tarteel, a platform leveraging AI to help Muslims memorize and recite the Qur'an, which grew to over 2 million users. He’s now building Usul, a research tool for Islamic texts.

At the recent Muslim Biz Summit, Abdellatif dished out his best advice on how to start a startup, and we’ve summarized the key points for you here!

Table of Contents

• Start Part-Time

• Building Products

• Growth

• Monetization

• Conclusion

Start Part-Time

One of the things most people think about before starting their company is when to take that leap of faith and work on building a company.

In an upcoming interview with Amany Killawi (cofounder of LaunchGood) she’ll describe her process of doing istikhara to determine when to jump in.

Abdellatif shares his own advise: start part time.

1. Set Performance Indicators:
   
   The most important thing to do is to set a benchmark for yourself, so you know when it’s time to go full time.
   

   • For instance, Tarteel's target metrics were roughly 10k monthly active users & raising $300k of venture capital.

   • Product-market fit will be reflected in your metrics and growth, but also felt in your interactions with users.

   • There are some other tangible indicators that Marc Andreessen (the venture capitalist who popularized the term PMF) also mentions, such as a need to hire customer support staff, and high retention rates.
     
     

2. Less Stress:
   
   

   Although the costs of starting up a business today have never been lower, you’re still going to face challenges financially, given the high cost of living we all face today.
   

   • You don't have to worry about money as you’re building your product, and can actually invest some into the business.

   • Keeping your day job means you can continue to build & focus on the product, rather than scrambling to prematurely monetize the business.

   • There are also significant monetization challenges when building products for Muslims (more on that later).
     
     

3. Increased Motivation
   
   You might assume that working on your startup part time indicates some lack of motivation. But in Abdellatif’s case, the time constraints compelled him to be more efficient & focused.
   

   • You know you have less time, so do you do the most effective thing you could do.

   • You'll be eager to finish your day job so you can work on your project late into the night.

     
     
     

4. Maintaining Momentum
   
   

   • Jumping into a project full-time without traction can lead to burnout and loss of motivation.

   • Building a successful products requires iteration, which means time, and having a job means that you have the luxury of being able to iterate, or pivot.

Building Products

5. Iterate
   

   • Create something fast, release it to the public, gather feedback, and build iteratively.

   • This approach keeps founders energized and motivated because users are constantly giving feedback, reporting bugs & and asking for features.

   • It prevents the feeling of building in isolation and ensures continuous improvement.

   • Create an MVP (Minimum Viable Product).
     
     

6. Training Data for Machine Learning

   • Tarteel's MVP was a website for "recitation donations" where users would play an ayah, and then recite it.

   • So before Tarteel started developing the app, they were collecting training data for their AI model, to build it for exactly the people that were interested in it.

   • Since this tool is designed for regular people to improve their recitation, using existing online recitations with near-perfect tajwid wasn't going to solve the problem.

And so the timeless principle of listening to users took on a completely new, literal meaning in Tarteel’s machine learning context.

Growth

7. Social Media
   

   • Leverage Facebook groups!

     • Wherever there is a community of people interested in the subject you are working on, that's where you need to be — another example is subreddits.

   • Understand who these people are, and what they’re talking about.

   • Build in Public: write threads on X/Twitter to introduce your product and announce new features.

     • The engagement on these posts serve as a proxy for gauging interest.
       
       

8. TikTok & Influencers

• Tarteel had a cost-effective way of engaging with influencers: simply asking them to share Tarteel as a form of sadaqah jariah — because everybody could benefit from improving their recitation & memorization of the Qur’an.

  • Influencers also constantly need content to share, so it’s not necessary to pay them if your content is interesting enough.
    

• Their outreach was customized, and personal — and this increased the likelihood of the influencer making content on their app.

  • Because these people are receiving a lot of requests, reaching out on every platform (email, every social media) lead to higher conversion rates.

    

• Engineering virality is impossible, so focus on volume rather than quality.

• User-generated content often outperforms high-production videos.
  

• Abdellatif recommends TikTok over any other platform.

  • The algorithm boosts content for you, making follower count less relevant.

  • Spending on influencers and user-generated content on TikTok was ten times more valuable than traditional ads for Tarteel.

Monetization

Once you’ve built a great product & got it into the hands of people, the survival of any business hinges on profitability — a particularly significant challenge when targeting the Muslim market.

9. Monetizing Muslim Markets

• Monetizing Islamic apps is tougher compared to other domains. For example, out of 100k Tarteel accounts created in Egypt, only five were paying customers.

  • Many users in non-Western countries are concerned about credit card security for international transactions, or worse, un-banked, which complicates monetization.

• Ads targeting Muslim countries are cheaper, but that’s also due to low ROI.
  

• Most paying users were from the US, UK, and Canada.

  • stay tuned for an interview we’ll drop with Chris (founder of LaunchGood) where he talks about cracking this user segment!

• For other markets, leverage the local pricing strategies of YouTube and Spotify, as they have done extensive research about purchasing power parity across different countries.

• However, it’s still crucial to internationalize your product and it’s easier than ever today.

  • For ex. translation is not a hurdle anymore, with things like
    

10. Platform Considerations

• Apple users monetized significantly more than Android users.

  • For instance, Android had 90k downloads with $30k revenue, whereas Apple had 40k downloads with $100k revenue.

• Use tools like Sensor Tower to understand app spending habits before committing fully to building a product

Conclusion

We hope Abdellatif's advice proves valuable to you, إِنْ شَاءَ ٱللَّٰهُ.

If this has just motivated you to work on your project, then do check out the Spark Award, where you can get up to $100,000 for your startup. Applications close on July 31st, so don’t miss this incredible opportunity to build your startup.

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Salam!