People assume that entrepreneurship is about the glamorous life.
It definitely has it highs but most of the time it has lows and struggles.
This series is about shining light on entrepreneurship with the focus on Dubai and the GCC.
Like so many others, I also decided to move to Dubai for work. In my case it was not to work for somebody else but rather build my own business.
Back in Germany, I was working for a private investor specialising on early stage App startups. As part of my role I was supporting the entrepreneurs we invested in. I had the privilege to learn a lot from my boss but at the same time do and witness mistakes that taught me for the years to come.
In 2012 I finally decided that I was ready to take the Leap of Faith and start my own thing. Simultaneously a startup had just started in Germany tackling the problem of physical loyalty cards. I thought it was a great idea as it is not reinventing the wheel. It was looking at something existing – the loyalty card – and was improving it from every angle.
I had decided on the idea now I had to choose a market.
Dubai came directly as I had just been there for a vacation and after doing my research I realised it would be great market, due to the following:
- Highest smartphone penetration in the world
- Highest spa per square meter in the world
- Huge density of great quality restaurants
- Loyalty cards are common
- No taxes
My mind was made up and I knew what I wanted to do and where. I packed my bags, took my savings and moved to Dubai in August 2012.
A year later, after a lot of challenges and unknown factors I had finally launched a working product and SnappCard was born.
SnappCard has two sides – the merchants and the end user.
SnappCard is a customer engagement and business intelligence tool for offline merchants. Our current focus customers are in the food and beverage sector but we also operate in any other sector such as health & beauty, retail, entertainment and recreation.
We allow these retails to really understand who their customers are and how they interact within their shops. This data is then leveraged in order to personalise and automated marketing campaigns and therefore drive customers back more often.
Furthermore we allow our merchants to collect relevant customer feedback right through the app.
For the consumer SnappCard is a mobile application that allows them to collect all their loyalty cards in one app. It is just about fun and rewards.
Over the period of the last three years a lot of things have changed:
- We now employee 30 people
- We have grown into four markets and now operate UAE, Turkey, Kuwait and Bahrain
- Over 120,000 users have downloaded the app
We now service over 600 merchants with our innovative solution and help them grow their business.
With startups such as SnappCard big corporates and even small and medium business can leverage innovative technologies in order to compete on a global level as well stay ahead of the curve.
This series aims to bridge the gap between startups and businesses by showcasing the benefits of collaboration and potential a partnership can create.
link below will direct you to the members of the editorial board of Venture Amwal
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