Founded at 2011
Mazeed was found by my friend and brother Mohamed El Gendy at the end of 2011, the beginning was in a large office in Nasr City, Cairo. Our last day together on The-Team-Building Day of OTS company coincides with Egyptian Revolution Day on the 25th Jan.
How everything started
The idea of El-Mazeed starts with a main product called M-Greetings, an application dedicated to send greeting images and designs as MMS to mobile-phones, WhatsApp and Messenger wasn’t that popular at that time. The company faced many struggles and cash-flow issues at the beginning of 2013, which led to a soft exiting of two shareholders. The company almost stopped most of the activities but only serving some legacy clients on a very narrow and with until almost the beginning of 2015, during this period, El-Gendy and I had to look for a full-time job to sustain our lives and rearrange our plans. El-Gendy joined ESR in Saudi Arabia, while I joined Vodafone International Services VIS.
The return
Based on talks and a discussions during the period of the two years working away of Mazeed, we decided to return completely and dedicate our efforts again to support the company and work together to push it forward, we planned to work on that in two directions initially, working to provide good labor in the field of development, providing professional services outsourcing and body shopping, in addition to a legacy support to our old products, this also Synced with the our partnership agreement with Nojoom-Al-Malomat or DataStars in Saudi Arabia, A company owned by our dear brother Sharqi Al Sharqi “Abu Rashid” and also for ElGendy “AbuOmar”, the company was the sister to Mazeed in this part of the continent, and it had a major role in the success of Mazeed, of course.
Splitting
Indeed, we had a retrospective meeting thinking about the issues we had with our previous trial and product, on the findings, we started redeveloping M-Greetings in a parallel track and separated it into two applications and platforms, the 1st application and product was Your-SMS.net, a web-based SMS texting platform that uses a modern web-interface, unlike the applications that were available in the market at this time, especially supporting Arabic and RTL, the second product was InstaCards, a digital publishing platform that uses our updated Online-Designer-Tool to allows users to use readymade templates and elements or start from scratch to create customized cards and designs suitable for occasions and social networks.
During this period, one of the partners separated himself to open another company working in the field of construction and real estate and remained on a board as a founder.
Struggling for the second time!
Our plan to go-to-market for those products was not that effective, I felt that the market is really saturated for SMS Product and providers with their limitation at the local country, we were in a need for a true financial stability and a cashflow, so we had to receive projects of different types, of course, the usual thing happens in start-up and small companies. We had to accept projects like Zain-Tawseel “an online e-shopping web application and mobile App”, we had to many struggles delivering this project at the deadline and hardly success, but that hard time we had completely changed our vision and strategy.
On the other side we had a very good success stories and projects we done with well known firms at KSA like Tamkeen and HRDF, and we supported many projects like Musaned and Ajeer and others.
During this period, and based on the agreement with @AbuOmar, one of the work partners and a true friend joined our team and family, whose name I would like to mention here, Ayman Syam. He was a trusted partner and multi-tasker who helped us playing many roles and tasks, and he has a credit after God in things that I cannot even list.
Saudization problem
We totally understand and respect that every country have the right to put a vision and utilize their people and specifically the youth, of course any change of the market would affect our business, the issue started suddenly and inappropriately for us, an important part of the company’s revenues and income depended on the outsource and the body-shopping business lines, when the Kingdom started support the Saudization and putting rules for having foreigners’ and their headcounts , the restrictions on our colleagues and employees became more and more, many of them were laid off back to our office in the Kingdom, which added more burdens on the company (DataStars/Mazeed). The company tried to absorb but it was too hard, so the company gave the employees the freedom to search for alternatives with most of the support and all of them almost were able to find a good company to move to.
A new hope, Mandate and Vision Support Solutions.
An accepted tender compliance with one of the ideas we had before, we had to consult a 3rd party expert as we were out of resources already, we worked with Techno-Management on this project first, it was a great kickoff, then we completed the project on our own. we made couple of partnerships at this time related to strategies, data and analytics, MicroStrategy, one of them was with INCORTA, we was an early birds users, we was the first middle-east license and we had a mutual and healthy sharing with each other discussing the Arabic and RTL Support of the platform, we’ve sponsored a GCC Statistical Forum Event at 2017 for Analytics with DevStat.
Was working with consultants agencies working with us in the analysis and validating the direction like Detcon, we were consulting other success partners like Efeso and there was great competition from big companies like PWC.
Strategy Performance On-time Tracker AKA. (SPOT.),
our project was for a big client like the Ministry of Economic & Planning and under the management of HE. Mr. Khaled Al-Shounifi, and our conversation was always fruitful with him, I found him personally interested and knowledgeable of user experience design, the thing that helped us develop with a better vision and confidence from both sides, the project manager, Mr. Hamad Al-Wahaibi was working as an evangelist project manager and even as systems analyst often, the idea of the business and the workflow was completely in his thought and mind, he was personally following up with the project development progress periodically with his management staff.
The GPM, Strategic Management Products
The CommandCenter and the SPOT were the seeds lead for that Product, this is started at the MOE and the inspiration made by El-Gendy based on his study, both from the sustainable developed goals and the direction of the World Bank as well as the vision and the direction of the Suadi Arabia. Finding a modern technical solutions and application to track the development and the progress of the strategies for the benefit of people, and the productivity of the governments making it easier for leaders and decision makers to visualize and take the right strategic actions. The result was these smart products that I believe It has a brilliant future if development continued as planned and with the support of the governments.
Committee and meeting management products
Do you feel that the name and the idea are replicated? but when we made our competitor analysis, we found that we are distinguished in many points, including the integration with our products, our Arabic and RTL support, the integration with government systems, those are part of our value proposition.
Read more about Mazeed and the products on the website www.mazeed.co