In the coming months, Executive is seeking to highlight exciting entrepreneurs from Lebanon and across the Arab world. Every Thursday we will introduce our audience to one of the new generation of exciting talents to learn how they are seeking to change the Middle East.
Company: Qabila
Country: Egypt
Industry: Media
Founder: Perihan Abou Zeid
Age: 28
Established in: 2010
Number of employees: 21
Revenues last year: $215,000 in 2012
Capital raised: Currently seeking a deal to raise $300,000-400,000
Awards: Best female entrepreneur — 2012 MIT Enterprise Forum. Selected among top five startups in Africa by Demo Africa and among the top 50 startups globally by Global Entrepreneurship Week.
Perihan abou-Zeid’s parents were not entrepreneurs, but she was always going to be one. She recalls how, growing up in Egypt, she first started trying to make money at the age of six by drawing stories and trying to convince her cousins to buy them. By the age of 12 she had moved on to bigger markets.
“I started creating bracelets with threads that you can write a person’s name on and selling them to my friends. I made a fortune off of that — I made close to $2,000,” she says. With that kind of natural talent for turning ideas into profit, Zeid was perhaps destined for success.
Perihan Abou-Zeid is Qabila’s Chief Executive Officer
Yet it was not for over a decade, and after a degree in business at the American University of Cairo, that her entrepreneurial drive would be put to good use, helping spur on the Egyptian revolution. In 2010, 25-year-old Zeid was feeling rather despondent about the state of Egypt’s politics. “It was a depressing year: corruption had skyrocketed [and] forged elections gave the ruling party 99 percent or something. So the youth was very frustrated and the media reflected something completely different from the reality,” she says. “66 percent [of people] are under the age of 35 in Egypt and for us it was just wrong [that content didn’t appeal to them] and we thought of doing videos that could change that.”
So Zeid and her friends (the company started more as a collective) formed Qabila, beginning by making a series of videos explaining Arabic proverbs, which she, perhaps modestly, now describes as “really bad.” They were finished but got little attention, with the group somewhat disappointed in their efforts – the threat of failure loomed.
Related article: EKeif seeking to dominate Arabic content online
But then fate intervened. Just weeks later North Africa was gripped by revolutionary fervor that would eventually bring down Egypt’s dictatorial president Hosni Mubarak. Qabila (which means tribe in Arabic) again sprang into life, creating a spate of videos — including the series that shot them into the limelight: the beginner’s guides to politics.
Using deliberately non-technical terms, the videos were hugely popular with a people making their first steps towards democracy. They went viral online, and within a few months, “the Supreme Judicial Council for Parliamentary Elections knocked on our door asking to produce a campaign encouraging people to vote,” Zeid recalls. “From that point onwards we registered as a company and basically made profits from our first year of operations.”
The company now has contracts in eight different countries supplying video content for both the traditional media — such as Al Jazeera — and online campaigns. Crucially, Qabila has continued to successfully straddle the line between online and offline — using the former to increase their popularity and the latter to increase revenue. They have also continued with an unusual crowdsourcing method of content production, with over 2,000 people having been involved in production in two years.
“The typical way of creating media is the company creates a pilot episode of production and go to TV channels to sell it. We did the complete opposite,” Zeid explains. “We realized that the rightful owner of the power of evaluation and selection of what content should go public is the audience, not the money or the owners or the big channels.” Thus videos would be tested and discussed online, with traditional media sometimes buying it after it went viral.
This innovative method of creating content has seen the company win a slew of awards, including Zeid herself being selected as the best female entrepreneur in the Middle East at the 2012 MIT Enterprise Forum.
And there is little chance of Qabila slowing down. Zeid says that television channels are beginning to catch up as they realize the future is digital, and thus the company has major plans to expand to keep ahead of the competition. Among recent innovations is a pan-Arab film contest with the aim of improving the talent pool of filmmakers in the Middle East, while they are also launching an academy to turn high-level amateurs into media professionals.
And they have set themselves one very optimistic target for an independent film company. “By our fifth year of operation we want to get into production of feature films, that is why we need more talent,” Zeid says. With plans to raise their first round of capital in the coming months and thus open offices in the Gulf, the company seems to be successfully positioning itself at the front of a booming industry.
