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Growth
Road to Growth
How a MENA last-mile delivery company drove success in a country with no postal codes b y YA S M I N E A B D E L K A R I M a n d K H A S H AYA R M A H D AV I
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emand for last-mile delivery is predicted to grow 78% globally by 2030, and emerging markets are at the front of the line to offer the service. But they also face some of the biggest obstacles. In our home country of Egypt, we launched our startup, Yalla Fel Sekka (YFS), in 2020, seeking to transform last-mile delivery for businesses there. Along the way, we’ve had to deal with economic instability, local competition for talent, and the fact that Egypt doesn’t have postal codes. But emerging market entrepreneurs are known for their perseverance, and we overcame those issues. We now deliver 10,000 orders per day, and we became gross margin positive just 18 months after setting up. We did so by responding to difficulties with creative solutions that have helped our company be more resilient and plant roots in a booming industry.
80 / E N T R E P R E N E U R . C O M / June 2022
Being an entrepreneur in any location has its unique hurdles, but we as emerging market entrepreneurs pride ourselves on our innovative responses, that not only serve us, but also lay down a more solid foundation for other startups looking to enter the ecosystem. Here’s a primer on four of the challenges we hit in Egypt- and, perhaps more importantly, how we got past them: 1/ COMPETING WITH OTHER ECOSYSTEMS FOR TALENT Getting a company up and running in Egypt is relatively straightforward. The country ranked number one for foreign direct investment in the Africa region in 2021, and nearly 20% of all active tech startups on the continent are based here. Swvl emerged in Egypt and is now listed in Nasdaq, Fawry is the country’s first unicorn, and Egyptian startups like Brimore and Homzmart have garnered significant buzz.
There are also a number of local venture capitalists and accelerators here that have been actively building a landscape to support small businesses. Most of the funding is private, and it includes local corporate investors who participate in seed rounds. Just earlier this year, three of Egypt’s biggest banks launched a US$85 million fund for fintech startups. On top of that, Egypt has a multilingual talent pool that is highly educated and highly skilled in tech work. The problem, however, is that the caliber of workers means many people want to start their own business or earn higher salaries by moving to Silicon Valley or Dubai. At YFS, we handled that possibility with a small and agile business strategy. Before we fundraised, we took care to keep our team small. Rather than spending huge amounts to bring people on board at the beginning, we centered on proving our concept. Once we did that and began raising
