Bey2ollak

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What they do and how they do it?

That idea itself is simple but in the same time it helps in solving a major cause of frustration to people but the It most impressive is how they were able to build up the team and managed building the blackberry application in only three month period even they didn’t know how code blackberry applications. And how they got sponsored from Egypt’s leading telecom company Vodafone in the first week of lunching. The lunching day of the application had a little more than five thousand users downloaded and registered into the application database, this successful launch is far away from being by luck this success came from planning and taking every detail into consideration from a creative unique user interface to a very user friendly system.bey2ollak is simply a An ios, android app that provides live user-generated reports of traffic conditions on the streets of Cairo (Groth, 2011).

bey2ollak itself without the user would not exist as it totally countable on people being active and share their information through the application, Gamal El-Din Sadek co-founder said “We operate on a trust based network with our users and we have the means to evaluate contributions based on the personal information or profile of the user who reported to us”. “When he registered how many times he shared information, how many times he viewed the application. According to that, we rank the users” from “unsure” to “top reporter”. If wrong information has been shared, we can take various measures from warning to blocking a user from reporting” (Farid, 2013).

Success factors

It all has been said from where the idea came from until it developed to be a successful award winning application and company. But what is the main reason this company is still running efficiently for almost six years now, and what makes them stand out so much that companies such Pepsi and Vodafone are interested to sponsor the company, and company such as shell to advertise its name all over the application.

- They fulfilled a need

Sure the idea of people talking about the traffic and warning each other about which road is blocked and which is running is not that genuine idea, people used social media and other Smartphone applications such as whatsapp to complain about the frustration caused by the traffic in everyday routine as well as warning each other about which road to be careful about. But such information was not an information taken on daily bases or at the time where traffic is actually shocking, people would probably read such information on facebook while they are at home not when heading to someplace, so what did really put bey2ollak on the map is that they offered the people a platform where people is reporting every day and every hour reports about the roads of Cairo all in one place and the coverage of almost every main road in Cairo. for example if you are heading to “tagamo3” from “monieb” you probably take the ring road but to make sure that the ring road is clear you only need to open bey2ollak and choose “monieb” to “tagamo” and their you will see lots and lots of people reporting about the traffic at different times in the day so you just need to see when is the last update is made and if it says green you would probably go using ring road but if the last update which would be maximum 30 minutes ago is red which means not good at all so you would look for another path to go to tagamo.

- Creativity and using existing resources

Gamal El-Din Sadek (co-founder) said “We knew from the first day who exactly was our target market, we wanted the internet users who are online 24/7 posting and tweeting about their daily life. So, we decided to launch virally through our friends, and told them to change their profile pictures to Bey2ollak’s logo and to send BBM and Whatsapp broadcasts to their friends telling them about the application” (Ledner, 2011).The founders knew what they want and used what they have in hand they didn’t count of a thousands and thousands of dollars advertisement, instead they counted on friends and the idea of word of mouth but what really made the idea expandable is the creativity and the way they integrated and implemented the platform, now a days and specially in Egypt we have our own way of chatting through social media it is not a new language but it is a mix of English and Arabic it is called franco-arab, which widely used among all ages. They also chose the language of the application to be the friendly franco-arab language which is spoken by all the youth, adding a sense of humor to the names of our features from “7alawa” which indicates that the road is perfect, to “mafeesh amal” which indicates that the traffic is very bad. They didn’t stop there, they co adapted with the country need for example when the 25th January evolution stroked in Egypt they started reporting about the blocked roads and added more functions like “Khatar” to warn people about roads where a danger is spotted, and “El7a2ny” which was added to make it easy to find the phone numbers of Emergency and Police and so on. Also When Egypt was facing the fuel crisis, they thought of adding a feature about it. It worked well and users started reporting about which fuel stations to go to at what time and during the elections time, they did something similar about the polling stations. Such adaptation to the changes with innovating ideas help in keeping the application fresh and more fun to use, and that what keep any user to reopen the application is that the user expect to see something new every time he/she clicks that icon.

- They had what it takes.

What makes a startup fail? There are a lot of reasons that a startup business could fail but bey2ollak team had it all covered and managed. First of all the market risk. Market risks refer to whether or not there is sufficient demand for what you have to offer at the price you set. Many inventors have died penniless, clinging to the belief that the market would beat a path to his door if he designed the better mousetrap (Hirai, 2010). Feedback from friends, surveys of potential customers, focus group testing, and beta testing are all useful techniques for helping to gauge market acceptance, and what the founders exactly did after making sure that the service they offer is needed they started to see in what shape the potential customer would like to see the service in .co-founder said “We decided to make an online survey, which showed a big appeal to the mobile application idea.”. Another thing is the risk that the team chosen is the right one or