17. Jawaker's path to $205M w/ Waleed Tuffaha

Speaker A: Ahla Sahlafikum Pahal Ashdida Minbarna Mij let's talk product. Uh. Abril wakt. Let's talk product.

Speaker B: Thank you all. I'm happy to be here.

Speaker A: Um uh has been acquired uh will be meeting million US dollar. Uh um.

Speaker B: Uh. Pretty much um within Jawakira uh like a local ISP industry like a potential that it has. But then I had a friend uh silantai4 who actually was one of the like um initial engineers and he invited me to join the team Uminhunak Balashit my career basically uh as a full stack uh Ruby on Rails software developer Omin Hunak as the team grew Okiber especially um my roles are actor like managing a technical team, managing a product team. Uh like as Joaquin grew uh like as a team we grew with the company basically. Kind of like Jawakir Bilash as an internal project. Uh correctly ah actual tassis that happened when we received like first round of funding uh first and only round of funding that we had at that time.

Speaker A: Yeah uh, You were there from the early early days.

Speaker B: Pretty much yes.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: Uh can very basic. That's usually our approach because we like mbelesh be the most basic thing we can do and that for us was basically turn neighbor tricks. The initial website canvas it uh had a way for you to sign up um but then you can create a room or uh you can invite your friends. Oh already Mojudin online you were able Tomibutrex at that time.

Speaker A: Okay. Hello.

Speaker B: Uh I would say uh um but initially like friends and family website. Even that initial core uh players that we had uh website it was actually very diverse. That's a reflection players uh board games. Like everyone plays these games. NASA, Zohar, Nasikapar males, females, everyone, everyone plays these games. But as we grew as we added more games, more geographies, Arabic Diaspora um uh that was kind of the main change as we grew

Speaker A: uh. Early adopters um m. They were also on Jawakir from the start. It must have been a simple product, easy to use.

Speaker B: It was yeah indefinitely. Um already the interface that we do is usually simple. Uh plus uh. Uh uh. Uh Onboarding new players, no.

Speaker A: 1. Private rooms, Word of mouth.

Speaker B: Um I think the active factor like private rooms definitely. Uh. Um even like we, we go and create a room. Uh I had a public game uh they can join it basically ok.

Speaker A: Um. Different groups of people. Relaxed um was such a success to incorporate social elements. Ah.

Speaker B: Um uh. That's why it kind of like grew by Demand many players. Uh examples features social uh like cool little social features. Private chat, public chat chat game essential and novel experience about Jawaka specifically one example can voice chat. Now that was a feature. Like a paid feature as you know like pandemic uh uh like lockdowns. We decided to make that feature like free for everyone. Uh that was like uh. You know we made it completely free. Ah that had a big like word of mouth effect a lot of Sabana. Uh uh it was a big factor that we grew substantially. Lockdowns build social features Ashftiyo Madol emo emojis uh which are like animated emotional uh expression that you can use. And uh. We have it as a way for players to express themselves. It's an easy way. You can easily go and express yourself using emojis to give like a localized expression. The different countries basically.

Speaker A: Uh. It was such a nice experience. Was in um. His avatar M. It was. And you took that experience um in offline Elements Incorporated. The company got acquired. Uh you only had one round of uh investment of financing and it can't precede. Since you were there. Um. Um.

Speaker B: Uh yeah we had our first uh. First and only uh round of funding. Admin 24:54 b I would say can um kind of slow uh team size like Jawakara mainly like two to three people. I would say full time.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: Around al I would say okay. We started working our MVP mobile app.

Speaker A: Okay

Speaker B: like that MVP kind of tier basic. Like we best released hand autonomy uh Android um or iOS. What we saw mobile uh app we saw like really good traction and adoption. Mobile app even though it was like very basic had a design tabal app and it was designed by engineers look and like very basic design but it was very functional same mvp like you can go in, you can sign in or you can play games. But when we saw that like really good uh retention adoption and um traction al mobile app. That's when BFM hubstash We decided to shift our focus completely on mobile.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: We started. That's a way of scaling the team uh to be able to move faster on mobile app. Well that was kind of like I would say the major inflection point. From that point onwards we started seeing like growth consistent year over year. Um until recently but I would say like even before that like we were pretty uh much for most of that period profitable. We were constantly growing and that's how we saw the business. Like something that will be slow and steady but always uh growing and like uh increasing basically.

Speaker A: Raheeb it's so refreshing to see that startups will invest investments couldn't shine in fast growth to growth at all costs to they think that's the only way to build a big and successful company. But hi Jamakari and this is such a good example Keith. Calculated steps focus uh on profitability steady and slow growth. Uh. It paid off Yanni. It's uh very successful company. Uh it got acquired by a by a still front group partners that will even help grow grow the company further. And this is not the end of the journey um at all. Um did you marketing spending was it all organic throughout the years?

Speaker B: Pretty much uh organic.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: Uh towards like Alfeino maybe I would say uh we started shuai experimenting with performance marketing.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: Uh but compared to what Matana what we're doing currently it was pretty much nothing. Uh and that was our philosophy. Like we always saw and know like we believed in doing marketing M by building great products. Uh that was like a big reason. The other reason was also like we we didn't have that experience of doing performance marketing. We kind of like um. Uh the mentality what we know to do is actually building products and trying to build great products and let the product speak for itself.

Speaker A: You're relying on word of mouth if it's good enough.

Speaker B: Exactly. Again how the issue I would say like different from one company to another. That's very social gaming. That M for us was a good fit.

Speaker A: Word of mouth is strong. It pays off. She launched mobile uh faster growth. Um I'm sure Covid 2020 Mahat grease of your voice feature in another growth

Speaker B: yeah and Hillel lockdowns As you can imagine in normal gaming sector uh entertainment sector is uh like a big boom in traffic that basically um. I think some companies some industries were able to maintain it. We were lucky we were some of these um companies uh and that kind of accelerated that growth trajectory

Speaker A: to grow the team steadily with the profit that's coming in. You hire new people based on the budget that you had. Is that how it worked?

Speaker B: It wasn't kind of directly related to budget. I would say it was more um like we have a very conservative mentality in hiring people were very cautious in short culture plus our industry build gaming industry. Uh it's hard to find experienced people um aboriginal uh for our approach kind of actor like we. We look for smart people especially as a kind of like fresh or like junior people and we heavily invest in. In uh whoever joins our team to grow. But kind of like our limitation was actually in. In finding good talent and uh, training that talent and nurturing that talent versus you know, limited by budget I would say.

Speaker A: Okay Rahib. Hire slow and fire fast.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: Employee satisfaction, retention, it's really high in terms of employee development or progression. The fact that you've been there for all this time, you're incentivizing talent to stay. Um, I'm sure there is good also options. Um, it keeps talent committed to the company. Um, in total. Okay. Product to tech.

Speaker B: I would say roughly. Uh, product to tech. Kind uh, of like support functions like customer support, uh, multimedia design, live operations and um, HR and stuff like that.

Speaker A: Okay. Rahib Rajad. It's purely a product and a product led company.

Speaker B: Exactly. We're a heavy engineering and um, product oriented company.

Speaker A: Okay Rahib, uh, you work on product development process. Um right now what does your product development process look like?

Speaker B: Uh, uh diamond had to experiment with different things. Uh, what's working, what's not working. We research what other companies do and we try to like adopt what, what we feel might work in Jack. What we currently have is a system, uh base camp if you know that company. And we work in what they call cycles. So uh, a cycle is usually the Sitla uh Saba Asabiyya and it's split into two sprints and um, between, between each between like cycles we have um, in some cooldown usually of um where we kind of like it's a change of pace direct Zee mechanic Abel Khilali cycle. We use this time to flush out plus you know a team can catch up on research on like reading their learning objectives. Uh we sometimes do like hackathons or game jams cooldowns. Uh like it's kind of a change of mission to build next uh, cycle of work.

Speaker A: Wow, this is actually so interesting and impressive. Uh push for production with the act that features his strong focus on release. Release. Release.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that and it follows our mentality. You know Jawaka for us was always like uh, we were never like building Joaquin to sell. It was a long term company that we see always going on. We always believe Joaquin has like potential. And um, we're building this for the long term for we're not. We always like want to keep the team kind of like uh, we want to avoid burnout basically. Like Mabinay has a team. You know, it's all about us uh, like, like uh, releasing features and games and stuff like that without uh, without investing the team itself, giving them enough time to refresh and all of that.

Speaker A: This must be so empowering. The team members know I hope so. I'm sure the fact that this is how you also help in in them developing M is time for you to learn. You learn new things, get to speed with what's advancement. Definitely it actually like went back and changed your product. You introduced new stuff based on that

Speaker B: actually like every improvement. Uh uh build product the way we build stuff, the way we test stuff, the way we design the art of the game Kulshi we do is actually a reflection of Hadanam okay. Uh experience in building games actually uh for us like hiring remotely. Uh it's hard to start like having a remote team when you're starting with SARV today. That's why we always saw the like the only option for us to grow and to become bigger as a company is actually for the team itself to grow and become more talented, more like and more skilled to invest in the company.

Speaker A: Basically. Okay. Amazing music to my ears.

Speaker B: Maybe another thing worth mentioning Bardo as a reflection of that they want to like you know doing cycles and I'll cool down. The way we decide in what to work on is what uh we call like pitches. You know anyone in the company from from the product team from the customer support. Like anyone can submit a pitch which is like a feature or improvement or a game or a change. Like Aishi um

Speaker A: okay.

Speaker B: We have discussions with the team of what's priority, what's urgent. Uh um engineering project. Like it's not always product okay. Like uh we always push the team the engineering team and the like our team uh to push in the other direction like we shall make them product product product like technical cleanup, technical debt cleanup uh art kind of cleanups uh.

Speaker A: Are neglected. On the same topic of customers. What are your channels of talking to customers their comments um Fiona multiple channels.

Speaker B: Um fiana like a support platform and um we have a customer support team that uh basically uh handles collateral tickets and issues and complaints. But like currently with social media and what's happening find aktir other channels like social media is one channel uh reviews Alplay stores uh al app store Play store is another channel. Uh and inside the app inside Jawaka uh uh we have a uh way for players like to submit uh feedback directly that we receive by email and Kulhudol channels are regularly kind of uh reviewed by Mushpa Seal customer support. Like even our uh product managers they filter them especially for new features. Uh our quality assurance team Bimshu Ali home to make sure any bugs Russia uh that we need to be aware of and ah we always try to like Have a good uh understanding of Shu Akbar Shakilna uh Shu Akhtar features that are being requested. Shu Akhtar games that are being requested. Again these usually either are mapped uh a pitch that will be included in upcoming cycles. Oh too small like tasks. Our tickets that we try to always include in the like day to day work of teams. Exactly. Exactly.

Speaker A: Okay Rahib. Uh I went through reviews on um on Apple uh store. With very small requests here and there or ashokambit to see or tele game or maybe I'm assuming like millions of users at this stage. Um how do you prioritize requests? A lot of people are playing. You want to um show them that you care about your customers for um fi and confirm frameworks for prioritizing feature requests.

Speaker B: Um as I mentioned uh we have had pitches that anyone can submit actually we always try to look at everything and um evaluate it from initial impact about high improvement change, business side of things, engagement and retention side of things, our monetization side of things. Plus we include other factors like uh you know a dish project would be actually fun to work on especially like engineering oriented projects um impact but still we want to work on them. It's a fun engineering project but we try to evaluate collateral factors and decide like we always have a discussion with the team to decide and know uh what's important, what's not important. And we push everyone in the team to be vocal like you know the way customer support and the way a a product manager or engineer. Uh uh we're always trying to push the team and no guys if you think something is important keep nagging. Uh like you know to to keep everyone aware. You know like we should try to solve it.

Speaker A: I absolutely love this. Rush to release rush to to grow next month. Um it could be to be very honest because you never had vcs any vcs. It's all about the returns with the growth. If you had the pressure you don't have that at least invested in the hamakum very early on. It's quite a long time ago. Um. It seems like a very comfortable culture.

Speaker B: Exactly. I think we've been, we've been lucky in that regard. Uh definitely not having like more VCs that would be like uh pushing you for faster growth and stuff like that. Can can applause maybe it's also a negative. Like maybe if we had someone pushing us like uh it's not always as a pure plus like with the Khada to push you mission uh what were kind of aware of like mission we have Full control of what to do. Uh the pace we want to have. Um to make sure we're not kind of taking it right too easy or too slow. But it becomes more of like an internal discipline that we try to have on ourselves or call it team.

Speaker A: That's so true.

Speaker B: Which is one of our cultural values. Like, like discipline, autonomy. Like you know uh people should feel that urgency.

Speaker A: That's so true. Since that external pressure is removed. M founders with leaders, top management. I know Muhammad have always had this um this is kind of what keeps the company growing. External pressure too slow, you're still growing healthy in a healthy rate. Um

Speaker B: definitely.

Speaker A: So so true. Um one thing we forgot, forgot to mention. What are the revenue streams?

Speaker B: Uh I would say standard. Um part of that revenue stream is ads. Um uh but we try to minimize that so it's a bad experience to our players. The other one is like we have a currency that uh inside the game which is a standard way of how games um monetize. Uh we have a currency and you can use that currency to buy premium features. You will game. Uh we have a premium subscription. It's Amabasha that gives you faster leveling up more experience points. Uh we have had all self expression items the emotes the custom towel that you can use to customize your experience in Wajawa care. Uh we have come out like semihome live operations modules which is kind of like events that we do on weekly basis. And um uh players can buy extra live jihuhadol events to play more.

Speaker A: Okay amazing going back give a team structured 50% of product and engineering. How how are they structured?

Speaker B: Uh so Eliana kind of uh we we build things around like product teams. A product team is a uh cross functional team that is as much as possible autonomous external factors like a product owner. Uh FIO QA engineer. FIO a backend engineer for the engineer Anna uh UX UI uh designer this way cool team with the Rishtael in an autonomous way. Like share the resources between multiple teams. Uh currently we have three product teams. The main teams behind the local Hadoo ideas and pitches that we generate for cycles. But then we have two other teams technically uh like QA work on clear on automation and uh building uh like our testing infrastructure in parallel to the product work. We have what we call uh an SRE team which is a site reliability engineering team which they monitor infrastructure Tibana. Uh they make sure everything is running uh like everything is uh basically in order to. And we have another team that again works across KUDI product teams uh which is the data team that does analysis machine learning and um all of that like data.

Speaker A: Okay okay. Everything that has happened in the past. What's next for Jawakir Especially after the acquisition Yani and partnership with the Stillfund

Speaker B: uh I think we still have a long way to go like uh both in. In serving our existing market uh and we always like see potential in venturing into new markets our new uh like new genres of games that we can. We feel could be relevant to our traffic uh uh like of how to run a company how to run teams how to do product with. We believe we can be still like uh with the Silphone acquisition specifically um. Um kind of like um manding that experience that community of game developers are part of that network uh suddenly big exposure uh in that like long term mentality sustainable growth mentality. Canada us Europe uh India uh uh having collateral collaborations even but purely discussions how they do things how they build features. We believe that will uh our growth and learning opportunities.

Speaker A: You still have the independence in a way on your own.

Speaker B: That's a model that uh. That works basically

Speaker A: your customers. You don't want to lose that.

Speaker B: Exactly exactly.

Speaker A: Since you've been there from day one. Main factors top elements

Speaker B: I think that's not easy to answer but um a big factor can had a long term thinking that we uh always had um as uh a motilec like we never built Jawakir for an exit uh mission frankly Come on like we never thought an exit especially Belgium and that would be possible uh but sport Lumpshan we uh frankly like working in Joaquin like it's a. It's an interesting business. It's an interesting idea. It's interesting technically and from an engineering point of view. Uh and that's why we build it in a way where we want to have a team where we actually enjoy working with where everyone is actually enjoys working in that environment and they are growing and learning. So and the other big thing uh maybe um. Were conservative and careful uh uh for that's why that was kind of like maybe a limiting factor in our growth um mushl financial side I would say some examples on that that. Uh can have us responsible freedom like we're not looking for people. You see it reflected the way we do things. We don't have like work hours we don't maintain. We trust now uh are here to work to give value and to grow Earth selling uh which again I think doesn't fit unfortunately but saying uh that that is what we filter for another Example. Uh. Uh whenever you're joining. But it becomes easy for people to stagnate tell them what they need to learn to do to grow. I think that's a challenge that we try to always uh solve like we always push people like we have quarterly okrs, objectives lives uh

Speaker A: oh wow.

Speaker B: And for us that is important. We shall like you know what we want to see in. Part of that uh uh uh conferences, our workshops M m that uh. And to bring that type of mentality that type of uh like seriousness about work and work ethics back. Uh another example uh the motorical mathematical engineering and being uh what we call like producers. Like we don't just want to be consumers of technology. We always aim to command to build stuff to experiment with new stuff to like be a uh true engineering company that is actually investing in. In technology and engineer.

Speaker A: This is so inspiring. No it's it's so you touch up on so many important points. You want to build a place to to retain talent. Uh and and I understand focus on hiring culture fit. Uh it's such a healthy culture and and you invest so much in everyone to mishbas progression or development. Oh it's a very nice place to be. It's a family but his in the actual definition of culture you know. Definitely you don't want to bring anyone in on that Hashan unfortunately some people abuse this abuse the system or when you have one or two toxic people it does impact the overall culture. Higher slow and fire fast is really I think key for every. For every startup before you even know that you need to hire you need to constantly be hiring Ashan to meet people vacancy you bring them on.

Speaker B: Our mentality is actually uh you know uh we're always hiring any uh basically isn't like Hada who's who's smart who's talented. Even if we don't have an opening we'll create an opening for that person. Like it's not a need based kind of hiring. Any damn need for for hiring a man. A limit on hiring is more than anti talented people.

Speaker A: Amazing. Um this was really such a valuable discussion.

Speaker B: Thank you Lynn. Thank you.