Startup Arabia: Untold Stories Featuring Instabug

A new book, Startup Arabia, tells "the untold stories of the high-tech entrepreneurs in the Middle East who are creating one of the most vibrant and fertile tech hubs in the world today."

Written by Amir Hegazi, Co-founder of intoMENA Group and lifelong entrepreneur, the book features 22 interviews with the Arab World's leading startup founders, including Instabug's Omar Gabr. The book is available from Amazon.

Startup Arabia documents the life stories of these founders and their businesses in 20-page chapters, sharing some of their most important lessons learned and the events behind them. Hegazi hopes the book will inspire the millions of talented and resilient youth in the region, hungry to make an impact, to pursue entrepreneurship.

I hope they will think, act, and live up to their dreams. There is hidden power in such pursuit. Whenever you set out pursuing a dream (or for many, searching for a dream), you’re already a success. Failure stems only from inaction. I encourage you to go after your personal dream and follow an entrepreneurial path. You owe it yourself to tap the best from within you and never hold back.
-Amir Hegazi, Startup Arabia

The stories in the book offer diverse and exceptional examples of what pursuing a dream can look like, including those of Mai Medhat, Co-founder and CEO of Eventtus, Mudassir Sheikha, Co-founder and CEO of Careem, Idriss Al Rifai, Founder and CEO of Fetchr, and Mona Ataya, Founder and CEO of Mumzworld.

Among the entrepreneurs Hegazi interviewed for the book, he found that all of them shared similar traits:

Trait #1: It was never just about the money.
Trait #2: They combine idealism with pragmatism.
Trait #3: When others might quit, they double down.
-Amir Hegazi, Startup Arabia

Instabug's chapter begins from the earliest days of Omar Gabr's childhood fascination with building things, to the events that led up to the creation of Instabug's flagship bug reporting and user feedback product.

During our last semester in college,  Moataz and I were just experimenting with iOS, and we started building a basic mobile app. It was a social and geolocation-oriented app. In spite of this being our first time around the track building an app of any kind, we had quite high aspirations for it. We literally thought we would launch and get millions of users the next day (laughs). Then, right before launching it, we decided maybe it would be a good idea to just send it out to a few of our friends and get their feedback. We figured it wouldn’t hurt to see what they said regarding design, usability, functionality, and overall potential before we release.
-Omar Gabr, Startup Arabia

The chapter continues with some of the challenges Gabr and Moataz Soliman, Instabug Co-founder and CTO, faced as an Egyptian startup knocking on Silicon Valley's door.

We worked so hard to prepare for this event. We were going to be on stage in one of the biggest mobile events in the world, drawing the best of the best in the industry. We were ready to showcase our product with all the new features we had been tirelessly working on. There was press there, investors there and industry experts. This was the place we needed to be at this moment in time, and we had our invitation and were literally ready to go. It was heartbreaking. It was one of those moments where you feel life is unfair. We did everything right. We worked extremely hard. So why should events in the country outside our control affect the progress and future of the company?
-Omar Gabr, Startup Arabia

Gabr also shares how Instabug was able to overcome these hurdles and the lessons learned from them that now form the foundation for some of the company's core values.

Today, we have mega companies that are using the product, including some of the top companies in the world. We have a solid team that I’m extremely proud of, a team that I learn from every single day. We have wonderful investors. We are well-funded. We are growing on all fronts and continue to live according to our core values, making things happen every day.
-Omar Gabr, Startup Arabia

‍

‍