Ramy Assaf, Zbooni CEO and co-founder speaks to My Startup World about how Zbooni enables customers embrace cCommerce.

Introduce Zbooni for our readers.
Zbooni is a business solutions platform that helps convert customer interactions into transactions. We help businesses unlock sales through real-time conversations with customers on social and messaging apps. This sector is called cCommerce and is the next generation of commerce, moving beyond eCommerce. Put simply, we help businesses engage with their customers to sell more effectively.

What was your inspiration behind initiating Zbooni?
It was a real business need, as my wife had started a business selling customized hats. She wanted a way to sell easily via Instagram. What resulted was the founding of Zbooni, which started as a way to help manage payments, but has since developed into digital storefronts, data insights and mobile invoicing, to full business and commerce solutions.

What were the initial roadblocks and how did you overcome them?
When we started out, we had a great idea, but needed to understand how we could take it to market. Two important things happened in those early days which has geared us towards success. The first was being incubated at Facebook where we spent six months in California developing and honing our product and being able to tap into some of the smartest minds in tech. The other was being able to draw upon strength of my co-founders. I am lucky to work with people who have a wealth of experience and business acumen to tap into. Ashraf Atia, who serves as our COO for example, has an unwavering commitment to our customers and even though we have a whole team to handle customer sales and enquiries, he still makes it a point to connect with at least four different merchants every single day to understand their business and how we can shape Zbooni to help them.

Your comments on the recent Series A funding and how are you planning to utilize them?
Firstly, we are growing the team. Bringing in the right people makes or breaks the business. We recently did a workshop bringing all our teams from around the region and realized that the last time we did this (around 18 months ago) we just needed three tables for everyone to sit around. Now, we are over 40 people – and take up a lot more space! It’s very humbling to see that we can support and employ such a talented group of people.

Secondly, that growth includes expansion into other markets – our next phase is Egypt and we are putting the finishing touches to our new office in Cairo. That will be an important step in our journey as we head into 2022.

Finally, product development is essential to our success. We are looking to introduce updates to the product in line with the demand and our next year is filled with new roll-outs. As a tech company, we always look to achieve product-led growth, as opposed to relying on solely marketing or sales to achieve growth targets. Our technology teams and product teams are never settling and always looking to do more for our customer base.

How does your payment solution power the small businesses in particular?
It’s important to distinguish that we don’t quite consider ourselves as a ‘payments company’ – we are here to provide the tools to enable commerce over new channels. We build software, we design workflows, and develop products that enable businesses to stay on top of their customers while converting more sales. As a result, we provide a solution within our app that let’s small businesses overcome the complexity of dealing with payments. We provide a solution for that and remove the bottlenecks they face.

Essentially, we enable businesses to capture higher sales revenues and convert far higher percentages of customer interactions through the power of human conversation. Our platform leverages years of experience and technology development to enable businesses with the tools they need to sell more online and on social channels.

Where do you see Zbooni in the next 2-3 years and what are the new exciting additions expected?
Zbooni is the first business to expand into cCommerce in the region. Our vision is to empower this next generation of commerce.

What advice would you offer to the young budding entrepreneurs?
It’s easy to make excuses not to start something, but until you take that first step you won’t know how great your ideas could be. Zbooni can help you get started in a matter of minutes and our team is always available for a friendly chat if you need a helping hand.