Follow A Female Founder: Amanda Sabri

Hafta, Hafta, Hafta; you Hafta download it! Hafta takes you one step closer to answering all your burning questions about people. It coherently organises the world’s psychometric data and then makes it obtainable for all; psychometric data-as-a-service (DaaS). Learn more about the genius Female Founder behind it all; Amanda Sabri.

Amanda Sabri
Hafta (https://www.hafta.co/)
Industry: Big data & analytics
Revenue Model: Hafta sells to Enterprise users, who use psychometric data to make risk assessments on individuals who are unbanked or underbanked. Hafta charges a monthly platform fee, with an additional API call charge per report.
3 year plan: Hafta will be the biggest psychometric data repository in Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia by 2020. Our end users will be able to use their psychometric data to get access to credit, business loans and job opportunities.
How does your business fit into the future of your industry?
We are ahead of the game at the moment, as one of the few psychometric evaluation platforms localised to the South East Asian market. We are serving users in emerging markets, where credit and digital profiles are generally unavailable or difficult to obtain.
Our product will remain relevant for many years to come, with a very strong pipeline of market-driven demand and a growing need for the SEA population to be profiled and made visible to businesses.
What has been your biggest insight or lesson learned about running a business?
I’ve been through MANY challenges, so I’ve learnt quite a lot of lessons. You can never stop learning.
The biggest lesson learnt to date: Hire with your mind and your heart.
Someone very dear to me said this the other day: Founders are the engine of a moving train, the team makes up the fuel that keeps it moving. I’ve learnt that hiring is as important as raising funds for a startup. In the past we overlooked the importance of giving everyone ownership of their work, today our team walks proud being able to call every bit of our product theirs. We spend hours convincing investors that we are a good bet to take, but very few of us spend the same amount of time convincing potential hires that we are a good bet to take. Get a buy in, and match their long terms goals with yours — you’ll have a killer team. Like I have with mine.
What has been your scariest moment? How did you resolve it?
As a mother of 3 year old, I would say that my scariest moment in business was when we (I am married to my co-founder, Saify) had enough money only to buy the smallest pack of diapers for her. That’s when the test of being an entrepreneur becomes real.
After obviously bawling my eyes out, we sat down and we relooked at the one thing that has kept us going. The reason why we started doing business in the first place — to positively influence the life of billions. So I turned to God, and asked for strength and patience.
We made it out, phew!
What is the one piece of advice you want to give to aspiring women entrepreneurs?
It’s not easy, It’s tiring. It’s painful. You need to have a reason, a very strong, compelling and clear reason.
Only you know your full potential, and we have a whole lot. For those of you have daughters, like me — do it so your daughter always knows that there is never a challenge to big for her.
