Chasing scholarships: from $10 to #1 online platform in arab world

Abdo Samy and Sami Al-Ahmad, co-founders of Marj3 project, shared their experience in creating online platform for searching scholarships and educational opportunities. Check out the story of young entrepreneurs and find out what it takes to launch a promising startup from scratch.

Marj3 is an online platform that allows scholarship seekers to find opportunities in the Middle East and North Africa in an easy and convenient way. Marj3 also provides a site-based consulting service.

There are more than 4,000 scholarships available through Marj3 Reference, with more than 2,5 million monthly visits. The site has also helped more than 60 applicants to obtain scholarships abroad.

Why did you go for scholarships? How did you come up with this idea?

Abdo: It was my first time to travel abroad — I had a scholarship in USA. But before I received the scholarship, I did a lot of searching and exploration about scholarships and faced many challenges, looking for the right information. Some of my friends also faced problems, related to finding information about scholarships. So I returned to Egypt with the idea of helping students to find answers to their questions. I really wanted to create something useful. Then I came up with the idea to launch a project, aimed at people, who wanted to apply for a scholarship and faced the same challenges. “Why not do it? We could have provided an information about payments, instructions on how to fill in the application and so on”, - I thought.

Sami: Before Marj3 I worked in another project, which was also an online platform, related education. I used to think that education is a problem for Syrians or refugees (I am from Syria, by the way). However, I understood that education it is a problem for the whole Arabian region. So I was thinking: “Why don`t start something bigger and help people in different countries?”. And then I found Abdo working in scholarship field and helping other people. I contacted him and organised a meeting. After some time we decided to create this platform.

Abdo: This meeting took place in December 2015, not so long ago!

Which problems have you faced when you launched the project?

Abdo: We didn`t face any problems with business registration, because we`re online. But we faced some problems with developing our project. We did a huge job cooperating with educational organisations and NGOs, monitoring activities in Egyptian universities.

Sami: I think every different stage had different challenges. Like Abdo said, legalization wasn`t the main challenge. At the first stage we had lots of competitors who has been present on the market for a long time, while our platform was unknown. So it was also a problem.

The next challenge was how to update our platform on the daily basis: creating daily content, making a really huge database that everyone can reach every hour and find the suitable opportunity. There was also a technical side of the problem: we wanted our platform to involve big number of people, so we had to understand how to facilitate the unlimited access this platform.

Abdo: Yes, we`re only three founders, so it`s very hard to update the scholarships daily. We could not publish more than one scholarship per day. On the other side, our customers needed more scholarships to be published on our website. Then we came up with the solution — and opened the internship program at Marj3. We raised our productivity up to 10–11 scholarships per day!

Sami: We wanted to make a lot of features for the website, but developing requires a lot of resources and money. Small budget was one of the main challenges. As the time went, we started to get more customers and receive more feedback. But it`s hard to start with small amount of money.

Abdo: At the time we started Marj3, we were still undergraduate students, so here comes the money issue. We faced many challenges to get revenues from our business. There is no money — there is no work. The question was “How can we make money out of something that was launched with really low budget?”

How did you make it? It seems like you have found the solution, eventually!

Abdo: Firstly, we investigated the opportunities, tried to do some consultations to support students, studying or willing to study abroad and get money from that. We also organized events to get money, but it didn`t work. After some time we started developing our platform from our own budgets and reduced our costs as much as we could. We aimed at getting investments.

Sami: We used our own resources, then we got accepted by one of the biggest accelerators, and from the benefits of this accelerator we succeeded to take a small amount of investment. That helped us to get some money to increase our marketing to enhance our traffic.

So, in 4 months we were able to become a platform №1 for scholarship in the region. We had more that 300 000 unique visits per month by that time, and we increased the number of scholarships day by day. That helped us to make a new business model, which brought revenue and sponsorship.

Аbdo: A lot of companies, NGOs and universities are interested in reaching the youth, but they don`t know how to make it possible. And they waste a lot of money on marketing and it doesn`t bring them cool results. We helped them to reach their target audience. Such cooperation helped us to improve our platform. NOW WE ARE GETTING SALARIES!

What we`re doing in Marj3 is supporting the youth in their development. We`re giving them the way to scholarships.

Sami: And soon we are going to launch a platform with new awesome service that will help students find universities around the Globe and fill in the applications using Marj3!

How did you monetize your service?

Abdo: We get the money from the adds, turning our traffic into money. And we`re still growing. This is much better than before.

Sami: Also we have an online advisory service, so our clients can connect to one of our scholarship experts and book this consultant session about the program or about the application. And soon we`ll be ready to offer paid online courses.

Relying on your experience, what are the qualities of the successful entrepreneur?

Sami: I think one of the main thing to be successful is to believe in your success. And you need to try very hard and knock at many doors unless you succeed. Before our first investment, we were declined by so many investors! Imagine, we`ve been trying so hard and people told us: “Are you sure Marj3 will ever become the platform №1? You`ll never be one”. But you have to believe in it. So I think it`s one of the most important things.

Abdo: And the second thing is patience. You should be patient (laughs). It`s like fishing — you don`t know when the fish will come up: tonight, tomorrow or anytime. I remember that the founder of Alibaba once said: “Today is good and tomorrow is worse. But the day after tomorrow it will be amazing”. So in your entrepreneurship way you have to be patient.

And third, he should be ready to devote his life for the project. I asked one very experienced guy: “Why won`t you start your own project? You are so experienced!”. And he answered: “I love my weekends”. Actually, once you`ve started your project, you won`t be able to have your stable weekends — you`ll spend a lot of time working hard. In the office you have a schedule, but here you live with the project for 24/7. (laughs)