Life+ Meets: Muhammad, Rajai, and Adnan, founders of Yalla Reyada
A fitness startup revolutionizing workout culture in the Middle East
Yalla Reyada is here to revolutionize the health, fitness, and startup scene in Palestine. Their name means ‘let’s play sports’ in Arabic ― but their message reaches far beyond that, as they are driven by their vision to change people’s lives for the better. Join us as we learn about their motivation for focusing on fitness, how they build relationships of mutual trust with their team, and the challenges they face as they seek to transform the startup infrastructure of Palestine into a sustainable ecosystem.
You can also catch up on the whole interview on our Life+ Podcast!
― Hi guys. Can you give us an introduction about yourselves?
Adnan: Hi everyone. My name is Adnan Jaber, and I am from Jerusalem, one of the co-founders of Yalla Reyada. Today I’m with my friends Rajai and Muhammad, the other two co-founders. We’re happy to tell you about our startup.
Muhammad: Hi, my name is Muhammad Massalha. I was born and raised in Jerusalem. I’m one of the co-founders of Yalla Reyada. We are a fitness application, targeting initially the MENA region. And we are here to share with you all our story.
Rajai: Hi, my name is Rajai Barakat. I’m from Palestine. I’m here with my co-founders today, and I’m excited to share our story.
― Can you first tell us how you guys met and the journey of starting Yalla Reyada?
Muhammad: So the whole idea behind Yalla Reyada first began in April 2019. I was studying at the Hebrew University ― you know what that means? The Startup Nation. Wherever you go, you hear about startups, venture capitals, angel investors, and everything like that. The infrastructure is so strong, and I have way too many friends who started their own companies. I was one of the few Arab students who studied this subject.
In entrepreneurship class, I remember discussing how they don’t want the Israeli startups to be exported anymore. They want to build their own empire. On our side [the Arabs], we don’t have any startups, so it was so hard for me to start anything. Even to think about a startup was hard for me.
Around that time, I was working out ― I was like a ‘gym-aholic’. So I had this idea: maybe we can do something about lifestyle. For example, my dad is obese. My father weighs about 120kg, my brother 160kg, and my mom 110kg. I’m around 80kg or 75kg.
― How come you got into sport, when your family is not so sporty or gym-aholic as you are?
Muhammad: Adnan and I were raised in our school culture where you play football at 6:30 in the morning and finish school with a football game. It’s all about the culture. If you sit next to a barbershop, you will eventually have a haircut even though you don’t have the money, you know? It was like that. So I struggled with conforming to my family’s lifestyle. I wouldn’t want to eat anything when my family prepared pizza or something like that at home. My father used to sit all day, playing Candy Crush.
But then I thought about gamification. Why is everyone so addicted to games? What makes them sit all day? I asked my dad why he plays games. He told me, you win things. So I started thinking about this seriously.
Then I thought about another barrier: the language. I started checking the statistics in the Arab world. Here in Palestine, English culture has a stronger presence than Saudi Arabia, for example. In Saudi Arabia, there’s a higher percentage of people who don’t know English.
I went to Rajai, who’s living in Ramallah (Palestinian city in the West Bank, 10km north of Jerusalem). People laughed at both of us because the infrastructure in Ramallah for startups is not ideal. The trend here is that people go out from Ramallah to Tel Aviv, to the Startup Nation.
I told Rajai that we can start from Ramallah, but we can end up in Dubai one day. We can do this. That’s how we started the journey, and he helped me a lot with the business side of things because I have no business background. After that, Adnan joined us. He added a lot as well.
Rajai: Adding to Muhammad’s story ― I remember when I met Muhammad for the first time, about two years ago. The first day we met, we started talking about startups. I was amazed to find someone passionate about such topics here in Palestine, because only a few people actually know what startups are. Even though I was studying business administration at university, our curriculum did not focus on entrepreneurship.
In my opinion, you can create and develop the whole economy through startups in the high-tech sector, and we need to work on that. I really want Yalla Reyada to succeed to a point where I can approach my university and tell them this is a success story that they could follow: change the curriculum and do something about it because we did it, we’re doing it, and we’re trying our best to succeed. We need to change something here.
One year after I met Muhammad, he told me, ‘I’m working on this idea. What do you think?’ I found that idea was simply life-changing, to us as well as to other people. If we implemented it the right way, it would actually change lives.
I was really interested in doing it, even though I was still in university, and I had a lot on my plate. I was a senior. But I actually put more effort into the idea because I knew the project had potential. Later on, we decided that we needed someone with a background in tech. Muhammad approached Adnan, and we’ve been friends and co-workers and co-founders since that day.
Adnan: Muhammad called me to meet up, and I was happy to see him after many years. Last time I saw him was at school when we graduated. He told me about the startup. He shared with me this story, and it made me emotional, just like it made me emotional now.
I started interviewing him as if I was an investor. How are you going to sell? How are we going to build? Who are our customers? He convinced me with all his answers. He was very sharp and passionate. He gave me all the numbers I needed to know, which convinced me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it that day. The second day I woke up and I told him, ‘even If you leave the startup, I am starting it myself.’ So I decided to take the path to join them and go deep with it. Then he introduced me to Rajai in a café in Ramallah. Rajai is a nice guy.
― Can you also tell us what kind of customer a typical Yalla Reyada customer is? Who are your fans and who would you like to be the fans?
Muhammad: First, our product is well designed for our families and friends. Our families and friends are struggling. First of all, let’s agree that all bodies are perfect. There’s no ‘perfect body’. We are fighting health problems here. We aren’t here to say, ‘No, this is the right body.’ Our message isn’t to tell people to ‘lose weight in order to’ ― no, we want to say, ‘Just accept yourselves.’ That’s our message.
What we’re fighting are the health issues. For example, my father struggles with obesity and diabetes; he always has to go to the hospital, and the journey was very frustrating.
Our target market is the MENA region ― especially the people who don’t know English. There are tons of solutions in this market, but they all target the whole world in English. When we first introduced our product to the people, they always asked us why it’s not English. Because English speakers are not our target.
We want people who don’t know why there is no product in English. The other criterion for our target is the people who have no money. Those people are usually cannot reach out to a personal trainer and pay them loads of money per hour. So instead, Yalla Reyada can introduce you to the best trainers around.
It’s like the idea of Uber ― anyone who is a well-known personal trainer can join us. They can introduce themselves and make money on our app. And in turn, we introduce them to the people who can’t afford to pay a personal trainer otherwise.
Adnan: Exactly. It’s a platform for both personal trainers to create more revenue and reach more clients. It’s also for the people looking for professional training and nutrition plans, but at an affordable cost. We’re trying to make it from locals to locals.
― How did all three of you create an amazing community around what you’ve developed. You have a strong presence on social media. How did you do that?
Muhammad: One way we’ve done that is through connecting with well-known personal trainers. Nowadays, all the people in our community keep checking what their friends are doing. My friend got a new car ― wow. New clothes ― wow. We use that logic for our app. For instance, you check on your friend’s activities, including what they’re saying about it. So you say, ‘Wow, he’s doing it. Why not me?’ We are using this toxic thing and channelling this to help them change themselves, to be a better version of themselves.
Another thing that helped us is that there’s a lack of knowledge about sports and nutrition, and our community lacks platforms for this. We have great experts in nutrition and sports, but they have nobody to introduce, no platform to make money, and to make a name for themselves.
This is one of our struggles. In a perfect world, they think about the idea. In our world, we think about the infrastructure. When we tried to register our company, we found that the legal terms regarding that hasn’t changed from around 1964. It’s way, way, way too old to provide the tools for startups to begin. This is our struggle from the start: the registering, the community, and so on. This is funny because here in Jerusalem, everyone says we’re a Startup Nation. Meanwhile, there’s no legal infrastructure. Why not? Most of the people in Ramallah know they outsource to Tel Aviv. What’s stopping us?
Rajai: As for our social media presence ― we understood that the main idea behind our platform is to give out information to help people with fitness and nutrition, and in general, to motivate people to self-progress.
They’re becoming more self-aware and taking steps to change their lives and habits. We’re trying to create and test out content that actually motivates people, or offer information that actually helps them, with bullets points for them to open the app and follow through. They can go to one of our programmes and test out what really suits them.
We’re also creating a community where people can share their results with us, and we can share it back on our page. We want to support their whole experience with fitness and health in general with our app. So that’s what we’re trying to do through our social media.
When it comes to the ecosystem itself and infrastructure, one of our main problems here in Palestine is that the commercial law, or laws to do with operating a company, or taxes, haven’t changed. It’s devastating, and it has to do with some political reasons ― I don’t want to get into too much detail when it comes to politics ― but the laws doesn’t pass through the parliament anymore. They have to pass through the presidents. This means that not all the laws are being changed and updated. That’s one of the reasons that startups are kind of slow here.
As far as I know, they actually are trying to change them all. It’s a very slow process, but they’re trying to change the law to make it better. I believe in about 10 years, we’d have a better ecosystem, but we should start working now. So we’d be ready in 10 years when the law is ready.
― Could you tell us more about these challenges you’ve faced in terms of not having a functioning infrastructure for startups in your area?
Muhammad: We mentioned this problem because as an investor, you [Savs] know that most startups don’t have the luck to make revenues in the first or second year, to make your own value and to reach the stores. The lack of information and knowledge of startups builds barriers between our partners and us. When you reach out to someone, they ask you about the revenues, first of all. This is not the right thing to do.
When we reached out to, say, a personal trainer, we were lucky that most of them wanted to change lives. They told us, ‘We don’t care about the revenues. We just want to change lives.’
Meanwhile, we had way too many people who asked about the revenues first. They’d say it’s not going to make us money, why would we join? This says a lot about our infrastructure, and we hope to change that.
Rajai: If someone shares the same vision as we do, it’s way easier to work with them. We’re glad we’re working with such people, and we’re happy that we found personal trainers, nutritionists, and other partners who are willing to give with the pure intention of helping others and changing lives.
One of the greatest things about our application is that we’re giving these personal trainers and nutritionists a new platform, which is not saturated, like other platforms such as Instagram or YouTube. We give them a new platform with zero presence, and we’re working to build that community. It’s easier for us to convince them that this is the business aspect of our app, but we’re building it from scratch ― so you can actually be one of the first people to join us. And you can actually help people out.
You have two kinds of mentalities here. People who are willing to give out free content and to help people while making money. There’s always the business aspect to everything, even if you have pure intentions. People who asked us purely for the revenues ― this has to do with the culture itself, which eventually you can change, of course, but it takes time. It’s just about people’s mentalities and perspectives on business, helping others, and all that.
Muhammad: This is a sensitive subject. Here in Palestine, I can count the venture capitals we have on one hand. Instead, we only have angel investors. This is not a good thing, believe me, to reach out to an angel investor. We were lucky that we got a good investment from an angel investor who’s not greedy enough to take everything because he’s a businessman, at the end of the day. But there’s a lack of such infrastructure with the venture capitals. The venture capitals in Palestine have these conditions ― let’s say, if Facebook reached out to them now, they would say no, because they’re not making enough money.
Savs: It’s crazy, isn’t it? In my experience, the investment landscape has changed quite a bit around this idea of being very mission-driven and, as we call it, paying it forward. It’s that Silicon Valley mentality of ‘Let me give it a chance. Let’s see where it develops, and let me be part of a movement, not just to make money’. I think that’s slowly spreading.
It’s really interesting to see that, maybe 5 or 10 years ago, Europe was in a similar position of having an underdeveloped venture capital ecosystem. Very conservative when it came to deployment of capital into early companies. It was very expensive to start companies then; whereas now, there’s a really great infrastructure of accelerators, lots of angel investors. People are curious about startups. Startups are cool ― people want to start them. And they’re aware that it takes time. Sometimes it’s because of politics. In the UK ― I can mainly speak about the UK ― we have various tax-related incentives for investors, such that it’s attractive to invest in businesses. You see, there’s a trickle-down effect when the government is on the side of startups; then things start to move very quickly and develop.
What you’re trying to do is preempt that, which is really exciting.
Thank you to the inspiring founders of Yalla Reyada for giving us a glimpse into their story!
