Launching Quran.com

It’s been almost two years now since Robleh and I first met and spoke about Beautifulprayer.co — a dream child of Ahmed Saleh and I. Later, after our huge success with the community loving BP, Robleh asked me if I was to work on something bigger — something like Quran.com

It’s been quite the experience so far and I am proud to announce my work and many late nights have pulled come to reality.

For many people, when I mention ‘Quran.com’ they always reply with ‘Wow! You are behind that?! I visit that site all the time! Awesome man!’ and it makes me feel great. Here is something that someone I know uses it on a regular basis without knowing it’s me, but as Uncle Ben (Spiderman’s uncle) once said: ‘with great power comes great responsibility’. Here is some things I learnt over the time spent working on this:

Our religion is beautiful, we should have beautiful products

I kind of stole this from Ahmed Saleh actually, but it’s true. We have a beautiful religion that celebrates beauty. It celebrates peace. It celebrates kindness. Our products have to be reflective to that, and so we strive everyday to make Quran.com the most beautiful and delightful religious product out there. Period.

It’s hard to make everyone happy, but users come first

We attract people from all over the world — from the US to Indonesia. From Arabic natives to non-English speakers. From listeners to readers. From scholars to students. It’s really difficult to build something everyone loves. Our mission is to always listen to our users feedback and make it easier for them to use and be delighted by. It’s not always easy and many times we get many angry support tickets, but multiples more of gratitudes and constructive feedback.

Support matters

Some of the most successful companies have had great community happiness and support. For example, my ex-roommate Mohamed Kazaz works at Tilt.com where he is doing wonders with their community happiness — and that’s what makes Tilt so special. You always know they have your back and will always listen to your feedback (Mohamed is one of the best listeners I know). I adopted that mentality with Quran.com and care that we try to answer all support tickets in a timely manner — and believe it or not, those angry emails turn into ‘wow, thank you for that quick response, I am sorry I was angry but …’ It’s almost like people write angry emails thinking it won’t get answered but once it does they are surprised and excited to help and pour their great feedback at you.

Track everything

There was a time where we tracked many interactions on the site till our sheer size of traffic max out all of our free tier or basic tier plans, but for that short time we learnt a lot. For example, we noticed that people would search things like ‘2:150’ or ‘2,150’. Initially this was confusing but as the trend continued we noticed users where looking for a shortcut to quickly jump to that section. When we built it, users loved it and continued to use it.

The vision is your fuel

Life gets in the way at times with work and family, but why do we keep doing this? It’s all about the vision. The vision is our fuel. Our vision is to build a suite of religious apps and products that are beautiful and delightful to use. That means great design, no ads and meaningful products that we’d love to use ourselves. Technology has really changed our lives in becoming more productive, knowledgable and enabling — we want to be in the forefront with great products.

It’s about the team

The vision, the hard work, the 2am servers crashing, etc would not be held up without the team. There are some great folks behind this such as Ahmed, Nour, Robleh, Khaled, Umar, Nermin, Quadri, Karim, Mostafa, Basem, Ahmed, Mohamed and many others (sorry if I missed you) that shape what this beautiful project is today. We want to move faster and grow our vision — please don’t hesitate to contact me (Tweet at me, email me, anything!). We need more individuals that strongly believe in our vision and want to help out, with anything!

I am excited to share more with you about Quran.com, recommend this post and follow us for more posts to come.