Yebab.com after One Year of Investment!
One year ago, I wrote a blog post about our investment in Yebab.com, and I shared the reasons why we invested in it and how we could help. Now, and after almost a year, Alhamdu Lellah, I have great news about this wedding directory and brides community website!
Yebab was my very first investment as a professional VC. I always tell Murshed Ahmed, founder and CEO of Yebab.com, that I use his company as my “VC Lab” to do all my experiments! After one year, it turned out to be successful experiments.
In less than 12 months, Yebab-UAE grew more than 10X in terms of traffic, 3X in terms of pages viewed per one visit, and 2X in terms of revenue! Yebab-UAE is breaking even now, and is planning to expand to Saudi Arabia and Egypt this year inshallah.
Honestly, this was not an easy job. I am continuously learning more about how to provide an added value, in addition to money, to our investee companies, how to provide them with all the support and advice they need to create a success story.
In addition to Board Meetings every quarter, in which we discuss strategy and roadmaps, we’ve created Monthly Investment Followup meetings, or what we call the MIFs, in which we set high targets for every aspect of the company, and we all at N2V work hard with the entrepreneurs during the month to achieve them all and sometimes even exceed them.
In the MIFs, within few hours in the beginning of every month, we go through business development discussions, technical, design and UI, traffic analysis, content, customer service, financials, etc.. And we ask the founders about what else they need but can’t get on their own, then we utilize our network to help them get it.
Because N2V is an internet company itself, not just an investment fund that is managed by few investment bankers, we can really help. We involve all N2V family to help our entrepreneurs. This is usually done through weekly internal mentorship sessions with our experts in marketing, business analysis, business development, SEO, user-experience, web development, accounting, legal, HR, etc… So our entrepreneurs get an accumulative experience and invaluable advice that can’t be found elsewhere.
Moreover, we encouraged our entrepreneurs to learn from each other, this includes managers of our platform companies as well, they all meet regularly, share experience, and discuss ways to improve their businesses.
Anyway, I can not summarize a year of hard work in few lines, but I would like to share with you what Murshed said when I asked him: “How much of this growth was contributed by N2V?” He said: “Almost all of it!”.
Thank you Murshed, and thank you all N2V family for the hard work, and I wish to keep up this energy and help all other portfolio companies inshallah.
