Abdullah Interviews Hamed Al-Bader

I’v always wanted to interview the people behind Ekelni.com , for some reason I though i’d delay contacting them till they’r all done and settled. They came a long way and im very happy with their over all results.

Its very important to go through what Mr.Hamed had to say about his latest successful venture into the world of E-Commerce. I am sure and confident you’ll find what he brought to the table very enlightening and has lots of hard hitting lessons. Some elements may sound too academic, but if you want to make it, dip in, these thoughts, specially from someone who shares regional backgrounds like you dear readers. I advice you to take your time and squeeze all the juices out.

With that being said, I must say that my dear guest was extremely cooperative, down to earth and very giving, you’ll observe that while reading. It does not hurt being ambitious with realistic future goals like seeing your company’s name in one of the GCC’s stock markets, this is his wish. Well, why not ? when you have a succesful model to build upon like Ekelni.com !

Get to know Hamed a bit more then dive more into Ekelni’s creative creation.

Hamed Yousef Al-Rushaid Al-Bader, 27 year-old, graduated in 2006 from the Marketing Department, College of Business Administration, in Gulf University for Science and Technology (GUST). Hamed is currently continuing his studies in GUST too aiming to gain his M.B.A degree.

From 2007 to 2010, Hamed worked as a portfolio and funds manager at Athman Investment Company. Currently, Hamed is focusing on his private business ownerships that vary from e-business, real estate, and stock market.

Hamed is very much interested in the areas of economics and finance that led him to focus on a very large number of short courses in these fields, specifically modern ones, such as e-business.

What inspired you to tap into who you are now?

I have been aware of e-business since the day I graduated from GUST in 2006 and focused on studying e-businesses within the region. I acknowledged the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) of these e-businesses and visualized the potential for some of them. Therefore, because I thought I can be of an added value to any new e-project, I made myself open and searched for an opportunity to begin.

I have realized that e-businesses run differently. They are basically not like other real-life businesses, and all their financial figures, plans, strategies, and forecasts are ruled in a different manner. What simply inspired me is that such e-projects require less capital and their returns are much higher than other typical businesses.

Eventually, I was contacted by a close friend, Abdullah Salim Al-Salloum, regarding a new e-project called Ekelni.

Ekelni is basically a web system that allows users to order food online using different channels such as computers, mobile and media devices. I did not hesitate to be part of this project and had a fair share in it.

As Ekelni founders, we have focused on doing everything from scratch, internally. We did not hire any expertise to achieve what we have achieved today. Our team is specialized in all areas that are needed to raise Ekelni.com to the extreme level of efficiency, from programming to e-managerial decision-making to marketing.

Doing everything from scratch was what inspired me and made me realize that success does not come by itself, but I must go for it.

What differentiates you from the rest of the competition out there?

First of all, everybody knows that any business will not last if it does not have a competitive edge. Therefore, we have considered many things such as the following:

1. Typical Figure: Spend more on fixed assets, rather than variable ones. We could have created a simple web system that gets orders from customers and assign employees to do the rest. This can cause a limitation to our expansion, and a heavy operational cost. Therefore, we focused on investing heavily on our web system to eliminate the expansion limitation, and to reduce our operational cost as we ensured everything is automated. That is why our prices are low compared to our competitors.

2. Portability: Today, Ekelni can be accessed from almost all devices around the world such as computers, smartphones, and media devices.

3. Media! Because of the success achieved by Ekelni startup, Alwatan newspaper and TV have reached us to do a semi-partnership. They believed such partnership can satisfy a mutual interest, so did we! Today, any restaurant joins Ekelni can have the public exposure based on the partnership between Ekelni and Alwatan.

4. Because our system is almost fully automated, we operate 24/7.

What were the difficulties you faced and how did you overcome them?

Although Ekelni is doing much better than expected, two primary difficulties were faced since startup:

1. Absence of E-Business Legislations in Kuwait: Everybody noticed that Kuwait is around 10 years late than the west in the field of e-business. And of course, there are issues rising every day within our operations. Some of them cannot be handled due to the absence of e-business law in Kuwait. One of these issues is the exclusivity terms in the contracts of our competitors.

We have been contacted by many restaurants that are interested to join Ekelni, but they cannot because they are currently vendors in some of our competitor. They could simply move to us, which might cost them the number of daily orders from that competitor in addition to the amount of yearly subscription they have paid. Or they might remain on that competitorís web system and lose the opportunity cost the exposure and benefit they will get from Ekelni.com.

At the end, the only party benefited from these terms is that competitor by trying to eliminate all its competitors. Restaurants can react, but that competitor is strong enough because it had enough time to grow. This way, although it has a high pricing mechanism, all restaurants are engaged to either benefit from this competitor or nowhere else.

We are currently overcoming this issue by creating a union of restaurants who are currently vendors in our competitors and aiming to eliminate the exclusivity terms from their contracts. All parties in this union commit to its board decision and accept it. The union aims to be stronger than Ekelni and its competitors to set an agreed standard for online food ordering in Kuwait.

2. Absence of Modern Business Thinking: Most restaurant owners lack the modern business thinking. They believe that revenue channels do not change, or distributed during time. Unless a restaurant comes to you and is interested in joining Ekelni, convincing it to join Ekelni is a bit difficult. Our e-business is modern somehow and typical regional restaurants are not that modern and, accordingly, you may not find a thinking intersection between the two paths of these businesses. Using presentations and discussions might help, but who is going to give you a chance to elaborate this unless they are a bit interested. Such issue should be gone through time and we have not decided whether to make it faster or not.

Your support system ?

I have been supported by my family of course. Some close friends even appreciated Abdullah Salim Al-Salloumís idea and became part of Ekelni too. But the public still needs time to acknowledge the importance and the benefit can be gained from e-businesses.

Currently, I see Kuwaiti people investing on e-businesses because it is within my field. But it is difficult to have it seen publically, not even five years later.

Where do you see yourself 5 years from now?

I believe Ekelni.com will be one of the first e-businesses that are listed in one of the GCC stock markets.

Throw something for p0ach readers !

Success is a hundred-step path, your idea is worth a step, and your commitment is worth the other ninety-nine. Everyone has a talent in some field, search for your appropriate field and focus on it. When you focus on that field, you will not cover it all until you reach its borders and start having unsolved problems ñ here the one-step idea comes up ñ and the rest of your life is the other ninety-nine.

Thank you p0ach for this interview!

Watch the team’s interview on Alwatan TV:

Ekelni’s first TV commercial:

- – - – - – - – - –     – - – - – - – - –    - – - – - – - – - – -    - – - – - – - – - – - -

Contact:

iPhone App link

Website: http://www.ekelni.com

E-mail: info@ekelni.com

Related posts:

1. Abdullah Interviews Farah Al-Zuhair
2. Abdullah Interviews Zeyad & Omar
3. Abdullah Interviews Rawan Al-Nafisi
4. Abdullah Interviews Abdulrahman Al-Nouri & Al-Qattan
5. Abdullah Interviews Shaheen Al-Khudhari