Digital Leadr provides an outstanding opportunity to the new and rising talent of Digital Media Marketing to learn, polish, and extend their digital marketing knowledge. Digital marketing is no longer just about SEO or Facebook ads; it has emerged as one of the world’s most profitable industries. Since the Pandemic of Covid-19, the business world dynamics have shifted 360 degrees to virtual shopping.

To teach our readers new tactics, inspire them with success stories, and motivate them with failures that turn into the biggest success, we have started a series of interviews with the world’s best and most successful start-up founders. In this series, our first guest is Randa Al-Baker.

Introduction of Randa Al-Baker

Randa Al-Baker is a Co-founder of Startovia – a Jordan based Business Consultant Company. She has built her coaching business to be one of the promising startups in MENA. Startovia offers guidance and support to emerging/new/inexperienced entrepreneurs from the beginning stage of starting and running a business by developing business toolkits, coaching programs, and specialized content.

Let’s learn some constructive insights from Miss Randa Al-Baker and her experience.

Interview Questions:

Q: Can you talk a little about your background and how you came to found ‘Startovia?

I am a lean startup coach and business development professional with more than 6 years of diversified experience. I hold a Bsc in Industrial Engineering & I am also a Certified SMEs Innovation Manager.

Working within the entrepreneurship eco-system as startup trainers & coach, me & my cofounder spotted a gap in which 90% of startups fail before they’re even launched; this mainly happens in our region because entrepreneurs are mislead by shallow training programs & hackathons that provide no actual value to their learning process of how to build a startup, thus they end up building products and/or services that customers don’t want or are not willing to pay for, leading themselves to disappointment by losing much time, efforts & money.

For this reason, we decided to establish Startovia to be the business platform that aims to provide support & guidance to entrepreneurs at the very early stage of building a business through a well structured coaching model which we call StepZero; our core business revolves around coaching entrepreneurs on building & validating businesses, thus building investible startups with higher rates for success.

Q: What problem does ‘Startovia’ solve?

The main problem is the high ratios of failure among early stage startups. According to 2019’s reports,
+5M startups are founded every year. However, only 10% succeed and the rest face Failure!
Studies also proved that the Lack of market need (Product-Market Fit) is the top reason startups go out of business!
For that we built Startovia to help those startups to validate their ideas & equip entrepreneurs with the
needed skills and strategies by matching them with the right coaches & experts & by using specialized coaching techniques.

Q: Who is your target audience for ‘Startovia?

In Startovia we target professionals seeking to start their own businesses or establish startups in their areas of expertise. We also work with incubators, accelerators, VC’s and NOGs to provide support to their startups and entrepreneurs.

Q: What’s been the biggest surprise?

When we first designed our model, we had this notion that it will not be easy to get people to understand its value, yet when we pitched it to stakeholders in our market we were surprised with how fast they liked and embraced it. Our first B2B deal was closed without any negotiations!

The biggest surprise is that our model turned out to be not only valid but also wanted!

Q: What was your pre-launch strategy?

Our pre-launch strategy included designing our coaching model and testing it model with entrepreneurs before officially launching the business, we also contacted many stakeholders in Jordan and the region to take their feedback and establish partnerships with them; we were able to coach more than 50 entrepreneurs, recruit 30 coaches across MENA and establish strategic partnerships in Amman and UAE in less than 6 months.

Q: Have you received any funding for this platform or are you guys self funded?

We were self-funded – bootstrapping

Q: Startups’ long term success depends upon their revenue generation model? So how do you generate revenue with ‘Startovia?

We have a revenue-sharing model with our coaches and we also generate sales through coaching programs fees. Soon our model will include a subscription model on our online platform.

Q: What are your future plans for ‘Startovia ? Key milestones for the next 6-12 months that need to be achieved?

Our plans include doubling our revenues, and the number of entrepreneurs benefiting from our coaching programs, building the MVP for the online platform and expanding our partnerships across MENA

Q: Describe your first user and what you love about him or her?

Our first client was a female entrepreneur who built a website to teach the arabic language to non-arabic speakers using educational tools, she was very passionate about her business yet like every entrepreneur, she had her struggles. What I loved about her is that despite being a mother and a wife and having many responsibilities, she was always eager to develop her business and she was very responsive to the coaching sessions provided to her by our coaches.

Q: What’s the best question about your company is asked so far by (a) a member of the press,

(b) an investor:

From investors, “How are we going to scale up?”.. This question came from a potential investor, and even though we had this in mind when we first started, his question and the discussion we had with him helped us to prioritize this matter and pivot our model accordingly.

and

(c) a user:

From users, the best question was “what’s the difference between coaching & consultation?”; it is a key question that defines our positioning in the market and we always seek to clear this to our potential clients to show the value of coaching and distinguish Startovia.

Q: Why do you think this company can beat the competition?

Our unique coaching model which utilizes the technique of executive coaching to help early-stage entrepreneurs help us to Meet our clients’ exact needs, in addition to our flexibility and continuous improvement

Q: What’s the current challenge you are wrestling with?

Startovia is less than one year old, and like every new business there is always the challenge of limited resources, and shortage of cash. Our biggest challenge lies in raising seed investment for building our virtual coaching platform.

Q11: Is it your first startup?

No, I was part of building a startup in the field of renewable energy services while I was still doing my bachelor degree. Also, I established another startup 3 years ago in online education with a group of co-founders. The first one is successful and operational while the other one was a failure and is no longer operational.