THE GOOGLE FOR ENTREPRENEURS STARTUP GRIND

According to founder of STEP, Mr. Ray Dargham, a person has three opportunities in life; his twenties, his thirties and his forties. This is but an example of the candid remarks that Ray made during yesterday’s Startup Grind, hosted by Google for Entrepreneurs, at in5 innovation center in Dubai.

Ray is an individual that, upon study of website content on traditional Arabic websites and media, noticed that there was a gap in engaging content and saw the opportunity to fill this gap. Thus he was led to set up the uprising media empire known as STEP.

Ray and STEP also host a yearly conference for entrepreneurs, startups and content producers known as STEP conference, the largest interactive gathering in MENA (the Middle East and North Africa). This year’s STEP conference will come off from April 5th to the 7th and will be hosted at the Dubai International Marine Club.

Throughout the program, Ray spoke of his personal experiences in setting up a team to accomplish the goal he wanted to achieve and a few of his personal insights with those that attended the program. STEP is mainly in the business of producing Arabic content for several different websites. Some of this content production is automated in that, a system processes which content is the most appropriate for which sites based on the region of the site’s reach, and the website’s purpose. One interesting thing he said was that he could not tell any business what challenges it should look for and what cases to avoid because each business is a unique case of its own with its own specific characteristics and challenges.

In the case of his business, he explained he wanted to add humorous content to websites. However, with each different type of Arabic dialect, there was a type of humor that was particular to it. So, in building a team, he had to find ppl to develop content for different dialects of Arabic as opposed to developing the same content across. Hence, he has teams of content producers for different regions.

My biggest takeaway from the conference was that there is no right formula for business. If you have a business idea and you would like to go head with it, you define your own rules and tactics based on the elements that you have to deal with. Every business and every business idea is its own individual identity. So, it is the job of the entrepreneur to help the world truly understand the identity of your business and its product or service. The next Google for Entrepreneurs Startup Grind in Dubai will be hosted in May at the same location. If you are an entrepreneur and seek an environment where you can discuss your business and its growth or its sustainability, I recommend this program for you.