In MENA markets, there’s often a gap between what people say they want and what they actually use. This isn’t because people are dishonest—it’s because behavior is shaped by constraints and cultural factors that people don’t always articulate in interviews. For example, people might say they want a sophisticated mobile app with lots of features, but then they primarily use simple, lightweight tools that work on older phones with limited data plans. They might express enthusiasm for Western-style productivity software but continue using WhatsApp for business communication because that’s where their customers are. The only way to bridge this gap is to watch what people do, not just listen to what they say. Spend time in the environments where your target customers work. Observe their actual workflows, not the workflows they describe. Pay attention to the tools they actually use, the problems they actually struggle with, and the solutions they’ve already cobbled together.

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Start with Behavior, Not Features

Most founders start by building features they think customers want, then try to change customer behavior to match their product. This is backwards and expensive. Instead, start by understanding existing behavior, then build features that work with that behavior rather than against it. If your customers prefer voice messages to typed text, build voice-first interfaces. If they’re already using spreadsheets to manage their business, integrate with spreadsheets rather than forcing them to adopt a new system. If they make decisions in group settings, build collaboration features rather than individual productivity tools. This approach often leads to products that look different from their Western equivalents, but that’s a feature, not a bug. Products that are culturally native to your market create stronger customer attachment and are harder for international competitors to replicate.

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Further Reading

Paul Graham’s Do Things that Don’t Scale provides excellent frameworks for the manual, unscalable customer development work needed to understand real user behavior. His essay Schlep Blindness also addresses why building culturally native products often requires tackling messy, unglamorous problems that other founders avoid.