Every successful startup starts with unscalable tactics. Airbnb founders personally photographed listings. Stripe founders integrated with merchants one by one. These manual, high-touch approaches don’t scale, but they teach you what customers actually need and how your product should work. In MENA, these unscalable tactics are often more important because markets are less standardized. What works in Dubai might not work in Cairo. The payment methods that work in Saudi Arabia might not exist in Morocco. The only way to understand these nuances is to get deeply involved in each market manually. The mistake is trying to scale too early. Instead of spending months building automated systems for markets you don’t understand, spend time doing things manually until you understand the patterns. Then automate the parts that make sense to automate, while keeping the parts that require local expertise manual.

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Embrace the Workarounds

In MENA, you’ll constantly encounter infrastructure limitations that require creative workarounds. Instead of fighting these limitations, embrace them as features that differentiate your product. The constraints that seem most annoying often become your biggest competitive advantages. If unreliable internet forces you to build offline-first features, your product works better for everyone, not just users with connectivity issues. If limited payment options force you to support cash-on-delivery, you can serve markets that competitors can’t reach. If regulatory complexity forces you to build modular systems, you can expand to new markets faster than companies with monolithic architectures. The key insight is that constraints often lead to better design. They force you to focus on what’s truly essential and eliminate what’s merely nice to have. They make you think creatively about solutions instead of just copying what works elsewhere.