Zain Khan knew he wanted to start a business. He was just not sure what kind of company it would be at first.
The 23-year-old initially contemplated an open table concept at restaurants, where anyone can turn up without making a booking. “But as I was talking to more restaurant and bar managers they said if only there was a better way for us to get entertainment. There is not a lot of variety,” says Mr Khan, a UAE resident his whole life, having moved with his family from Pakistan when he was a few months old.
It turned out to be good advice, because the business he founded as a result – The Sound Gaarden, a website which features artists who can be booked by the people running restaurants, events, festivals or venues – caught the attention of Equidam, an online company valuation platform based in the Netherlands.
Equidam is in the process of listing the 10 best undiscovered businesses in some of the 78 countries it operates in globally, and included The Sound Gaarden in its UAE list.
“It was interesting to investigate the situation of the start-ups in this country, because maybe it is not one of the hottest start-up hubs right now. It’s not the US but it is growing fast and has a lot of potential,” says Giulia Girardi, a growth marketeer with Equidam.
The competition was open to all businesses in the UAE, but to participate they had to input their data into the company’s valuation system. Equidam whittled down the 10 most promising companies in the Emirates based on their current and forecasted revenues and valuations in three years’ time.
And what was particularly interesting about the UAE, says Ms Girardi, was the prevalence of online companies, such as The Sound Gaarden, which help people find and book services.
WhizzTips is another company of its kind on the list. The online community helps to put people in touch with experts, who could be anyone from an accountant to a cleaner, to hire them.
Operating since last August, the business is based here and in New York and has about 7,000 registered users and some 100 experts.
Prajit Arakkal, the Indian founder and chief executive, set up WhizzTips to solve a problem for many companies. He came up with the idea after working at Symantec, where he worked in a few roles, including director and head of the Europe, Middle East and Africa area for small and medium business sales.
“All the studies at Symantec show that eight out of 10 SMEs will fail. And the failure comes down to the fact they haven’t planned properly. They didn’t have the right budgets to expand, or they expanded too fast, too soon. All those sort of things were factors that contributed to these guys going bust,” he says.
And as it turns out, being on the undiscovered company list does not even protect against a small business’s failure, as the entrepreneur behind one of the other 10 companies found out.
The founder, who did not want to reveal his name, launched 24/7 Venues, a booking.com-type of business for anyone looking for an event venue.
The company offered people and companies the chance to book meetings, parties, classes, conferences or fashion shows in a range of unlikely venues including Dubai’s new indoor rainforest and art galleries, among others. It was still in the testing, or beta, phase when its shareholders decided to close the company in late October.
“Despite our efforts, we were unfortunately unable to reach a consensus on managing and growing the company,” says the company’s founder.
Ms Girardi says despite all the data and analysis that can be done, start-ups remain the most volatile class of companies in the world.
“They can have the best team, the best product and the best execution and still disappear in the blink of an eye. It is, however, that risk, that volatility, that allows few of them to skyrocket,” she adds.
Many of the other businesses on the list are doing exactly that.
The Sound Gaarden website has been operating for about a year and is going from strength to strength, with Mr Kahn now hoping to persuade investors to help take the business to the next level.
“So far we have had 87 artists booked, which has just been fantastic. Our videos are going toward 250,000 now and this is all from a boot-strapped company, so essentially whatever savings I had left from the few jobs I had in between, that’s how the company is running,” says Mr Khan. “It is tough and every day you just pitch to new people and you are showing them your ideas.”
business@thenational.ae
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