Bahraini appmakers expand foothold

Manama : A social media platform for football players created by two Bahraini app developers will soon expand its reach to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

Ahmed AlRawi and Yasser Abduaziz, founders of Malaeb,  said the app has become hugely successful with over 5,000 football players and enthusiasts in Bahrain signed up since its launch four months ago. 

In an interview with DT News, they explained that the app will be launched in Kuwait in the coming days and in Saudi Arabia by October. The young app developers, both in their early twenties, said they hope to make the app successful across the GCC.

Excerpts from the interview:

How would you describe your app?

Ahmed: Malaeb is a social app for football players where they can plan matches and book football pitches real-time. Soon we will introduce ‘Teams’ feature where users will be able to create teams and challenge others through the app.

How did you come up with the idea? 

Yasser: Being someone who plays several times a week, finding a pitch to play in was always an annoying and lengthy task even when you have all the contact numbers. We started thinking of a solution and saw an opportunity in Malaeb that solves a problem for people. 

We didn’t want to keep the app at that stage only due to the huge potential it has, so we came up with the social features which should play a huge part in making the app even bigger, more fun, and more interactive.

How did you manage to make it popular among the football enthusiasts here?

Ahmed: We talked to a few football pitch owners to introduce the idea of the booking functionality and the social features. After running a beta testing period, we launched the app in May with the booking functionality in seven locations. We only sent a WhatsApp broadcast about the app, and people started forwarding it to their football groups, which resulted in over a thousand downloads overnight! 

That itself validated our hypothesis about how the app would bring value to football enthusiasts. A lot of people have faced issues for booking a pitch for their matches before, so they shared the app with their friends to avoid such issues in future. Today we are about to hit our 1,000th booking through the app!

What made you expand to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia? 

Yasser: From the beginning, our plan was to be a platform for football community, without any geographic boundaries. The ambition to build something great is what’s driving us forward, we have a fantastic opportunity in our hands and we want to make sure that we reach the targets we’ve set ourselves. There’s no reason why we can’t grow from Bahrain to GCC and beyond hopefully.

How will you do the marketing in Kuwait and Saudi? 

Do you have a team there?

Ahmed: We use multiple marketing channels to reach different audience segments. Most of those channels are digital, and we keep experimenting with new ones regularly. 

However, the majority of our users are driven from word of mouth by other users. We are planning to have an operational team in each location with the headquarters still being in Bahrain. The journey is long ahead of us, so we don’t know what surprises the future has for us, but we will be ready to experiment, learn and grow.