Bootstrapping to Exit from Saudi Arabia: Emad Daghreri, Co-Founder CEO of Autobia (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the 2012-13 time frame. You’ve done this $50,000 project, are seeing other kinds of competitive situations where you can play a role, are automating, and you’re turning everything into a digital competition. At that point in the 2012-2013 time frame, what was the price point?

Emad Daghreri: It was based on the size of the project.

Initially, we’d have small projects. The hit among the projects was iRead. We did it for six times year after year. It was seasonal. We also did an award with the health ministry. It was a very small competition that was repeated every year.

We started to have all of these repetitive projects where they follow the same structure. The next year, they have the budget for it, and we do it again and again without huge improvements. The expectation would be that the prices will go down because now you’re optimizing your processes. The price will not go up.

We realized from early stages that in those kinds of projects, they have no idea how to improve it and make it a bigger project on a bigger scale because they lack the consultation infrastructure to help them achieve more with the same idea.

We stuck with this small project and introduced a consultation layer and project management layer, and on top of those, the technology layer. Now, we engage in the early stage with the entity with a small contract wearing the consultation hat, help them scale up the project and understand more of their pain in the early stage. We co-design the framework that they should follow and we will manage the entire project including contracting with third parties and adding even more to the ecosystem. That’s why the scale of the project was going up, not necessarily because they are paying only for the technology layer, but they are paying for the entire ecosystem that we are creating for them as consultation technology and project management and on the later stage doing marketing campaign for them as well.

Sramana Mitra: What I’m trying to understand is what is an average deal size. In the 2012-13 time frame, what is an average deal size? Then, I’d like to ask you questions based on your go-to-market strategy.

Emad Daghreri: The range of the projects was from $50K to $300K. If it gets more complicated due to the addition of more components, the price will go up.

Sramana Mitra: Because of the project management and other modules. It was modular pricing.

Emad Daghreri: Yes, exactly. As we invested a lot in our business development arm, we’d the pleasure to work with multiple projects at the same time.

Sramana Mitra: For the same same client?

Emad Daghreri: The same clients and other clients as well.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the go-to-market strategy you said you decided to focus on the government but of course the government is a many-headed monster right. It has lots of different departments agencies so on and so forth. How did you navigate the government to get into all these different projects? How would you locate the projects? How would you locate the buyers? What was the business development strategy?

Emad Daghreri: When the government announced different projects and visions for the last ten years, we studied them in more detail to understand what goals and matrices they want to focus on. For example, one of the matrices is the quality of life of the Saudi people around which they have a lot of programs, events, and ecosystem happening.

We started to see what programs are more relevant to our experience, product, and the mechanism that we can push. We hired a lot of business development people who understand that ecosystem and started to contact with the governmental entities at an early stage so that we can be on the table while they are thinking about the right strategy for that.

Sramana Mitra: When you say you are contacting these people in the government in Saudi Arabia, what does it mean to contact people in the government? Is it something that you just naturally pick up the phone or send an email and you start conversations? Do you have to go through relationships? How does it work culturally?

Emad Daghreri: It sounds weird when you say it this way, but they’re actually open to receive and do meetings with every single entity out there as businesses. Usually, there are project managers from their side as well. They are looking for suppliers and vendors to help them in a particular project.

Sramana Mitra: So, they’re open to doing business with young companies. That’s great!

Emad Daghreri: Yes, that’s why a lot of businesses actually grow up because of that healthy relationship between the private sector and the governmental sector. By being open, sharing your success, and having a lot of projects out there is actually another pillar where they are reaching out to the companies who did that specific project. That’s what happened at the beginning with us with Saudi Aramco. They reached out to us because they saw a good example that they want to follow in the first project.

It’s a healthy system. Every single project goes to this central platform called the Etimad, where anyone is allowed to place a financial and a commercial bid. Whoever is suitable for that project will be awarded that specific project to execute it.

That’s why there are a lot of B2G companies. I’m naming them B2G because it’s an ecosystem that’s happening on a really bigger scale as we speak today with all of those programs and events.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrapping to Exit from Saudi Arabia: Emad Daghreri, Co-Founder CEO of Autobia
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