OUR FOUNDER OF THE WEEK– Every Tuesday, Founder of the Week looks at how a successful member of Egypt’s startup community got their big break, asks about their experiences running a business, and gets their advice for budding entrepreneurs. Speaking to us this week is Jad Ghalayini (LinkedIn), co-founder of freelance and project-based employment platform Inploy.

My name is Jad Ghalayini, and I’m a co-founder at Inploy. I studied graphic design at AUC, and worked with my diploma for a few years before jumping on a very promising potential journey to transform the creative industry as a whole. Now, I am focusing on marketing and design, creating meaningful campaigns for our customers at Inploy.

Before founding Inploy, my work mostly focused on user experience and interface — mainly for applications and websites. This exposure helped me a lot in my current role and in providing an immersive experience to our clients and the overall business development of the company.

My co-founder, Karim Fahmy, and I first came up with the idea for Inploy during our senior year at university. It was actually our graduation project, and we officially launched it to the public a couple of years later, in 2019. Inploy is a platform that fills various gaps in Egypt’s freelancing ecosystem. In Egypt, there is no umbrella market for freelancers, and many people are unfamiliar with the term. We saw the potential of this sector from more developed countries that rely heavily on freelancers.

Our goal was to build and arrange a market for freelancers so they could obtain more visibility among clients and develop their portfolio. Inpoly currently has over 2k active freelancers and 600+ clients. It’s tested out projects worth EGP 3 mn and freelancers have received more than EGP 2.5 mn to date.

We are more than a platform that connects freelancers and clients — we also handle taxes, bills and contracts. It’s a freemium platform, which means it’s part premium, part free. We only take commission on transactions that we manage. We provide the service to handle invoices and taxes for freelancers and customers, taking the burden off taxed freelancers, and providing tax invoices to clients — a big game changer for firms wishing to work with freelancers but are constantly discouraged by the lack of formal tax remittals and invoicing.

We raised EGP 500k with Flat6labs during the pandemic. It was a very challenging time, but we were able to capitalize on the circumstance because the concept of freelancing matched well with the shift to working from home. We also raised a second round from family and friends, and are currently working on numerous funding plans that will be announced in the near future.

Inploy’s plan for growth involves a more comprehensive process. Freelancers will be able to create briefs and projects directly on the platform, while clients will have access to track the performance of the freelancer during the project. We are also in the process of transforming into a digital fintech platform. We are developing peer-to-peer payment software that will allow transactions to pass through our platform.

The best part of my job is meeting new people from different sectors and communicating with them on a regular basis. I consider myself very lucky to have had the chance to learn about various industry trends from experts in many fields.

The worst part of my job is getting clients to understand how freelancers work. Because not all clients are willing to work with freelancers, we do our best to always onboard exceptional talents on our platforms who can help us reach out to more clients and help them understand the benefits of working with us.

I gave up my social life to found Inploy. I was working on Inploy while having a day job. So basically I spent all of my free time working on Inploy to get it to where it is today.

If I were to give someone starting their own business just one piece of advice, it would be to never give up hope. You will go through some difficult times and be tempted to give up, but don’t. To fulfill your dream of becoming an entrepreneur, you must be persistent. The journey is never easy.

I always turn to my wife, Azza El Shenawi, for advice. She’s a marketing guru and we share the same mindset, so she’s often the person I go to when I need to solve a difficult problem.

The only way I’d exit my firm is through an acquisition to expand it and improve it. I wouldn’t continue as an employee, but I would love to have a say or work as a consultant.

My family was highly supportive of my decision to start a business. My mother has always predicted that I will become an entrepreneur ever since I was a child.

I recommend reading Atomic Habits by James Clear. It’s truly a great book that helped me a lot in the process of launching Inploy. It discusses how to become a better version of yourself and breaks it down for you. I recently also watched The Swimmers. It particularly moved me because I am Lebanese and lived through the 2006 war. Therefore, I could relate to the fear of being near or experiencing an explosion. It’s very difficult to get over it.

I turn to music for inspiration. Music and its different beats motivate me to design. It helps me to visualize and delve into a more creative process at work.

One startup I believe is killing it is Paymob. They’re rapidly growing and doing an excellent job of communicating what Paymob is to everyone.

If I couldn’t build the business I have now, I would’ve started another business, most likely an agency. It’s always been a dream of mine to launch a digital agency, with a fully remote experience.