Kyle
An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Brush your teeth at every meal. Don’t feed the bears at the national zoo. All of these are short little tips and people love sharing them. That’s why Dubai startup TipBox was created.
TipBox makes it easy to share little tidbits or tips of information with anyone using an iPhone.
Tipbox founder Ali Razzouk tells nibletz.com “It’s an ever-growing collection of short, simple & personal tips, posted by people just like yourself from their everyday experiences on anything you can think of. Tipbox makes it easier to discover & share tips that are actually useful.”
Once you’ve left your tip by category in the TipBox, it’s archived for anyone else with the TipBox app to go and search for it by category. If you’re looking for travel tips, computer tips or just little anecdotes you’ll find them on TipBox. Sounds easy enough right? So why hasn’t anyone else thought of it? Because these guys did.
Check out the rest of our inteview with Razzouk below.
In layman’s terms, how does it work? (In other words how would you explain it to your grandmother)
You type your tip, pick a topic (what’re you talking about? Apple? Photography?), pick a category (Are you talking about Apple the company or the fruit?) , tap a button to share it to your Facebook or Twitter (optional), and hit “Post”. That’s it.
It might seem a bit lengthy, but then again, you aren’t tweeting or updating your status. Leaving a tip is something you might do once every few days.
Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?
Ali Razzouk: Ali was born in Aleppo, Syria, in 1993, but lived most of his life in Dubai. After reading the stories of companies such as Google and Apple, he decided to start his own thing in technology. He loves building beautiful interfaces, & designs all graphics, interactions, & marketing material. He also handles client-side development.
Abdullah Khan: Abdullah was born in Karachi, Pakistan, & moved to Dubai in 2008. He was into 3D modelling and CGI at the time. Today, his expertise is mostly in maintaining servers and server-side development.
We met each other in high school, late 2008.
Where are you based?
We are based in the Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. We don’t have any offices yet, so we work out of our bedrooms.
What’s the startup scene/culture like where you’re based?
There are several ambitious startups, but very few (if any) of them focus on quality and beauty in what they make. Many of them are local copycats of international hits such as Groupon. We haven’t had an international hit born in this part of the world yet, and we hope that Tipbox will be the first.
How did you come up with the idea for Tipbox?
Before Tipbox, we were working on another one of our projects. That project had almost ground to a halt. Abdullah approached me with a simple idea: a platform for sharing tips. What he had in mind was a website that allows you to share tips. I disagreed, because I believe the world’s headed for mobile, and that’s where the next big revolution will take place. So we started brainstorming for ideas and features to put into our little app.
How did you come up with the name?
The name was inspired by Dropbox. I love Dropbox. Our thing was about tips, so it made sense to have a box with tips scattered inside. Hence, the name “Tipbox” was born. It was easy, memorable, & no one else used it for similar purposes.
What problem does Tipbox solve?
If you go to the App Store right now, and do a search for “tips”. you’ll see an app for beauty tips, an app for iPhone tips, an app for sex tips, etc. There are apps for tips on many topics, but each one is an app on its own. On the web, you can google tips, and you’ll find them on many different websites. That’s the problem right there. It’s fragmentation. There’s no service that specializes in letting people find and share their own tips. Tipbox solves this fragmentation by bringing all these tips under one platform, in one format, and making them social, searchable, & discoverable. At the same time, it makes it a much more enjoyable and rewarding experience.
What’s your secret sauce?
The quality of the tips and the beautiful, simple, streamlined UI. Really, I think the power of Tipbox comes from the quality of the tips that people leave. The community regulates itself to make sure that spam gets weeded out and you’re left with useful tips.
Are you bootstrapped or funded?
We’re bootstrapped. We’ve been spending our pocket money as well as our savings to keep everything up and running.
What is your goto market strategy?
Our target market is mainly content creators. We are trying to tailor everything to suit the tastes and needs of such people. Once we have good content, getting content consumers is not really a major issue.
What’s one challenge you’ve overcome in the startup process?
Not having a central place to work out of was challenging. We live with our families and had to work out of our homes. The home environment is full of distractions. We’d have our parents calling us to do chores and stuff. Luckily, we managed to pull off the task of completing and shipping our product using almost nothing but Skype and WhatsApp to communicate.
Who are some of your mentors and business role models?
We’ve turned to the entrepreneur Danish Farhan, co-founder of Xisché & Co., for advice at times.
As for business models, we like the models adopted by companies such as the Tapbots and WhatsApp. The Tapbots make beautiful, quality apps, and at the same time, they charge you at acceptable rates. The people who care about quality are willing to pay for it. You ask people for money when they get the app, and you then provide them with a wonderful, ad-free experience.
What’s next for Tipbox?
We’re looking to secure some funding to help us take Tipbox to the next level. We plan to expand to other platforms, as well as add several new features to the existing iOS version. I can certainly say iPad OS X versions are in the talks, as well as a web version. We also intend to add photo and video attachments. Location will play a vital role in the future of Tipbox as well.
You can find out more about TipBox here
