Egypreneur is a community of grassroots entrepreneurs, building that community is the greatest asset for all Egypreneur upcoming work. The Crew celebrated the beginning of an organized model to build Egypreneur community, a signup page is now with our community team members across the country as they organize casual gatherings and guerilla activities to invite people to become Egypreneur(s) and expand the community of entrepreneurs all around Egypt.

The signup page, which will be used for our social network afterwards is going to be available in the upcoming events that’s open to promote entrepreneurship to its audiences, our community team will be identifying these events and activities and invite participants to signup!

By 5PM Egypreneur friends who signed up to attend the celebration joined in, after a very interested round introduction during which they spoke about (Google Ebda2, ArabNet Conference, Education vs. Career, Public Speaking and energetically shared the positive energy towards building the New Egypt) while signing up for Egypreneur.

After the introduction and break, attendees split in 2 focus groups and a networking area.

First focus group for entrepreneurs support, identifying what entrepreneurs in Egypt need and how Egypreneur can help them was lead by Ahmed AbdelFatah our PR Executive and contained very interesting discussions and suggestions. Egypreneur CEO, Abdelrahman Magdy asked the focus group members for their views about the financial model they think would be best for sustaining Egypreneur and a lot of interesting suggestions had been shared.

The second focus group was about Za7ma the Cairo Traffic problem in Cairo, led by Sherif Ahmed the Za7ma project manager, the focus group included entrepreneurs already running ICT projects to help solving Za7ma and students working on their graduation project to solve the same problem.

Around the focus groups, attendees enjoyed networking, chatting and discussing how they can possibly work together to advance their projects.

Egypreneur Crew received very positive feedback on the gathering and wishes for more, attendees was promised of a lot more gatherings in the coming period as the community team starts its public activities.

After this gathering, Egypreneur community team will be organizing and/or participating in at least one activity per week in every city around Egypt, where the signup form will be available.

I tweeted some tips from ReWork while having a refresh skimming through it yesterday and wanted to share it here. Enjoy!

Instead of trying to outspend, outsell, or outsponsor competitors, try to out-teach them.

Teach and you’ll get a pond you just don’t get from traditional marketing tactics.

All companies have customers. Lucky companies have fans. But the most fortune companies have audiences!

Being obscure is a great position to be in. Use this time to make mistakes without the whole world hearing about ‘em

You don’t want everyone to watch you ‘starting’ your business. Doesn’t make sense to tell everyone to look at u when not ready

The enthusiasm u have for a new idea is not an accurate indicator of its true worth, Let your latest grand ideas cool off 4 a while

If you’re successful, people will try to copy what you do. There’s a great way to protect yourself from copycats.. Guesses?

Make ‘you’ part of your product or service, inject what’s unique about the way u think into what you sell

Momentum fuels motivation. It keeps you going, it drives you. Without it, you can’t go anywhere

The way you build momentum is by getting something done and then moving on to the next

To keep your momentum get in the habit of accomplishing small victories longer something takes the less likely you’ll finish it

Remember, great brands launch without PR campaigns all the time. Starbucks, Apple, Nike, Amazon, Google all became great brands over time, not because of a big PR push upfront!

Never hire anyone to do a job until you’ve tried to do it yourself first. That way, you’ll know what a job well done looks like.

No one likes plastic flowers, the business world is full of ‘professionals’ who wear the uniform and try to seem perfect. In truth..They just come off as stiff and boring. No one can relate to people like that.

There’s beauty to imperfection. This is the essence of the japanese principle Wabi-sabi, valuing character & uniqueness over a shiny facade!

Abdelrahman Magdy

Founder & CEO

Abdo is an Entrepreneur, Founder and MD of Al-Adham Co. and involved with running several entrepreneurial activities, started Egypreneur 2008, sustained it, developed its strategies, recruited the crew and currently leading its strategic and executive work!

During the previous weekend, with the need to sort a few things in Alex, I used it as an opportunity for some – unfortunately, very rare – ‘me time’ to rethink things, reorganize priorities and get back with a clear vision of where am I standing and where am I heading. Looking at this experience now, I discovered that I already have a system to run my life accumulated from previous experiences and just never thought of it as an organized structure to “run your life”. I’m here to share.

It’s important to first understand what controls our decision-making and influences “how” we approach running our life. I believe we have a few assets that direct our decision-making and eventually decide our destiny. Those are our beliefs, character and experiences.

We grow up with our beliefs and owe our parents and environment for the fundamental ideas that will control how we approach life afterwards. Our faith, national belonging and basic ideas about social interaction are mostly formed at an early age. While we should never stop questioning our beliefs and be open for a paradigm shift, a major change in those is rare, takes time and is a heart-wrenching experiences.

Besides our DNA, practicing these basic ideas forms our character. Our basic personality traits start showing up as a result of our interaction with the environment and experiences we go through. I believe with practice people can change if they have the will, dedication and suitable environment. I personally started showing more patience lately and that wasn’t a character trait I grew up with.

The set of knowledge, skills and mental images formed by our experiences in life are also a major factor in deciding our destiny.

As we define who we are and how we look at life by these beliefs, character traits and experiences, we realize that we have limited time to live, with room for limited things to do. That’s when we’re required to decide the direction that our life will take by deciding our goals. If we don’t have well-defined goals, values and objectives in life, then we didn’t start living yet and just being reactionary towards what happens to us in life.

From about four years, I started using Clear Mind ~ Bright Future to write down my goals in a booklet. I come out from a goal setting session with a single paper with my goals for every year; an exercise through which you ask yourself about your purpose, legacy, values, life goals and fears. It helps you write down who you are and what you want in an objective way that will lead to your yearly objectives this year.

I led an exercise on 01/01/2011 in a gathering JanSat1 Achieving Your 2011 Dreams during which I went with some colleges through the experience of setting our goals on a single paper.

Getting back to my 24 pages analysis, I can see no change in life purpose, values or legacy, but as it moves to specific key areas in life, goals start to get smarter and more specific. Every year, reading this, I can see the direction I’ve decided to take my life to and see the path evolving, that makes you feel grounded, aware and “know what you’re doing with your life”.

Funny thing is that in the 2008 goals paper, I can find “Tozzz” (an Arabic word meaning “doesn’t matter”) in the “Positive attitudes I am now cultivating” section and I can evaluate this in that the last few years whenever something happens, I say “Tozz” and move on.

Having decided on specific goals, it’s time for strategies and the action plans to reach them. Two years ago, I started using 37Signals applications and currently as I look to them, I find on Backpack that there are private pages that include how I’ll approach what I want to do. When it’s not private, these pages get shared with team members, advisors or anyone who has a valuable contribution to make.

So, our goals lead to strategies, models and approaches to get it done. And by then it’s time for execution. Basecamp, being a project management tool, is currently where operations to get stuff done is being led. I counted 23 projects currently being executed in different activities I’m involved with. I created a company and called it “Abdo” through which I manage personal projects and executive tasks not related to any other project.

I base all my communication on these applications, so whenever there is something that should get done, “if it’s not on Basecamp it doesn’t exist” and I try to train and mentor everyone I work with to religiously follow these applications. Actually, the level of interaction there is a health indicator of whether things are being done and on time or not.

Even if I’m digitally connected most of the time, I keep my agenda as a record for my previous activities and those soon to come. Having to organize your daily activities on the agenda is the best approach ever. All this digital stuff gets too complex for a daily check of what you’re supposed to do.

Sometimes, our life gets out of control and we need to get back to researching who we are, what we stand for, what our goals are, what strategies we need to reach these goals and then what should we do about them. When I get back and look at things with this clarity, I can identify what went wrong and how to ReWork it.

I enjoyed this exercise putting my thoughts on a blog post and I’m curious to know about you, how do you run your life?

Abdelrahman Magdy

Founder & CEO

Abdo is an Entrepreneur, Founder and MD of Al-Adham Co. and involved with running several entrepreneurial activities, started Egypreneur 2008, sustained it, developed its strategies, recruited the crew and currently leading its strategic and executive work!

I believe that positivity and optimism are more of a way of life other than an attitude we selectively have when things are going well. Being a Muslim, my religious belief teaches that everything happens for the best including failures, difficulties and hard times and that my role as a human being is to heartfully submit to the will of god in all that I don’t have direct control over and then change reality with the power god has given me, which is endless!

While observing tweets about the economic and political situation in Egypt currently, I find it mostly sarcasm and crying over a situation you’re a part of; the story of prophet Joseph occurred to me and found it a brilliant representation to while objectively and realistically facing challenges, staying positive and optimistic at all times other than crying over a situation you’re not objectively working on solving.

The king of Egypt called Prophet Joseph telling him a dream he had – Having the talent to interpret dreams – he didn’t went on describing the fact that Egypt will be going through deadly seven years, but he directly described what should be done about it and how to tackle the situation and get through it with minimum losses.

We’ll be always faced with obstacles, challenges and hard times while realistic realization of the situation and an an objective plan to get through it is obviously a must, I believe the attitude and emotions involved during these times should still be positivity and optimism and that stating being optimistic during these times, is not being an unrealistic dreamer, but maybe a natural optimist and a firm believer.

As an entrepreneur, you’ll have to rely on your internally generated positive energy when the things you need to get done, teams you have to lead, people you have to deal with, disputes you have to go through and challenges you have to face demands more and more energy, positivity and optimism.

What about you, what motivates you to stay positive and optimistic during hard times?

Abdelrahman Magdy

Founder & CEO

Abdo is an Entrepreneur, Founder and MD of Al-Adham Co. and involved with running several entrepreneurial activities, started Egypreneur 2008, sustained it, developed its strategies, recruited the crew and currently leading its strategic and executive work!

Twitter proved to be one of the most powerful tools for a real-time brain-storming sessions that leaves wealth of knowledge, experience and anecdotes shared in a specific matter to be wiped with the flow, as from now on, we’ll be blogging interesting discussions that we have on Twitter and any other tool in here. We haven’t started talking about our blog yet, but we’ll in the near future and consider this a teaser of what this website is meant to be for

Amr El-Gabry @AmrElGabry someone I personally had the pleasure of meeting while working on our CairoTraffic Solutions Project, asked a question about the source of satisfaction for an entrepreneur, is it from the environment or from Managing “your business” – (my interpretation: being the boss)

Experiencing that managing in an early stage, probably with limited resources, in a dynamic fast-paced environment with a place for a lot of risk and disappointment, that was my response:

Mostafa Naguib, finalist for Imagine Cup Award and one of my all-the-time most favorite geeks, added that sometimes management in a startup can get overwhelming tweeting:

Toffy El Shafei @ToffyElShafei , partner at Outreach Egypt Small and medium organizations’ institutional development consultancy emphasized that having systems in place would make managing fun:

Startups being so much of a dynamic, fast-paced place to be, I added:

Amgad Kaldas, @Amgad_Kaldas one of the voices that always brings wisdom to our twitter conversations added that right people on the right seats in a startup will require some effort:

Toffy then added that the process she mentioned should be developed according to the case of the organization – with some flexibility.

And a very good point is that this process can be initiated in a smaller scale and then expand as the organization grows.

Amgad then brought to our attention Jim Collis “From Good to Great” where he has a chapter speaking about getting the who “staff” first and then getting them used to the what “process”.

What I have learned from this interesting conversation is that in a startup environment – which passes with different stages dynamically and managing can be hard in some of these stages – the way to evolve the organization is to focus on who, who you bring in to play and then start slowly developing processes and coaching/training people to follow the process, hopefully that can lead to satisfaction to the manager side of you while running your startup.

Yet, more interesting input being added..

Thanks everyone who participated in this interesting conversation and keeping it flowing and if anyone have any ideas or interesting input feel free to comment below.

And, soft welcome to our blog

Abdelrahman Magdy

Founder & CEO

Abdo is an Entrepreneur, Founder and MD of Al-Adham Co. and involved with running several entrepreneurial activities, started Egypreneur 2008, sustained it, developed its strategies, recruited the crew and currently leading its strategic and executive work!