Mahmoud Hussein, Malak El-Bahtimy, Taher El Shafei, and Amr Abdel Fattah are co-founders of Tayary, an online food delivery app based in Alexandria, Egypt. When the app launched in January 2017, the coastal city did not have an online food delivery application. Tayary was the first to break into the market with a unique application, one that offers users food from places that they otherwise would not be able to order from, be it a fancy four-star restaurant or a street spot.
Tayary allows users to track their order via GPS from the restaurant until it gets to their doorstep. It also gives them the option of recommending a place that is not featured or listed on it. Whenever a user recommends a place, the Tayary team visits the recommended food spot or restaurant and uploads their menu on the application giving users exactly what they need. “We follow exactly what the customer needs and that’s another thing that I believe makes Tayary stands out,” Hussein said in an interview.
In setting up the platform and creating the application, the founders started with nothing, Bahtimy tells StartUp Scene, “We couldn’t even afford to have an office.” The four of them had to bootstrap to get things going. They also had a challenge of sustaining a delivery fleet that is positioned across the city to guarantee timely delivery. “On our first day of operation, none of the delivery guys we had agreed with showed up while we had orders hammering in. My partners and I eventually had to deliver orders ourselves because we couldn’t possibly just cancel the orders,” Hussein said.
What they initially perceived would be a challenge, which is getting people to use the app, turned out completely different than they expected. People were excited about having an application that gives them a wide array of food and restaurant options especially from places that usually didn’t do food delivery. Hence there was an influx of Tayary users from the first day of its launch. “It actually surpassed our expectations. When we initially launched, we were aiming to have 30 to 40 steady orders per day within six months. But Tayary crossed the 100 orders a day mark within the same period, and it’s been growing steadily ever since,” Hussein said.
The four founders come from different business backgrounds. Hussein is a business developer with a background in marketing. Bahtimy is the company’s social media expert. She also used to handle the logistics and customer services when they initially launched. Shafei is Tayary’s tech expert, he supervises app development and ensures that it runs smoothly. And Fattah oversees everything as the Managing Director.
On why they chose Alexandria to launch Tayary, “We’re all from Alexandria and we know it well. From a business standpoint, Alexandria is a perfect place to build muscle in. It’s a smaller city in comparison to Cairo but it still has a solid consumer base, so we started from there with plans for expansion,” said Hussein. After two years of steady and consistent growth, Tayary now has over a hundred employees in Alexandria and is planning an expansion into Cairo this year.
