It’s always great to see great startups emerge out of the Middle East, and Wally,a new free, fun and painless personal finance app for the iPhone, launched out of Dubai is the one of the newest kids on the block brought to you by 2 of the oldest kids on the startup scene in the Middle East.
I sat down with Saeid Hejazi to tell me more about what Wally is all about it:
Who is Saeid Hejazi?
I am! The cofounder and CEO of Wally.
Tell us more about Wally. What? How? When? Why?
Wally is the latest and smartest personal finance app to launch on the iPhone a few weeks ago at ArabNet in Beirut and won first place for best start-up in the Middle East.
We realized that no one has been able to create a personal finance app that really creates value to its users – users that are always on the go and need something smart to do most of the work for them. It helps users track not only the amount they’re spending, but the venues, categories and even aspects – which answers the “why”.
Was your dinner social, family or work related? This gives the users a clearer understanding of how they’re spending their money so they can make smarter spending decisions.
How did the idea come to you?
What you see as Wally today is actually the brainchild of my partner Baher and was born in his tech lab, Napkin (http://npkn.me/). We’ve been friends for several years and a few months ago, when discussing ideas, I told him I had an idea for a tool that helps people manage their budgets and plan for the future. Baher was already working on Wally at the time with the idea to help people track what they’ve already spent. So, with his ideas of tracking what has already been spent and my ideas of managing what will be spent we decided to work together.
Wally today is only the first version of our release but will soon be releasing some awesome features to give users a 360 comprehensive view of not only their situation today, but deep insights on where they’ll be tomorrow.
What makes Wally different from all the other apps for personal finance out there like Mint & BillTracker?
Because Mint is based in the US and limits its users to countries it operates in, we haven’t had the chance to use it. Although we understand and admire what they have done, their growth and the value they create for their users, it’s important to understand that we are not the same.
It’s one thing to argue that we serve different demographics and geographies (Wally is built on every global currency), the only thing we have in common is that we’re both in personal finance – that would be like arguing that Twitter and Facebook are the same.
Wally is trying to create a different type of value to its users. We want our users to take every aspect of their financial situation into consideration to understand not only their past, but plan their future. We take aspects such as your income into consideration to allow you to create targets – whether that means setting emergency funds, planning a trip to Spain, or managing your children’s tuition fees.
As the name implies, BillTracker just helps you track your bills.
What are your current/future challenges that you need to overcome?
The reason Wally is a winner is because of the intelligence built into the back-end. Meaning, we’ve incorporated a lot of machine learning, AI, geo-tagging and more in order to reduce the amount of work the user has to do as they track their expenses.
That is something we’re constantly going to keep innovating on and keep answering the question “How can we make Wally even more seamless in someone’s life?”
As most apps focus on stickiness by keeping the user engaged in their app, we want our users in and out as quickly as possible. Log in the transaction and get out.
It’s only when they are reviewing their expenses do we want them to spend a little more time.
The latter brings me to my next point; what can we tell our users about their habits. It’s one thing to tell users “Oh, you spent X amount on dining-out last month.” – but what does that really mean? How can give our users better visualisation and tools to smarter decisions? How can someone use their financial history as a basis to plan for their futures?
What’s the progress till now in terms of users and downloads?
We don’t track the number of downloads unless we’re working on optimising Wally – we consider that a vanity metric.
What we do track obsessively, however, is the number of active accounts – which has reached over 12,000 in just 3 weeks. We’re incredibly proud of that and find it even more motivating to innovate and work harder for our users.
Who are your team members that helped you put this together?
Wally is the perfect example that you need a solid team from day one to build an amazing company.
We’re a small team of 6 that include:
Makram Saleh, our gifted CTO that I believe is OCD about design and code. He’s also a part-time professor at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts.
Mohammad Skafi, our brilliant mechatronics engineer who is majorly responsible for the clean code that makes up Wally and has it run so smoothly.
Maya Zankoul deserves the credit for the user interfaces and experience in the app.
Farid Gharazeddine, is our latest addition to our tiny team and we’re excited to be working with him and he joins Moh in coding and development.
And of course, there’s Baher Al Hakim our product guy who just obsesses over the user experience on Wally and leads our development road map.
You seem to have turned a few heads in the start-up scene the past couple of weeks, how does that make you feel?
It feels great to see Wally get all the credit that it deserves. We want our users to understand we’re a start-up and not just some app in their phone built by a publishing house. We are Wally and we’re in this for the long run and focus on nothing else but creating more value to our users.
You’re a full-stack entrepreneur, what do you think of the regional status for Tech start-ups like Wally?
When I first got into the start-up world a few years ago from Dubai, you could count on one hand the number of start-ups in the whole Middle East.
It’s incredible to see how Arabs and expats alike across the region are taking that leap of faith to innovate and build companies that solve problems for people and other companies.
I’m excited to see what happens in the next few years and really happy I could be a part of it.
Any last words?
Download Wally! Now. Do it – it’s free!
