ENTREPRENEURIAL CHALLENGES AND INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS

Sama Abbas and Abdullah Amjed

In recent years, the concept of Coworking Space has become a buzzword in the business world, so what is a Coworking Space? It’s a shared space designed in a unique way to serve entrepreneurs and freelancers. Because traditional offices can be expensive for earlystage start-up founders, and because it’s very difficult to predict when they will be able to grow and have their own space, or whether they will still be in business after a few months, a Coworking Space is the best choice for an early-stage start-up, MSME, or freelancer.

The Station’s Coworking Space was the first to be established in Baghdad in 2018. It provides the entrepreneurs a lot of benefits, such as offices at nominal prices, free internet, free access to office appliances, complimentary drinks and pastries, and use of other spaces in The Station at discounted and free prices. Another service that The Station provides in the coworking space is an atmosphere of collaboration, cooperation, and support. Over the last four years, the Coworking Space hosted over 97 start-ups and MSMEs in Baghdad, and over 25 startups and MSMEs in Mosul.

In this article, we will look at a few examples of Iraqi start-ups in The Station’s Coworking Space that have faced a variety of challenges and how they were able to solve them in their own creative and innovative ways.

1- GREEN GOLD

Green Gold (GG) is a start-up founded in 2018 that specializes in reducing and recycling all types of organic waste (food waste, cloth, cardboard, animal waste, and vegetable waste) into environmentally friendly products free of chemicals. To keep up with population growth and production, Iraq is struggling to achieve adequate waste management and waste disposal practices. GG faced many challenges in the past few years regarding how to make fertilizers because the machines that convert waste food into fertilizers are expensive, harmful to the environment due to gas emissions, and waste energy.

Marwa Al-Nuaimi, GG’s founder, created an innovative solution to this problem by combining worms and food waste for 3 to 4 months and creating an organic fertilizer made in a 100 percent eco-friendly method without any machines.

We are a social enterprise, not so much for the money as for our mission and goal for the planet, people, and nature of not harming and preserving this planet to the greatest extent possible.

Marwa Al-Nuaimi Founder of GG

2- SAFR

SAFR is a registered travel and tourism company that aims to develop travel to and from Iraq by developing a fully interactive system for electronic reservations that combines all travel requirements into one convenient place. Their vision is to be the leading travel agency in Iraq and consistently provide the best available service and offers to their customers by streamlining the process of organizing individual and corporate travel, providing a unique travel experience for individuals and developing a plan to reduce corporate expenses.

SAFR now has the experience and access to create custom travel apps for companies thanks to their work on the Travel API and how it relates to travel apps and websites.

After dealing with over 100 hotels in Iraq, it has now become necessary for SAFR to connect several of them to the outside world. After months of hard work in locating Iraq’s best accommodation service providers and connecting these hotels to them, SAFR will be able to reach all hotels in Iraq within a few weeks.

SAFR suffered greatly from the lack of human resources in the travel and tourism field. The majority of young people graduated without any experience or knowledge of aviation systems. So instead of searching and trying to find the best candidates for their job position, they decided to train young people by exploring their talents and passions and then hiring them. SAFR now has more than 16 employees

Success is achieved through a series of failed experiments.

Ahmed Qassim Founder of SAFR

3- ECO LIFE

Eco Life is a green tech start-up founded in 2020 with the vision of being the hub of all eco-friendly products and providing customers with the best shopping experience for eco-friendly products, with the goal of spreading the culture of an eco-friendly lifestyle, reducing plastics and chemicals, and strengthening the Iraqi product industry, as all Eco-products are locally manufactured using local raw materials, expertise, and 100% Iraqi hands. Eco Life faced an issue when first entering the market: the culture for eco-friendly products is practically nonexistent in Iraq. In addition to that, the concept of an eco friendly lifestyle was still unheard of at that time.

They began addressing this issue by devoting all their offerings for about 6 to 7 months to raising awareness among people about what an eco-friendly lifestyle entails via their social media channels (posts, videos, live sessions, and so on). They then had to build trust in their products because they are locally made and many customers were hesitant to use them. But Abdulrahman Abdulkareem, founder of Eco Life, and the entire Eco Life team worked on the quality of their products and the raw materials, as well as taking advice from experts in this field from inside and outside Iraq. The other challenge they faced was finding a place for their machinery, but with the help of their partners, like Soft Touch, they were able to get a wider workplace for the Eco Life team to produce their products.

Before you begin developing products for your start-up, consider how to target and understand consumer behaviors, as well as how to reach your target audience. Understanding target audience behaviors is a continuous process for us throughout all stages of the Eco life cycle.

Abdulrahman Abdulkareem Founder of Eco Life

4- SEVEN PROFESSIONS

Seven Professions is a general services company that acts as a one-stop-shop platform and enables households and SMEs to get the essential services they need, such as: maintenance, plumbing, electricity, welding, carpentry, construction and decoration, handymen, and nursing. via mobile apps and social media platforms. Their vision is to become the go to way when it comes to ordering such services by changing the reality of obtaining such services in Iraq to make people’s lives easier by taking care of all the processes for them.

Seven Professions’ main challenge was the need to create a culture for customers and service providers for the services they are offering in order for them to be trusted and accepted in the market. This was achieved through Seven Professions’ incredible marketing campaign which included social media posts (focusing on Instagram Reels) and sponsored competitions for cash prizes. The Seven Professions promo video attracted close to 11K views on Instagram.