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Idriss Benarafa is a political analyst and Editor-in-chief of The Moroccan Times. Follow @IdrissBenarafa
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Last Friday night, at least 150 stakeholders including entrepreneurs, investors, lawyers, developers, designers, and artists in the Moroccan Startup community took part of the “Startup Your Life”(SYL) second Big Meetup. The participants, from all wakes of industries, gathered in the charming Bikhir.ma locals in Casablanca.
“Startup Your Life”(SYL) aims to gather young Moroccan entrepreneurs and create a melting pot of know-how, collaboration, sharing-experiences, ideas, and networking. It does that with the purpose of making a resilient and powerful startup ecosystem in the country.
Strikingly, most attendees were of a quite young age, yet their achievements grandiose.
Take as an example “The Anou Project”, a revolutionary E-Shoping platform that removes middlemen from the buy-sell transaction process between illiterate artisanal manufacturers and direct customers. The Anou’s founders Dan Driscoll and Tom Counsell created an intuitive, easy-to use, image-based interface for illiterate artisans to sell their merchandise in one click, with a fairly good price.
I was also impressed by “KipInTouch”, a new platform to exchange business cards, manage and organize business relationships. The user experience and fluidity seem revolutionary, to my eyes. The project’s founder is the young Saad Jenane.
Also interesting was MySportner by Kenza Bennani. MySportner is a Mobile application that enables you stay healthy and happy by finding sports partners, at your level, to play sports with. Its Founder made it clear the project’s main focus is the US market, but it can be used everywhere, including Morocco.
Omar Madi stole the spotlights with his unique role-play pitch that left the audience in awe, when presenting his Social business “Care”. “Buy any T-Shirt and we give the same to an orphan/poor in need” is Care’s motto.
Many young Entrepreneurs also pitched to bring forth their ideas at the image of Younes Kacimi and his EV event calendar, Ali Elouafiq with Jabekelah social network, Zineb Drissi Kaitouni with DabaDoc doctor spotter, and others.
A special announcement was made at the end of the event by Hicham Oudghiri, an SYL member and founder of Enigma.io, where all Moroccan startups can be empowered through SYL to benefit from 150$/month of cloud services for free, for a 3 years duration.
Worthy mentioning also the CodeForMorocco initiative made by SYL startups to redesign and rebuild the Moroccan government websites, in order to make them more user friendly and accessible for the general public.
Yet, above all, no flattering and no buttering here, the founder of “Startup Your Life”(SYL), Kenza Lahlou, and her community did a great job through this event.
Idriss Benarafa for the The Moroccan Times.
