If you thought wisdom and business acumen is commensurate to age and experience, think again. Because Bahrain can now boast of a very young, talented and enterprising young lady behind Bahrain’s unique online platform for payment of online shopping. Meet Fatema Ebrahim, Founder of Valopay to understand the story of her journey better.
Tell us briefly about yourself.
I am Fatema Ebrahim. I re-located from the states about a year and a half ago. I was heavily involved in the startup space in New York. I was working for an award winning startup in in the city which was the perfect hub to start up my entrepreneurial senses. I came back to Bahrain with the drive to start something of my own. A friend from San Francisco and I decided to start this journey and in a couple of months, we decided to jumpstart the idea of Valopay!
Give us a brief summary about your educational and professional background.
I got my bachelor’s in Communication Studies from SUNY Buffalo and my Master’s in Public Relations and Corporate Communications from New York University. I’ve interned for several PR agencies and foundations working for several big clients such as illy issimo and Coca Cola. Currently, I’m a Country Manager for Action Bahrain, part of Action Global Communications handling local clients and aiding in increasing their media presence locally and regionally.
When and how did you come up with the idea of starting up Valopay?
Valopay was an idea that sparked after realizing how huge the Instagram marketplace is in the GCC— it has become an important platform to launch a business. After research and observation into this area, we saw some gaps we could fill. After outlining these gaps, we created solutions and created one platform that catered to the Instagram market place, and in general can cater to others beyond that.
Valopay is an interesting name. Tell us more about the business.
“Valo” has Nordic origins actually, it means “light” or “man of light”. It is an online platform that simplifies communication and facilitates payments between sellers and buyers within the Instagram marketplace. Valopay allows sellers to accept online payments and offers buyers a simpler experience when placing an order.
Valopay has features that any small business owner with a base of buyers can use. The features are user-friendly and convenient. To help process secure and quick transactions, we became certified partners with Paytabs, a Middle Eastern company that has been processing payments in the GCC.
What are benefits?
Valopay allows sellers to create a simple order link for each product, and the link can be shared with buyers anywhere, via email or social media or Whatsapp. The order link takes less than a minute to complete and asks for the buyer’s basic information, address, and whether they would like to pay online via Paytabs or cash on delivery.
Because sellers are registered with Valopay and under Paytabs for security, all online payments will be transferred to the seller’s bank account when a transaction is made.
What are the benefits for sellers?
-Free registration
-Receive payment online instantly
-Buyers can send payment anywhere, anytime
-A personal dashboard to track all transactions
-User friendly mobile optimized platform for daily use
Checkout our website at valopay.com
What have been the initial challenges and how did you overcome them?
Our challenges were:
1. The payments field was a new territory for us so we had to educate ourselves on the process and talk to
many experts.
2. We had to make various changes and that’s a learning process until we finally reached a stable stage to be able to test the concept. Who knows? We might have to make more changes but that’s what’s a startup about, taking the risks to keep developing your product!
3. Reaching out to sellers and buyers and have them experience a new change in their business process. No one likes change even though they are interested in the solution. It’s a task of educating them to take that first step with Valopay and see the benefits in action.
We overcame each challenge by being a team, trying out “out of the box” ideas and we never thought of anything as a failure but as a learning step. The more we tried to diversify our tactics, talk to different people of different ages and most importantly we kept on going.
How is Valopay different from any other online selling platform?
Valopay is a unique aspect is that it caters to the Instagram marketplace and it links payments and communication between buyers and sellers, for ecommerce payments in Bahrain, and the GCC. The two elements together make the right sauce! We are the first mobile friendly platform in GCC enabling payments within any mobile social application, including Whatsapp and email.
In this age of increasing shopping malls, why do you think online shopping has a future?
The Internet has changed many mindsets and the way they view things. With a modernized outlook, and a way of doing things, we simply can’t go back! If you can shop for anything you can find in a shopping mall, have it delivered to you and lets you track it track it at the same time? Why wouldn’t you shop online? Of course everything has its shortcomings but we now want one thing: convenience. I believe anything that has gone online slowly has eliminated its first traditional version or has a little bit of both.
Mobile usage in the Middle East and spending are the highest so put these two together: e-commerce opportunities boom and they will keep booming. Our solutions have to cater to these two elements.
Where do you see Valopay in the next 5 years?
The payments field in Bahrain is slowly transforming and we hope that in the next 5 years, Valopay will be the chosen platform for online sellers. We also hope Valopay can be an example for other startups that cater to the e-commerce and payments field.
What according to you are the essential qualities of a successful entrepreneur?
A successful entrepreneur should be able to have 3 main qualities:
– Have a drive to keep learning. Knowledge doesn’t stop and you can’t reach perfection, you always have to strive to go close to that
– Learn to appreciate failure and understand why you’ve failed in several areas. Your solutions come up in those times
– Balance your life. Being in a startup doesn’t mean you have to sleep less! It means you can sleep knowing you’ve made use of your time doing what you love the right balanced way
What is your message to aspiring entrepreneurs of Bahrain?
Don’t give up even if everyone doesn’t seem to understand your concept. Find a way for them to do so. Everyone learns about things differently – a cool video, a 30 minutes coffee session or being the social bee more than you’re used to. Keep going till you get your AHA moment or till they get the AHA moment for your product!