Abdalaziz Elbahnasy, 28 years old, Bachelor of Mechanical Power Engineering, Co-Founder & COO of Tegarti.

Just because you did not find the way, does not mean that there is no way. The effort you will do will not be wasted, and it will open unexpected doors for you that you didn't even knock. Trust god... keep hustling.

Abdalaziz Elbahnasy, 28 years old, Bachelor of Mechanical Power Engineering, Co-Founder & COO of Tegarti.

For his admiration of technology and growing passion for solving problems using it, Abdalaziz learned that embedding technology in the right service can positively impact his society, solve problems, and make people's lives easier. 

His ambition throughout the course of his life, and his passion for technology and impact led him to a tough career uncertainty at the early beginnings; either to write code and help with building solutions that add value, or to get in the business of solving problems -entrepreneurship- with sustainable models, and use the help of the brilliant software developers he had in his network.

His passion for analyzing, validating, and solving problems using technology, triggered by his passion for business, and driven by his enthusiasm for impact led him to choose technology entrepreneurship.

Abdalaziz started his journey in technology entrepreneurship while he was still a student. He started with internships in tech startups, jobs in other companies, founding and launching tech solutions, failing, learning, growing and trying again with full-time jobs at other companies until his latest employment was at a startup that was founded by his current partner at Tegarti.

Ideas are everywhere. Moreover, successful solutions are all over the market too, and it's never about the idea, but the implementation within a sustainable layout and a profitable model.

In most cases, building a technology product that solves a real pain come from problems that you face yourself, a struggle that your close people go through, or an experience with a specific underdeveloped industry that you encountered.

And don't get me wrong, ideas are still critically important, and they gain their actual value after testing and validation, but implementation and go-to-market strategy are the keys to success. Sometimes the differentiation between two service providers is just the angle of implementation, even with identical technologies.

The problem that Abdalaziz is currently solving with his team -which consists of different extensive business experiences and strong technological backgrounds besides their background in the retail industry- is that more than 75% of merchants in Egypt still use pen and paper in bookkeeping and business management, while on the other hand, the Digital Commerce market is developing quickly and negatively affecting the market share of the traditional trade merchants.

Today, micro, small and medium retailers are not only worried about managing their businesses or keeping their books, inventory, and cash right, but they're facing a huge threat to their sustainability and even future existence.

The solution was to provide a software as a service (SaaS) that is completely easy to use for these merchants, works online and offline, and is compatible with their educational level, culture, and different backgrounds.

Not only that, it's hardware agnostic so they can run and grow their businesses using only their mobile phones without any initial investments in special hardware or specific setups. Moreover, it's subscription-based with very affordable payment plans for the average merchant.

By using Tegarti, merchants can register their accounts, create their stores, add their products, manage their sales and inventories, manage their costs, expenses, employees, and track the whole cash flow in a very simple way that a barely educated merchant would understand. Adding to that, store owners can track all the transactions happening at their stores remotely at any time and from anywhere on a real-time basis, so that if they have multiple stores or branches, they wouldn't have to visit each one multiple times a day.

The Software also integrates various digital service providers such as electronic payment services, delivery services, e-commerce services, and other retail-focused digital services thriving in the market.

This way, Tegarti becomes a one-stop platform for the whole retail ecosystem; connecting merchants with different service providers, and gathering services providers in one marketplace that induces more compatibility and enables collaboration and integration rather than competition.

Through Tegarti, the traditional trade merchants will smoothly become an essential part of the digital commerce movement, without investing anything extra over the devices they have and the businesses they run.

Sustainability and growth for traditional micro, small and medium retail businesses is what drives the ambition of Abdalaziz and his team to scale their product not only in Egypt, but across Africa and the Middle East.

Discussing his daily routine, Abdalaziz said that he starts his day early to get enough time and space during his day to do more, and not a day passes without reading at least one article to develop himself more. An article that might take 10-15 minutes of reading, might be equivalent to, or even more informative than a whole book; taking the author's experience and background into consideration.

Abdalaziz gave advice to the younger generation in the field of entrepreneurship, telling them: Go ahead and do not imprison your ambition in any way, and do not listen to those who tell you that it is not suitable for you and that entrepreneurship is for certain people, this is meaningless and unreal. However, if you're sure this is what you want, be ready to pay an expensive price to get on the road.

Entrepreneurship Is Not Exclusive, BUT, it's tough and exhausting by all possible means. It affects your mental and physical health, it affects your social life, and it's full of uncertainties and rapid changes.

If this is still your choice, your first step shall never be building a business, neither with your own nor with your family's money.

Work at a startup first, learn from others' mistakes, do internships, work for free or get a job, build a career and grow your experience in different aspects, try different roles, volunteer for more responsibilities, challenge yourself, and build a strong network.

When the time is right, the opportunity will represent itself to kick-off your next big thing.