Pictured above at LinkedIn’s headquarters, from left to right, CTO Mehdi Mehni, Senior Product Manager, Cédric Poirier, Senior Software Engineer at LinkedIn Muhieddine El Kaissi, and COO Taoufik El Jamali. Photo: Wamda
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* “When I arrived in Silicon Valley, I changed my mind. I was no longer afraid to talk about my vision, because the most important part is not the vision, but its implementation,” says Moroccan entrepreneur Taoufik El Jamali. *
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Wamda, by Aline Mayard (June 30, 2014) — Despite his success, Taoufik El Jamali is largely unknown in Morocco; too bad, given that his business wins could serve as inspirations for many of his North African peers. In just five years, the entrepreneur was able to grow and sell his businesses Unyk to Viadeo, and helped sell Netclub to Match.com, the number one professional social network in French-speaking countries and in China. Today, he is the co-founder of Viral Ninja, a viral customer acquisition platform based in Montreal with a team of North American, French, and North African talents that recently became Sociable Labs after a merger. Here he reflects on his journey and give us tips for a successful exit.
20 million users
After earning a bachelor’s degree in aeronautics at a university in Moscow and working for three years in engineering in Morocco, Taoufik moved to Montreal in 2002 to pursue his master’s studies in e-business and delve into what was then called NICT, New Information and Communication Technologies. There, he met Sebastien Brault, a Québécois working on his third startup: an early dating website launched in France and Québec, called Netclub.com. Together, they sought to create a website that could help drive traffic to Sebastien’s website. In 2004, they created Unyk.com, a smart address book that groups all contacts in a single address book and automatically updates the information of those contacts.
“We spent zero dollars on marketing, and one month after the launch, we had 30,000 registering every day,” the entrepreneur said. This is a success he attributed to the viral nature of the product; you had to invite contacts so their information would be updated automatically, and a lot of time spent on ensuring the sharing process will be seamless. That the app was online in English, French, and Spanish from the beginning also helped get people sharing. For three years, the two entrepreneurs worked on both startups. That changed in 2007, when they realized Unyk was the startup with the more potential, selling NetClub, with its four million users, to Match.com who was focusing on expansion to francophone markets. This allowed in turn for Sebastien and Taoufik to focus their human and financial resources on Unyk. Shortly thereafter, Unyk reached 10 million users. Inspired by the success of LinkedIn and Viadeo, the team developed a strategy to turn the address book into a professional social network whose added value would be the synchronization of contacts with one’s address book. And so they began raising a $15 million round.
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