Meet An Entrepreneur
By Nayrouz Talaat
Tarek Mandour has co-founded Mazboot app in 2018 with Ahmed Medhat, a doctor and health tech entrepreneur who strongly believe in the power of technology in facing complex healthcare challenges. The app is an in-app coach for helping diabetic patients self-manage their disorder and consult doctors. In an interview with co-founder and managing director, Mandour reveals more about the main aim of the app and how it solves lifestyle issues for diabetics. Mazboot is the Arabic word for ‘normal’ result after a patient measures his diabetes level.
EG: Why did you start and what was the passion?
TM: The idea came after my co-founder Ahmed was working on a research for diabetic patients on the sidelines of developmental charitable projects in his place of birth, and he was shocked by the results of statistics, as the prevalence of diabetes was very large.
At that time Ahmed had a passion for combining medicine and technology, especially when he saw that Egypt ranked ninth globally in terms of the number of diabetics. An amount of $17 billion a year is spent on the disease and its complications for 39 million diabetics.
What added to Ahmed’s determination to implement the idea was that his father was diagnosed with diabetes. Despite the fact that Ahmed is a doctor, he faced some difficulties in monitoring his father because follow-up visits were every three months and the treatment plan not only contained drugs but also lifestyle modifications such as diet, physical activity and checkups.
EG: What are the issues you are dealing with?
TM: Diabetes is a chronic health condition that requires patients to be educated, empowered and motivated to self-manage their disease to avoid severe health complications. The market gap is that current healthcare systems in Egypt and Arab countries don’t provide proper services for diabetic patients in terms of patient self awareness, specialised insurance models nor smart interaction with healthcare providers.
Diabetes needs a management plan that’s so complicated including not only medications but a whole lifestyle change. This demotivates patients and does not empower them enough to follow the plan, so they develop serious complications. Meanwhile, doctors don’t have enough time to educate the patient about how to control their glucose measurements and this decreases patient retention at the doctor’s clinic.
Mazboot provides people with diabetes a personal assistant (conversational agent) that empowers them within their daily life to take care of their glucose measurements, diet, medications, physical fitness, and required checkups. Mazboot also offers patients a smart communication channel with their doctors. Besides this, Mazboot helps patients to face the financial burden of diabetes management by marketplace offers that offer patients discounts on all diabetes management products like glucometer strips, medications and even healthy meals.
EG: What is the app actually providing to the patients?
TM: The mobile application helps diabetes patients in their daily lives as it is a tool to communicate with their doctors and get a health record and general information about diabetes. It also connects patients with doctors through a smart system to follow-up with their patients, involving caregivers to motivate patients and take care of them.
EG: What is the team’s background?
TM: Our team of co-founders are from diverse backgrounds that were enough for conception and making this innovative idea into reality.
The team consists of Tarek Mandour and Ahmed Hamed. Tarek holds a bachelor degree in Computer Engineering from Menoufia University, he is also fond of technology entrepreneurship. Tarek’s passion is to develop and commercialise technologies that add value to people’s lives. He is responsible for driving the growth of the company and executing top-level strategies in marketing, business development, and product management. Tarek has a proven executive management track record in many startups and NGOs like Health 2.0 Egypt. He is on the top 25 list of entrepreneurs under 25 to be one of the most promising young business leaders in Egypt.
Ahmed has experience in managing national health projects in development organisations and was on an internship at the WHO regional office. He is certified as a professional in healthcare quality (CPHQ).
EG: How do you stand out from the competition?
TM: Mazboot supports Arabic language and takes into account the habits of the Arab diabetics towards diabetes, such as dealing with diet and glucose measurements and other important things for the patient, despite there are many Arabic language apps, almost all of them just show static informational content with no interactivity or personalisation for users.
The app coaches patients in their daily life, coming with an interactive comprehensive solution for diabetes management with localised experience for Arab countries. Mazboot offers comprehensive diabetes management solution.
EG: Tell us more about the process, users and business model.
TM: We have more than 5000 monthly active users and more than 500 premium subscribers in our services. We provide our premium services to diabetic patients through Mazboot subscriptions (3-month, 6-month or annual) that include diabetes coach service, doctor consultations, and nutritionist consultation.
We also offer diabetes population’s health solutions for hospitals and clinics and most importantly insurance companies for which we provide an insure-tech model for diabetes.
Moreover, we provide sponsorship packages for pharmaceutical and glucometer companies, and any service providers for diabetics to sponsor customised challenges on the app or offer service in our marketplace on the app which the patient buys through our mobile wallet and we receive a commission from the transaction.
EG: What are your main challenges?
TM: We all know that every tech startup faces a lot of challenges. Right from development, and funding to the final launch and marketing of the product, the entire process is a daunting task.
To really develop an application it definitely requires an ample amount of money. It is not just a one-time investment but the changes and value addition features also require an adequate amount of money.
EG: What are your achievements and coming plan?
TM: We have reached more than 5,000 monthly active users also we have raised about $120,000 as pre-seed funding. Also, we have joined EBRD star venture programme in order to be qualified for the seed round.
We graduated from Falak Startups accelerator, and we won first place as a top winner in Hult Prize Egypt Ideathon and the app won second place in start-up track competition 3 in Mobile App Launchpad which organised by the MCIT and Google.
We were selected as the best social startup in Egypt in the Ma’an Arab University Alliances Competition from AUC and finally selected from IOM as one of the best startups in Egypt.
In addition, we have won challenges from pharmaceutical companies like MSD in Switzerland and Sanofi in France.
Our plan is to expand your service this year into a new market in GCC (in Bahrain) to test a new model also we plan to integrate with hardware glucometer to provide a more comprehensive service for diabetic patients
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