High-Impact Entrepreneurship

Endeavor Enterpreneur Amr Shady of Egypt-based mobile value-added service provider company T.A. Telecom describes how he got his start pitching mobile advertising concepts, how an initial meeting with the CEO of Vodafone kickstarted their pivot into value-added services, and how having a bootstrapped approach to making profit helped him sell his first big clients.

They’ve been growing the company in terms of revenue 10 times every 5 years, Shady says, lately benefitting from assistance from Endeavor since T.A. Telecom was selected in 2011. He advises young entrepreneurs to test, test, test, and be open to feedback.

“It’s important not to [simply] take someone’s opinion on an idea. If you believe in a service, you need to really test. We’ve learned to double down once it’s generating cash and it’s a scalable project,” says Shady.