3Bont: The First Middle Eastern Platform for Football Content

Usually, a normal football fan goes through tremendous hassle to follow up on a match in specific, or all the football news in general. “He wants to know the score, watch the video, see the social feeds, and follow the news all at the same time.” Mohamed Abdeltawab, founder of 3Bont, said.

3Bont came to solve this hassle; it’s the first Arabic personalized football platform that brings quick access to the best, freshest, on-demand content in the football world from all over the globe so that the users wouldn’t miss a thing from the moments that matter to them.

“We, 3Bont team, are people who love football. We’ve been through this hassle almost on daily basis, and we knew from the market research we’ve done that around 45 million football fans in the Middle East go through the same hassle and discomfort. So we decided to collect and unite all the football data and content in one single platform that is tailored to each user’s preferences.” Abdeltawab explained where the idea came from. He also highlighted the role of 3Bont team in turning the idea into reality and said that without Moustafa Ashraf, co-founder of 3bont, and Amr Afia, CMO, and Abdelrahman Meniawy, Backend Developer, the idea wouldn’t have been out to the light soon.

3Bont platform gives the users control over the sports content they want to see by letting them choose what they love, so they would find on the platform all the news, videos, and social content according to their choice of preferences.

Challenges

According to Abdeltawab, a big challenge 3Bont faced was the negative feedback from different people, consultants, and professionals. “They would tell us that our idea won’t succeed because what’s already in the market satisfies the audience’s needs. Or they would tell us that we would need a big amount of money to acquire users. Everyone was somehow demotivating us but we chose to continue.” Abdeltawab said.

What made 3Bont overcome the different challenges they faced, Abdeltawab claims, was the passion towards the idea itself and the persistence on solving a problem many people face on daily basis. “The feeling of responsibility to solve this hassle gave us a weird energy and feeling of patience and persistence. It was like having two different jobs; the regular job and the other one that doesn’t bring you money but you do it for the sake of all the football fans in the Middle East, and for the sake of the idea itself.” He said.

Funds and Achievements

3Bont was incubated in TIEC at March 2016, after winning “the best platform” in TIEC’s competition. However, the startup is still self-funded.

Also among different 6000 startups participating in the MIT Arab Competition, 3Bont reached the finals and was one of the top 10 idea stage startups in the Arab world. Not only that, but also 3Bont was selected to present their idea at ArabNET KSA last December and they won the second place by the audience votes.

“We didn’t win the MIT competition; however, we got an investor out of the event. Actually, he was one of the panelists and he publicly offered us to fund our needs. We also participated in Gitex and got another investor out of the event, but we still refused them both because they didn’t fulfill our needs.” Abdeltawab said.

Mohamed Abdeltawab, founder and CEO of 3bont.

And, another achievement for 3Bont is that after two months of its launch, it had 16,000 unique visitors and 90,000 page views. “People were really impressed when we presented these numbers at Gitex,” Abdeltawab commented. Now, 3Bont platform has more than 100,000 page views per month, and its facebook page has 120,000 likes.

Also, 3Bont just released a new feature in the platform called “Stadium”. This feature allows the users to add content and get money from it through the likes the post gets. “This feature is considered our first step in crowdsourcing the content on 3Bont”.

3Bont is now looking for a $300k investment to fully cover the Middle East and Africa by the end of this year. Also according to Abdeltawab, if 3Bont got the investment it needs, it’ll be one of the top three platforms that provide football content in the Middle East in a period of six months.

Say Something to young Students and Entrepreneurs

“Do not follow people’s negative feedback. Don’t stop if anyone told you ‘no you won’t succeed’. Your success only depends on the amount of effort you’re willing to exert on your idea and the amount of belief and passion you have towards it,” Abdeltawab said advising aspiring entrepreneurs.

Finally, he said that there were many good ideas that didn’t succeed or endure in the market so choosing a good team to make the idea succeed is more important than the idea itself. And he finished his advice saying: “You have to study the market well, but don’t spend a lot of time developing your idea. Enter the market, validate your idea, then develop it and work on it”.