Meet the Egyptian Entrepreneurs Behind The New Online Service Eliminating Queues
With thorough backing from both the World Bank and the Ministry of Industry, these Egyptian entrepreneurs are eliminating the need to wait in line.
If there’s something that Egypt almost never runs out of, it’s queues; queues at the bank, queues at any of your standard governmental functions, university admission queues and so on. It’s safe to say that Egyptians spend about a quarter of their lives just waiting in line to get things done, valuable time that could have been spent productively elsewhere. One man had wasted enough time in queues his entire life, and thought to use his skillset along with those of his friends to abolish the waiting game once and for all, and after leaps, bounds, rises and falls, Dor-e came into existence.
The idea came to me when I was waiting in line at my bank, and after hours passed by, I managed to get to the front and realized I had missing paperwork.
Dor-e, a one-of-a-kind Egyptian queuing service, is one of the first startups to sign a long-term contract with the Egyptian government as a client, an extremely rare sight to say the least, but the reason for which is pretty easy to see; Dor-e gives the Egyptian citizen the invaluable option to keep their place in whatever line they need to be, without physically having to be there. With backing from the government, and financing from the World Bank, Dor-e aims to streamline the process of queuing from the ground up in all possible fields; banking, education, healthcare, automotive services and telecommunications. All you’d have to do is download the app, book your place in whatever line you need to be in, track your progress in real time as you go about your life and the app will notify you when your turn is about to come up. Currently, their service is web-based and client specific, with the app coming out of development later this year.
“The idea came to me when I was waiting in line at my bank, and after hours passed by, I managed to get to the front and realised I had missing paperwork, and now I’m back to square zero.” Mostafa Balbaa, CEO and Co-founder of Dor-e, told us in an interview, “I decided to use my skillset along with those of my friends to help end this nuisance for everybody out there, we pooled our resources together and here we are.” Currently, Dor-e operates with the AUC as well as the Al-Sagheer group, their work with the former has dramatically decreased waiting times in admission and advising lines, to the point where students are in disbelief of how quick and painless the queuing process is as opposed to what it was. The entrepreneurs have already signed deals to work with educational facilities and governmental authorities, making waiting in never-ending queues for the myriad governmental functions for Egyptian citizens a thing of the past. And for the 37 percent of citizens without access to modern phones, Dor-e will be available on publicly accessible tablets at relevant establishments, and will notify number holders via SMS, facilitating the process for all classes and demographics.
We’ve been faced with a tonne of roadblocks and obstacles along the way, same as with any endeavour, but we believed in what we were doing
The service is a testament to the massive potential for ingenuity that Egyptian startups are capable of, and they’re an example for perseverance in an environment that isn’t too susceptible to change. “We’ve been faced with a tonne of roadblocks and obstacles along the way, same as with any endeavour, but we believed in what we were doing, and despite months of constant struggle, we managed to sway the government itself, and with any luck, we’ll hopefully branch out internationally.” Hussein El Said, COO and Co-founder of Dor-e, told us with regards to the journey from concept to reality, who gave us a thorough demonstration of the web-based service along with CTO Majid Hassan and CXO Shehab Elnoury. With one of the entrepreneurs being an AUC alumnus and the rest having braved the tribulations of the GUC, they plan to be in the upcoming GUC Employment Fair to recruit valuable personnel for Dor-e, a chance not to pass up.
For more information about the game-changing app and the folks behind it, head over to their website as well as their Facebook page, and zip on over here to try their services at the AUC. If you feel like giving people back their lives and helping Dor-e reach newer heights, send them an email on Careers@Dor-e.com for a chance to work with some of the country’s most promising minds.
