Startups to Watch: Fix It
Fix It - The sharing economy is predicted to reach an astounding $335B by 2025. The peer-to-peer business model, exemplified by Uber and AirBnB, has become one of the biggest business models worldwide. The MENA region is no stranger to this collaborative model with the Iraqi market witnessing its fair share of online marketplaces developed for industries such as photography, transportation, and e-commerce to name a few. On June 18, Five One Invest caught up with Zahraa Alabdali, CEO at Fix It. Fix It is a peer-to-peer repair services platform, based in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, connecting customers with technicians and engineers to provide home and building services, such as plumbing, electrical repair, and more.
Zahraa, the founder of Fix It, first developed the idea for Fix It when she was home alone with her daughter, and a pipe burst in their kitchen sink. She suddenly panicked. Who could she contact to fix the leak? How could she source someone trustworthy and skilled? That was how the seed for her idea was planted.
In 2019, during Zahraa’s enrollment at Five One Labs’ tech incubator program, her minimum viable product (MVP) evolved. Zahraa’s market research in the city of Sulaimani revealed that more than 90% of her target audience faces two main challenges when sourcing a maintenance technician: first, locating a technician willing to provide services at a time convenient for the customer and second, finding a proficient and skilled worker. Based on these parameters, her MVP came to fruition. Zahraa describes her startup in three words: simple, fast, and safe. Ultimately, she wants to provide people with peace of mind. Currently, Fix It operates in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq in Sulaimani and Erbil. In 2022, Fix It plans to expand its operations into Dohuk and Halabja. Zahraa’s long-term target is to expand services to all of the Iraqi market.
Over the past two years, Zahraa’s startup journey has been backed by several entrepreneurial support programs. When Zahraa graduated from the Five One Labs’ GIZ-supported incubator in February 2020, she was one of ten startups that won funding from a partnership between the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and Five One Labs. IOM provided Fix It with a $20,000 grant, and Zahraa was able to launch her app and serve customers immediately. In December 2020, Zahraa graduated from Takween Accelerator’s first cohort, where she focused on business growth with the support of expert trainers and mentors. Zahraa also successfully completed a UNITAR program on how to grow her business. Finally, Zahraa won the local Iraq competition of the Seedstars Global Competition.
Fix It has seen a lot of traction when it comes to usage and adoption of services. A main trigger for this growth is the impact of Covid-19 on people’s online usage and consumption habits. The pandemic has prompted a huge cultural shift within Iraq, where people’s appetite for, and acceptance of, online services has dramatically increased. This has been to the benefit of peer-to-peer services such as Fix It. 2019 to 2020 witnessed an increase of 60% of repeat customers and 4x increase in revenues. During the COVID shutdown, app downloads and service requests more than doubled! Fix It’s social media reflects this, where Facebook likes have increased from 1,000 in 2019 to more than 10,000 in 2020. When Fix It first started out in Sulaimani, it had four technicians. By 2021, Fix It has over 50 technicians spread over both Sulaimani and Erbil.
Zahraa is now ready to take her startup to the next level through investment funding. However, raising investment as a female founder in Iraq is not easy. First, most nascent regional ecosystems face a gap in seed and angel funding; this is particularly pronounced in the Iraqi market at this point in time. Additionally, according to an Arabnet report, female founders in the MENA region are mainly more active in early-stage businesses, and very few female-led startups raise big-ticket deals. The shortage of female investors/partners in both the regional and Iraqi markets may explain some of the funding imbalance of female-led startups. However, in spite of this, we remain optimistic that building seed stage investment knowledge and sharing stories like Zahraa’s will be effective ways in which to increase funding for Iraqi startups.
If you would like to learn more about Fix It’s products and services, you can learn more here.
If you would like to support Zahraa, feel free to connect with her directly.