interview - Tbs Alumni Association

Chaima Chaouachi Story

admin — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 12:30:29 +0000

I started TBS in 2010 with the first generation. And then I completed my bachelor degree in 2016 with double majors which are marketing and business analysis. I was the first student who ever has a double degree in TBS. After graduation, I worked with civil society, with a multinational firm as a communication and marketing’s head of department, as a LSU, which is social corporate responsibilities department and then moved back to the civil society. This is because I believed in that we live to make an impact.

“Now, can we say that TELA is primarily a social enterprise? ”

Yes, it is a social business. It started with a personal experience when I had my mom got sick. I didn’t know how to manage working outside and at home. Hence, using my marketing and communication skills, I created a platform that connects households with professionals to speed up the process of getting things done easily, professionally and smoothly. This marketplace also meant to support small businesses from shutting down during the pandemic period. I started working with the cleaning services then, enlarged my database to the babysitting volunteers, plumbers, etc. Currently, I reached 1 000 professionals from all over Tunisia and I’m expecting to reach 10 000 after developing the mobile application soon in April. In a short period of time, I was managed to make Tela to have the label of a startup even though I was a 9-5 employee.

To know more about Chaima’s success story and how she made it to the top, please check out the next podcast!

The post Chaima Chaouachi Story first appeared on Tbs Alumni Association.

Imen MAAROUFI Co-founder and chief strategy officer of Point Motion

admin — Sun, 27 Feb 2022 13:11:28 +0000

I am an entrepreneur, art lover, and technology enthusiast. I am absolutely Tunisian. And I could say that even though I lived in so many places in the world, I could say that I identify myself as a design thinker, because it identifies how I feel and how I think. And I could also say that I am a creative problem solver.

Given the fact that TBS has an entrepreneurial culture, I was already having an entrepreneurial mindset to create businesses instead of applying for a job. Meanwhile, I was focused on learning more because the more, you know; the more you know that you don’t know. After a decent experience, I realized that I needed to do more like co-founding an idea that I had with my partner and bringing it to reality.

So Point Motion is a company co-founded by Kevin Clark and me. The idea came about when a family member has suffered a spinal cord injury after a motorcycle accident. When US people go for physical therapy, the doctor gives them a list of physical activities that they have to do at home to get better. The problem is that often those people get very intimidated by the exercises and they don’t show any motivation to do them. And that creates a lack of adherence in therapy and worsens the cases.

It’s a vision from Kevin Clark, a Berkeley college of music alumnus that popped up. His background is in jazz composition and film scoring. The idea was how can we use music to be able to motivate people, to adhere to their physical therapy and be able to notify their doctors of their current state. The solution is about translating body movement into music. So when somebody moves a specific breed of their body, they make the sound.

So, we created a cause and effect relationship between movement and music. This helped people feel more engaged to do those activities prescribed. And at the same time we combined motion capture technology using computer vision to be able to track in real-time those movements and translate them to data.

So, one thing that I learned is that it’s not about bringing the product to the customer. Instead, it has more to do with satisfying the customers’ needs with the right product.

What I’d love to tell TBS students and the new generation is to cherish this period of time to make sure that they use every moment to learn and to get internships, part-time jobs, etc. and it’s ok to learn and fail without fearing the judgements.

If you want to know more about Imen Maaroufi’s success story, please listen to her podcast for more !

Stay tuned for more stories

The post Imen MAAROUFI Co-founder and chief strategy officer of Point Motion first appeared on Tbs Alumni Association.

This article is about three TBSers, two graduates and one who has a senior mini project !

admin — Sun, 27 Feb 2022 11:18:23 +0000

Hello my name is Wael Gargouri. I am 23 years old. I joined TBS in 2017 one month later after the kickoff of studies after unpleasant experience in a private university. I joined first MERIT TBS as my first experience in a club. That’s where I started learning new hard skills like graphic design, motion design, and WordPress development. I also had the chance to attend many bootcamps and trips held by other clubs

“Life is so short to be employed in a full-time job. Take on the risk, get out of your comfort zone and show to the people the real version of you.. ”

In late 2019, my first partner Ahmed Ben Mahmoud and I decided to start a development agency dedicated to building new websites for small clients I know from my network. To start, we set a Bootcamp challenge in Ahmed’s house to finish the company’s website in 4 days and we succeeded in achieving that goal.

When covid hit the world we ceased our activities and I was interested in spending more time with family than sticking to the computer wasting my time on social media. March 2020 was a turning point in my desperate situation when a company from France contacted me to start working with its CTO as a virtual personal assistant to organize the workflow and supervise the team. At the same time, I landed my first contract on Upwork as virtual Boutique manager for a German Jewelry company. I enjoyed the work process and especially the multitasking although I felt overwhelmed by the amount of work sometimes. I managed this situation till the end of August 2020 when I decided to leave everything and start focusing on my senior year.

The post-first pandemic period, October 2020, was known for its social media boom and the fact that businesses must turn to the digital world to continue to operate otherwise they won’t last too long operating. That’s where Ahmed saw a potential for starting a business idea to help content creators make a new stream of monetizing their work on the social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube. This kind of monetization is an alternative to the collaborations’ payout and the low revenues caused by the low CPM rate in our country and in the MENA region.

So I contacted my friend Abdelhalim who was the creators’ friend like Yassine Sondes, Samy Chaffy, Mo5ek Ejja… and asked if the idea would be in the interest of the creators. Directly, he felt the potential of the idea and jumped to enhance it and give it a legitimate aspect.

As for the mini senior project, I opted to develop more deeply the idea to create an identity for the project and started developing the platform with my teammate in the senior project Ahmed ben Mahmoud during the first 6 months of 2021. We had many Bootcamp at home for days and even weeks. Adam, who was a junior student at that time, hadn’t had a successful application in a startup with his old startup idea. When I told him about this, he was hesitant at first since his first rejection of startupAct devastated him. Later in January, he accepted the challenge and joined the team.

In July 2021 we applied for the ImpactUP incubator program organized by Startup Haus and we were accepted from the beginning since they saw potential in the team and the program was freshly new. Later September we applied for the startup label to officialize our entity as a business, we were the last ones to apply and we submitted before 1 hour of the deadline, so, don’t lose hope buddy ! We got our pre-label later in October. We were super excited to start the journey and we kicked off the legal aspect of the company to obtain the label certificate.

At the same time, I was introduced to a French guy running a development agency having an expert certification in Shopify development called Expertify. After working for several weeks with Ahmed and Adam, he decided to invest in Tunisia by starting a new branch of his company in
Tunis. Since, I was experienced in launching companies and I had a large network in Tunis,

I introduced him to technopole Ghazala, one of the best workplaces in Tunisia. The staff was welcoming and they shortcutted procedures to convince him to start as soon as possible. We are now in the phase of decorating the office to make it a home for many innovative ideas and projects. As of 22 February 2022, we are a team of 12 people, half of them are from TBS, and two have end of studies internships. A big thanks to Adam Boulila and Ahmed ben Mahmoud who made this investment opportunity come to life and flourish.

As for Unify, we were lucky and super enthusiastic to fulfill our fire milestone in the startup, which is our label at the beginning of February 2022 and we are launching our first mentoring session with a social media artist well known in VFX art in March 2022. A big shootout to my co-founders Halim Zaibi, the CEO and the salesman, Ahmed and Adam, Binkey and Brain, CTO and co-CTO

The post This article is about three TBSers, two graduates and one who has a senior mini project ! first appeared on Tbs Alumni Association.