JEDDAH: Three finance graduates who were PricewaterhouseCoopers interns together have started up an online and mobile company offering ordinary car drivers the chance to make money without working any extra hours.
Shiftah, which launched in Riyadh, already has plans to extend into the Makkah region later this same year. Further expansion is planned to include all the major cities in the Kingdom and the Gulf Cooperation Council region.
“We thought about the ongoing change in the Saudi market. The increasing support for small- and medium-sized enterprises and entrepreneurship in the country, and how we could benefit from that in starting our own business. That was when we started to look into industries that have been operating in the same traditional way, aiming to introduce tech-based solutions to it,” explained Salem Aljawini, co-founder, and CEO at Shiftah.
Shiftah has a shared-economy model. It was co-founded in 2017 by three young Saudi entrepreneurs — Salem Aljawini, Muath Altukhaifi, and Ahmed Aloraifi. They had analyzed business reforms and decided to build their own startup with the main goal of reshaping the conventional advertisement industry in the Kingdom.
Aljawini said: “The three of us hold bachelor’s degrees in finance and did an internship at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), where we started to discuss our careers options and the opportunities to start our own businesses... five years later we started to discuss Shiftah.”
Shiftah is an online platform inviting car owners to earn extra income by displaying adverts on their vehicles. Shiftah promises to turn everyone’s car into a moving billboard, generating extra income for local car owners who just need to display adverts on their cars. The lure for the advertiser is that it promises to be an affordable way of boosting their profiles.
Aljawini explained: “The young generation of Saudis are highly attuned to the new tech-based options to increase their income, while outdoor advertising is costly and used to be exclusive to large companies. That led us to think of ways to introduce a model which would be attractive to both ends in providing outdoor advertisement services car owners would be able to generate extra and easy money, and outdoor advertising would be efficient to SMEs as well as large companies.
“Drivers will be able to earn between SR500 and SR3,000 a month without working any extra hours and with no additional money, basically by wrapping the sides of their cars and going through their daily commutes,” said Muath Altukhaifi co-founder and managing partner at Shiftah.
While it was funded by Wa’ed Ventures, in its early stages it was self-funded by the team, with the focus of developing a minimum viable product (MVP) in order to approach angel investors and venture capitals for seed funding.
Aljawini said: “We were lucky to have a big and reputable venture capital (Wa’ed Ventures) as our first investor. The proceeds were used to enhance and improve our website and technology.
“That also helped us capture the attention of big players in the Kingdom’s entrepreneurial ecosystem such as the Small and Medium Enterprises General Authority (Monsha’at) and Badir Program for Technology Incubators which allowed us the opportunity to represent the Saudi startups in several events around the world and showcase Shiftah.”
Drivers and car owners can use Shiftah through simple online registration on either the website or the mobile application (available through the App Store and Google Play) where they can choose one of the listed campaigns, and get paid for driving around the campaign area. At the same time, companies and SMEs can control their marketing and advertisement budget with an option that is almost 50 percent cheaper than traditional outdoor advertisements options.
“So far, we have launched our operation in Riyadh and plan to expand to the Makkah region this year. Further expansion will include all the major cities in the Kingdom and the Gulf Cooperation Council region,” Aljawini added.
