Get Ready to Automate Like Never Before With RTILA Software

Mohamed Es Fih:
RTILA is not just an automation software is an automation software making software. So now, now that you have constrained factory building factories, it's a tooling. It's a tooling, it's a tool that makes tools.

Mikael Hugg:
You know, it's our pleasure to have you here. So welcome.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Thanks, Mikael. And thanks for.

Mikael Hugg:
So.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Thanks for having me here. Yes. So where are.

Mikael Hugg:
Where are you right now? What is what is your current location? I noticed that there's multiple countries in your profile.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Yeah, I traveled a lot. I lived in almost all the continents. But right now, I've been living in Mauritius for the last two months. Oh, nice. A bit of a diagonal from you.

Mikael Hugg:
Oh. That's true. That's true. The teams same time zone. So yeah I've been actually in marriages as well. It's a beautiful, beautiful island. Yeah it's.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Cool. And they're doing well also at the digital level. So you know, you think that if you have a software you start.

Mohamed Es Fih:
So yeah they've made a lot of progress. Oh really. You could say it's the Estonia of of the African continent.

Mikael Hugg:
Wow. All right. That that's great because you know when I was there well it's I don't know 14 years ago. Oh no. Okay. Maybe it's no ten years ago or seven years ago, actually. Yeah. Something like that. Times flight. You know, time just flies so fast. So. But yeah, I remember that. I saw some sort of, you know, some articles about Mauritius trying to get a lot of like banking economics people there like all over the world. And they were trying to build like a new financial center there. Yeah. That's right. So yeah, I really liked the idea. And that's, that is the way to go. Well, yeah, I didn't I didn't even realize that there's a startup community.

Mohamed Es Fih:
And so yeah, I think it's getting good. You know, I mean, once you plug your country into one of the major optic fiber cable for internet, you know, you have you have an island and the beaches.

Mohamed Es Fih:
And then with the very good infrastructure and some good policies as well. Very true.

Mikael Hugg:
Very true. How long you been there?

Mohamed Es Fih:
Two months. So I'm pretty new, you know.

Mikael Hugg:
Oh, okay. So you just came there?

Mohamed Es Fih:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it was it was a very calculated decision.

Mikael Hugg:
And and where you can come from, you know, before you went to.

Mohamed Es Fih:
The French Moroccan. I'm born in France and I'm French citizen, but I also have a Moroccan citizenship because our family is from there. Right. So?

Mikael Hugg:
So then Mauritius is.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Perfect for you. Yeah, they speak French. They speak English. It's very multicultural. It's it has a bit. It has a bit of an Asian vibe, you know, so you're in the African continent but with an Asian touch. So it has and it has also you know the history brought brings so many different people together. You have Europeans, you have Asians, Africans all living here pretty nicely together. Yes.

Mikael Hugg:
Maybe you can sell something about your current company. The art dealer. Or did I, did I? That's right. Yeah.

Mohamed Es Fih:
So let's start with the etymology. You know, the the meaning of the name. So, like I told you, my my origins are from Morocco. And actually this software was created in Morocco by, by my partner Tariq. So when he chose the name. Means in the North African dialect, it means the spider.

Mikael Hugg:
Okay, so that's the reason why you have the spider.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Yeah. So it matches the ambition or or the activity of the software, which is, you know, going on on the web and spreading your, your competitiveness, let's say through automation. So that's what it means. Or it means spider and it does what, what what it says. So we started we started the as mainly a web scraping software. That was like the first strength. But then, you know, you evolve and then the users, they guide you. And so now it's it's really going into like a full fledged automation, even bridging to APIs, rpas, desktop automation, web automation.

Mohamed Es Fih:
So once you start to put your finger in these kind of things, you know, you get drawn into so much, you want to do so much more. So that's that's where we are right now. Actually, we just went out of being a top tier web scraping and data mining, and now we're entering the space of of bringing that power of, of getting the data into linking it to chat, GPT, data analysis, data formatting and then marketing. You know, the whole marketing space can be automated as well. So now, now, now the software can take you like from the origin of the data up to the last mile of your data, which is usually monetizing or building traffic and so on.

Mikael Hugg:
So can you walk us through about the ideal case where this would be beneficial? Let's say, you know, because me and Arden, we are both growth hackers. So of course we are interested of on on all these, you know, the whole journey from finding somebody and turning them into clients. So so if you're going to walk us through like a hypothetical perfect scenario where all the all these different steps would be beneficial. Yeah.

Mohamed Es Fih:
So so there are two schools or let's say two approaches. Yeah. You have the how you call it, the heavy bombardment approach where you try to target everybody. So you like mass scrapping information, then mass mailing mass contacting mass everything. That's one way which our software can support very well, because the way we've built it is that it consumes the minimum resources in terms of CPU run. So and then it's it's really stable. So you can we we've run we've run automation flows that lasted for 200 hours in one go. So 200 hours it was running and collecting like 100,000 data sets rose. So so for that part it's good. But I think the scenario where it could be more interested, interesting for your case is that we now have this capacity where you can spot the intent, then activate your automation. So you could set up our Teyla to look at at certain influencers who talk about your industry as soon as they post.

Mohamed Es Fih:
And there is this keyword or that keyword then. Then whoever commands whoever react means that they are interested in this subject. Now I know, I know when they are interested, which is right now in the last few minutes. Then they then can activate a whole flow that is like you have the intent, but also you will be the first one to reach that that persona, that group of person who manifested the intent. And I think that is even more powerful.

Mikael Hugg:
So. But how so? Is it like you can you can add it to your social media account and then they are going to send like direct messages or something like that, or just they're going to, you know, is that able to find like emails or.

Mohamed Es Fih:
You have different.

Mikael Hugg:
Approach numbers or.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Something. Easiest way is that you you already identify the sources where people post information and people react to that information that that you're interested in. And then you you set up a scheduler. So Attila would go and check every five minutes, every one minute, every one hour or whatever you wish, and then you give it.

Mohamed Es Fih:
We have conditional logic. So you can say that if this keyword appear then initiate this flow. If that keyword appear, initiate that flow. And then you build your logic and then you just let it and it will be like surveilling that that space. And then pinpoint because you know you can as soon as somebody commands, you can do like you can send the message of that person to child and get like, what's what's the main idea behind they want to buy. They want more information. You know, you can fine tune it. And then depending on the classification of that message, then you can also initiate a different flow. And then once you do that now you know that somebody is interested in something. Right now, you can be super customized in terms of your approach to that individual or that company. So you can, for example, now that you have the nickname or the name, you can also use APIs or use another flow or Tila can connect to Apollo or any kind of contact. Source where you can get the email, the Facebook and so on.

Mohamed Es Fih:
And then it grabs your databases. Then you grab that data, and then in the next one minute you've crafted a custom message right on time. In the right place, you can answer within that flow. You can get to answer there to that message and at the same time shoot an email. So meaning that in the next five minutes that somebody manifested an interest about something that relates to you, you're the first one in their inbox. You're the first one in their panorama, let's say.

Mikael Hugg:
So. Okay. So this is basically like Zapier, but with this crawling and and like buyer intent. That's right.

Mohamed Es Fih:
And also the feature works even if, if there is no APIs. So because we can use APIs if they are available, we have an API bridge command. But even if there is no let's say the data is somewhere that there is no API. You can send to use that name. Go and crawl. I don't know in a university list something and and get the data still. So yes, we also have an integration with Zapier.

Mohamed Es Fih:
So you could you could trigger from Zapier. Let's say there is an event somewhere on your Google Sheet or anywhere. And then you say, as soon as X happens, I send this data and this data to to this flow, and then I will do that flow and send back the data to Zapier for your next action. But you can also very well start with, because the good thing about is that it can really bridge the gaps between different automation softwares. So you can have the whole flow in and then use Zapier here. You use another tool right here. You use maybe a script, a Python script. You know, you use a folder on your computer that has some data and then can go and pick from it. So it's really versatile. This is pretty recent. Like I told you, we just open this door. But it's so much more powerful right now.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah. Because I went through the you had in Appsumo for quite some time and I went through the reviews. By the way, you had excellent reviews.

It was like 4.5 out of five. So it was really good one. And, and a lot of people were talking about the scraper possibility of what you can do with that one. So yeah, but I think that's a smart, smart move to go toward more these like the full automation stuff. Can you show what kind of how the actual process goes? Because, you know, as we are also recording this as a video, so people who are watching this as a video, they can see what your software actually looks like and how you can build this kind of stuff, because that sounds fantastic. Also, it sounds really difficult, but based on what I read from the Appsumo and all the other reviews, people say that it's actually really, you know, quite easy to use already.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Maybe I can clarify where the the perception of conflict being complicated comes from. It comes from the activity itself, you know, you're automating websites that sometimes they obfuscate. So what you see on the website is not really what is coded in the back.

Mohamed Es Fih:
So there is so many subterfuge and techniques to to block people from automation. So that creates like sometimes expectations that are not aligned with the level of effort that you need to do. But then the return on investment, that's what is important. If I put one hour and I know for sure I'm going to get ten times more out of it. That is what is important. So no matter where the level is of difficulty, I will get my return on investment and I can show you something pretty simple that I think can can express what I said. So just absolutely share the screen, share the screen. And it's actually a real case that we just got yesterday. So it was a request from a client that was just asking a question, can help with the getting an order from Squarespace and then copying the data and then getting the order fulfilled in another system called Ingram Spark, which doesn't have, you know, there is no plug in. No. So I did it in like half an hour and I can show you if I inspect the code.

Mohamed Es Fih:
It took me more time to actually create the account on Squarespace and and on Ingram than than doing the flow. So, so where, where sometimes looks very different is that you see here we build stuff in a vertical way in a nested vertical way. When the other software they, they build like a horizontal cascading approach which is much more pleasant visually speaking. But in terms of logic and power, we think that this this gives more granular control. And so what you can see here is that I organize my flows into folders, and then I can collapse and collapse my folders. So the first thing, for example, that I had to do right here is let's log in to the two websites. So if I open here the login to Ingram I use the command called go to URL. I put the login page and I can click on the run command. And it's going to go to this page. This login page. And then you give it, and then I give it a bit of wait time.

Mohamed Es Fih:
I say, wait 10s that everything comes up, which is now the case. And then I used a populate command, which is very easy to add. Just click on new command and then you would go and search for populate and then you click and insert here. But I've already done it for now. So I use like very basic commands where I say that you're going to populate my email into this fill. And this field is using this locator. Yeah. So we have a point and click where you can click here and then select this field. And then it will populate the locator for you. So that's that's the basic of it. How it works. And then it clicks on on login. So sorry. It goes in, populate the password after the email and then it's going to click on the login button right here. Then we wait a little bit. Yeah. And then we click on Accept all cookies. You know a few things that can help. And that that will log in into the engram.

Mohamed Es Fih:
And then I have another. Folder here is to log in to Squarespace, so I do the same. I go to that URL, I populate the email field, populate the password. So I will have to go to Squarespace login first. So you get the concept and and I can clone like when I do a first group, I can clone it and then I can reuse it and change just the locators in my data for the next website. So you can save time by cloning your, you see here the clone command. You can clone a whole group of of command. That's what I did here. Just like to stay brief, but. But give you the principal. Once I log in into both websites. The good thing is that keeps the login session. You don't have to log in again and now you can navigate. You can navigate from one website to another picking up some information from here, pasting it there without having to log in again. It will manage the session for you. So now I close up my login session.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Now what I want to do is that I need to go to Squarespace, and I'm going to go to the URL. You see, this is my admin URL where their orders are. That's where you click. It will bring you there. I don't remember if I'm logged in or not. And again you give it a bit of weight, so it's always good to wait a little bit longer. Sometimes the internet can be slow. So you see it brings me to the other page. And then what I tell it is that click on the first order on this button client name. Yeah. So it's going to click there. It's going to open this little window. And then here I use what we call a selector command which goes into a specific place in the in the page here to grab this data. Because if I'm going to fulfill this order I need to know what is the product. So I go to the last order. What is the product name? And I save it into this Dom selector variable.

Mohamed Es Fih:
And then I transfer the value of this variable into a static variable which which will like conserve it over different websites. So now my data, this product name will be confirmed there. And that's it. And now I can go to. To the fulfillment website where I already logged in earlier. Yeah, so that's Ingram Spark. Yeah. And then it will go to the page where I choose the product, and then I enter the product name and so on. So now I lost the. The high quality. I lost the login here, but what I can show you is is something very fast. I did the video so I captured it on video just yesterday. Can I play the video and then it will just show us.

Mikael Hugg:
Oh, absolutely.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Yeah. So I'll explain. And then I shared the template as well with whoever was to. So the first step, like I showed you is to log in on both websites, right?

Mikael Hugg:
Okay.

Mohamed Es Fih:
So I started with Google just as a start page, but.

Mohamed Es Fih:
The first. The first step is to log in into Ingram Spark. It's waiting that 10s timeout. And here you see it start to type my credentials.

Mikael Hugg:
Oh nice. Okay. So this is done by.

Mohamed Es Fih:
This is done by the bot. And it's exactly like a human. It really looks like a human.

Mikael Hugg:
That's true.

Mohamed Es Fih:
So now I'm logged in. That's it for that first step. Now we're going to go. It's going to go to Squarespace and log me in into Squarespace.

Mikael Hugg:
So this is still done by the bots.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Right now it's like your hands free. Let's just.

Mikael Hugg:
Wow. Yeah. Because, you know, I just wanted to confirm. Because this looks like you're.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Actually doing something here. Yeah. You see, the mouse is stuck there. So the pot is doing the job right now. Knows where to log in and work. So now we have logged in into both places. Now it goes back to the ecommerce website where the order is. So there it goes into the last order.

Mohamed Es Fih:
It opens it. It's going to get that retail e-book one, which is the product. And I did narrate command to show you that we are getting indeed the right book name, you know. And so then you can click okay. And now it's going to it's going to. It got the data. And of course you can add more data like the client address and so on. In order to to to properly fulfill the order. But right now it's moving into Ingram Spark. And it's going to enter that product name in the title field. And it's going to search it. And because I don't have products on in Grand Spark, I didn't go all the way. But I just want to show you to see it's really that book that has been entered. And now it's searching right here, but don't have products. You can see that I have inputted. I mean, the bot has inputted the last product of the last order. And just like it did. So you can select the item that you want to fulfill, and then you can paste the customer name, the customer address, the customer phone number, and then click fulfill.

Mohamed Es Fih:
So. So this was done in. It took me like of automation development. It took me like half an hour. But to create the accounts it took me also half an hour.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah that's true. And so this is this is perfect when you have tasks that require repetitive.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Repetitive, representative.

Mikael Hugg:
Continuous, repetitive. Exactly. You know, manual work all the time. So you can just put these bots to do it for you and then that's it. You can just sit back and relax.

Mohamed Es Fih:
I mean, there is yeah. You know, it's like we are in an age that if you don't automate, you're dead, commercially speaking, business wise, because life is competitive. So if, if you if you as a human, you don't add value, the machines will will like annihilate you. You know so so we have we have like as business people as, as even just as humans like what is the added value that I can add so that I don't have to do repetitive things? If it's repetitive things, can I find a way to automate it? I mean, it's not only about Zapier is a fantastic example.

Mohamed Es Fih:
There are so many other software, how can I release my human time to go and do a higher value input? And I would say that, and that's also where we are going and where we are investing. Is that the combination of automation with AI, it's like exponential for not not times two. It's really an exponential competitiveness that you gain as a business. So so you said yes, it's it's appropriate for things that are repetitive, but actually it's also appropriate for other things as well. It doesn't necessarily has to be a repetitive. It can be analytical. So you're not going to spend four hours of human time to analyze the sentiment or analyze something. You're going to go and get Arcilla to get that data, send it to target, get the the intent and sentiment, and then do X and Y and Z without reading that that content, you can set up Arcilla to send you alerts when things go wrong, which is very useful for a business. So you can set up alarms that I don't know if my CEO if my speech score on this website goes below, send me an email.

Mohamed Es Fih:
You know you can, you can you can place a lot of little things little bots that run every hour, every day, that kind of each one is doing a little thing that you can remove from your brain and release your memory, CPU and run.

Mikael Hugg:
So basically this is kind of like the I'm sure you have heard the auto auto dev, you know, this software that like creates basically a group of bots that are doing different parts of the development process in the agency. That's right. So you can build this kind of like a robot army to do manual stuff. And you know, they can. Yeah. This is this absolutely makes sense. So what kind of clients you know how you get your own clients right now. What is the best way to get it in your point of view. And what type of people and companies they are. You know what.

Mohamed Es Fih:
They're using this most. So we have a particular history, which explains why we have a certain type of users at the moment. And or we are appealing to a certain type of user is that, you know, I was a customer of just a year back, so I joined the team.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Yeah.

Mikael Hugg:
So okay, so you didn't co-found this one?

Mohamed Es Fih:
No, I'm not okay. I mean, that's pretty early so that now I'm considered the co-founder. But I didn't build it. I didn't build the first instance of it. Yeah, I used it as an early as an early customer. So. So like ten years ago I started to really invest time in automation. I saw I tried a lot of automation softwares and. Using Python, using either programming languages, and then hiring expensive Python developers or trying to get software. So I've gone through that journey of of a business person who just want to automate, and I want my automation to be resilient, because if I spend 20 hours, 50 hours into building a flow, I don't want it to die after a week or, you know. Because. Because. Calculate my return on investment. So? So I tried so many softwares. And then. And then I couldn't find a software that was resilient enough. Like either the software bugs while you're using it or it's very sensitive to something.

Mohamed Es Fih:
And then and then I got to, you know, put my hands on it. I did an automation that I was doing with others and then it like, it runs it consistently and it runs it for hundreds of hours. So I thought, oh, there's something different about this software. It's ugly. It's very hard to use. That was like version three for you had a very. Yeah, I mean people say that built by developers. That's what I was when I was going at it was built by Dr.. No engineers you know.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah. Exactly. So they worked like a charm but they look awful.

Mohamed Es Fih:
It looks awful. But it's like a four wheel drive engine that was put in a Lada car. But if you go in the car, if you like, if you go beyond the first perception and so on, just the noise of the car, you know, just the rumbling of that thing, you know, that is going to do the work. So that was my first experience.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Oh, there is something right here. Let me reach out to the founder, and maybe I just wanted to give advice. I said, hey guys, you have a you have a fantastic tool right here. But if you did A, B and C and so on. Yeah, it can do better. I'm happy to be your test, you know. Jews or whatever and so on. And then we started, like interacting like that. And then I think we, we synched well with Tariq and then basically Tariq said, no, you why don't you be part of it? So so I jumped in, and now we're driving this, this little monster together.

Mikael Hugg:
And and he's there. A whole team now in Mauritius. Or are you started in the world?

Mohamed Es Fih:
So Tariq built the first version. He's from Morocco. And then he was joined by another very talented engineer. His name is Roberto. He's from Spain. Yeah. And at that time I was living in Rwanda, so I was I was in East Africa, in Rwanda, in Kigali.

Mohamed Es Fih:
And then I joined as well.

Mikael Hugg:
And how did you end up there in Rwanda? Yeah, Rwanda is you know, it's you know, I have to say, but I'm not sure that it's going to be like it is not a startup hub right now or know you'd be. Am I wrong?

Mohamed Es Fih:
You'd be surprised. Yeah. Yeah. No. You know the African. Yeah. Really? The African continent is in an acceleration ramp. Yeah. It's really like.

Mikael Hugg:
I don't know, I, I noticed Nigeria is.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Nigeria. Yeah. Of course Nigeria has been.

Mikael Hugg:
Always.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Tough. Yeah. Nigeria as an African country has always been preceding us with South Africa. But then. But then you have Kenya, which is pretty big in the software development industry. True. You have Rwanda, which is smaller but super active. So I was I was sent there. I was recruited by the German Ministry of Cooperation to, to go and and build the national platform for the country, for e-commerce.

Mohamed Es Fih:
So that's how I landed there. All right. And in the process, you know, when you build the national platform, you have so many vendors to deal with. It's a marketplace like an Amazon. It's called Random Mart. So there was no way that we can build something in an efficient way unless.

Mikael Hugg:
And what is the what is the user base for that?

Mohamed Es Fih:
The user base is small and medium enterprises that have beautiful products in Rwanda, but they don't have the means, financial and technical, to put up an e-commerce website. So we built like a small Amazon, you know, that is owned by the country, owned by the community, that has fulfillment, physical fulfillment of orders, payment integrated. You get your store, you get your blog, you know, and you just come take your photos and list them. And we teach you how to do so. So that's what we've done. And and you know, because this is like donors money. This is the German people tax tax money who want to help the Rwandans.

So like to get the best out of that goodwill. We use automation a lot because then we get the best for every buck. That is, we have to. So so I've been using automation extensively and people love it. You know, it allows you to do things that you normally you would have to charge like five times more if you don't use automation. So if you use automation you reduce your costs. You open up your doors to much more customers because now you can reduce your costs and take in more. So it's a win win for for both sides.

Mikael Hugg:
So let's talk about the African startup culture. Because I know I've been a little bit a part of Ambitious Africa project, which is the Finnish based, you know, the guys who were inventing the Angry Birds. So these guys and they pulled they are ambitious Africa projects, and I was part of it when it was launched. And that is that was the time when I was actually seeing that how much the different African nations are, you know, getting on board this all this like very high tech stuff.

So but, but now that you've actually lived there and you know, you've been cooperating with them, what is your view now when you're when we look in, you know, the next ten years or so, what is the future coming up there? And, and is going to be the AI, you know, that they are going to be excelling or what is the thing. Yeah.

Mohamed Es Fih: Yeah, it's a good question, Mikael. It's hard to say now, but. But like, you can hear the sound of things coming up here when you were there. So my experience, because I've been to. A bunch of African countries. Yeah. So, so like, I've been a lot in West Africa, East Africa and North Africa. So I would say that the power of Africa, it is it's youth, the young people. You have a lot of young people that have time, motivation and hunger. So you have those together and you have like little Superman everywhere. So, so when you bring a technology or if you bring an approach that is in the, in the front edge of, of development.

So if you bring AI right now in Africa, you bring AI, they're going to take it to a higher level. Then if you for example, you had to set up a team. I'm just saying like let's say I'm from France. So sometimes when you're in a developed country, you don't really realize the capital you have in the advantage of. And you may like you may not be as hungry as the brother in Lagos, you know, or as a brother in, in Cape Town or in Kigali. Yeah. So, so you have those parameters and because also locally in, in, in the African countries you have much less other opportunities. You know, there's 50% unemployment. You know we don't have the same. Yeah. We don't have they don't have the same industry that we have in the West where you may find a job and so on. So the opportunities of making money are much smaller. Therefore therefore technology is even more important. So and I think this these two parameters of having a base of youth who want to learn, who are dedicated, they put time, they put energy, they put commitment.

And if you bring them just the right ingredients, you know you're going to get a fantastic output. So and this is expressed in our team because as soon as we started to to grow we got on from Rwanda. Who's our next engineer. He's our right now. He's doing fantastic jobs. He picked up our line like very quickly. And he's a JavaScript Node.js developer. So so you can you have those talents. They know like let's say the main programming languages, but they may not know the context in which they can be applied. And they can have a multiplying effect because they don't have that experience. For example, in Rwanda you don't have the Microsoft, you don't have Google. There is no big software that opens the branch there. So as a local developer, you're not going to get that exposure that if you were in the Bay, if you're in the Bay, you're going to maybe work with Facebook, work with Google, or with other startups. The yeah, you learn the good processes, the good practices, the frameworks.

Mohamed Es Fih:
You come up after 2 or 3 years, you have a much better idea that's that's not yet available in Africa. So in a way, project like yours, a project like ours, when we, when we're working with the German corporation, is providing that environment and that sandbox where we can bring that additional knowledge. So so I think that's where the future is, is that maybe Western companies that could be interested in building hybrid teams, you know, with local people from your area and then some others from different countries, and then like sharing the opportunity, but not only sharing the opportunity, is that you also now have in your team people who have a different perspective of life. So they may tell you, hey, Muhammad, that's not how you sell things in in Kenya or in Rwanda. That's not the way things. Wait, you think that works? It doesn't work because the internet here has micro cuts. So you have to review all your proxying and networking. Oh, I didn't think about that. Now when I optimize.

Mikael Hugg:
That is so critical.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Yeah. So, you know, when we were optimizing our marketplace for Rwandan connections, guess what? It makes it ten times faster for Europeans and Americans because it's super optimized, you know. Oh, yeah. So those little gains I mean on the on the long on long run that makes sense.

Mikael Hugg:
I just I just noticed that Elon Musk just, you know, tweeted that now the Starlink is now available in Rwanda and Mauritius and had to Google but also Sierra Leone. Obviously it's also higher. You're right. I think at least in Rwanda he was saying that you know now it's available there. So that is giving more opportunity. It's huge.

Mohamed Es Fih:
More and more Rwanda was the first the first African country, I think, who got Starlink. I was there when when the news came in. It was. Yeah, it was really refreshing. I think that's that's a smart move.

Mikael Hugg:
It's funny how how it to, you know, all these big, these tele operators and those companies that have been like, oh, you know, we've been trying to build this coverage, you know, the coverage to Africa. And they haven't been just able to do it. And then just Elon comes and you know there you go.

Mohamed Es Fih:
No. But you know, it's it's even more impressive because this is not a business decision. Like like why would you go to a country that has 8 million people who have no money? You see the point? No, no, no company would go and do that because it's a it's a loss making adventure. So something else is guiding as well. Elon Musk maybe he really wants to because also for him for them it costs the same when because you're in low orbit, whether you broadcast to Rwanda or Kenya, which is ten times bigger is the same. You're sending in the signal anyway. So so I think they have they must have a kind of a business principle that let's democratize things. Let's not leave.

Mikael Hugg:
Well, you know, he's from South Africa anyway, so he knows he is he knows a thing. And also I think it is also an investment in future because, you know, when you are allowing this kind of stuff happen and, and actually letting people to learn more about AI and all that stuff with, you know, via Starlink that they get the internet and start to learn stuff.

You can actually create new, very talented workforce as well. That you said earlier is that, you know, there's the youth and when they are learning all this, these like the newest technological stuff in development part and all that, you actually generate so much more wealth and, and bring the whole country actually, you know, from the poverty.

Mohamed Es Fih:
No, definitely. I think with this development, like look out for the African continent, not only the African continent, you can look out like for any country that so far was like landlocked and remote, like, I don't know, Mongolia, you know, who's Kazakhstan? Kazakhstan is already doing very well, but like countries that you would have thought are insignificant. Uh, now, soon they're going to be super competitive.

Mikael Hugg:
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And the automated stuff, you know, if you're, you know, putting that to this whole whole environment, it basically democratizes the whole whole world because now, you know, people from doesn't matter where you're coming from.

But if you're learning how to do automation parts and that's, you know, that is like all the countries and developers are in the same level right now. This is still you've been doing that ten years, and you have been actually one of the first early adopters in the automation part, because, you know, ten, 12, 15 years ago it was almost non-existent. Yeah. And, and and now, you know, people are just learning about all the, you know, even like Estonia and Finland as well. We do quite much of automation because we are all across hackers. And it's kind of makes sense to automate stuff and we are now teaching big corporations how to automate stuff. The most of the things that seem automated, they are actually manual labor work, and there's just a lot of people doing it, but it's just so expensive that companies are running out of money. You know, they can't scale because everything is so manual, or they are very complex old programs and softwares that they are just not talking to each other.

And there is no Zapier in the whole world that can solve these kind of problems. Because the code is so old.

Mohamed Es Fih:
That's that's exactly where I can do the job, because we can, we can we can connect to legacy systems. Yeah. You know, even on unstructured data, you can build the that's the power of, of, let's say web interface automation. But also you can you can read into an an old base and an old access database. You can read into it through folders.

Mikael Hugg:
So I said safe because a lot of companies, you know, when they are having these legacy systems and etcetera, one of the things that why they are not eager to change the new ones is that they are fragile, and also they contain so much of valuable information that can't leak outside of the ecosystem.

Mohamed Es Fih:
So, yes.

Mikael Hugg:
The safeness, you know, is it GDPR compliant?

Mohamed Es Fih:
So I would I would put the the question, if you don't mind, I'll take the question in a different way. Yeah. Yeah. So so I think there are different parameters that keep companies from moving away from legacy systems or legacy, let's say legacy habits, because actually it's more of a habit than than a system issue. So at the case where we were working with an airline agency, you know, they book flights and so on, they were still doing it in access. They are still doing access for some of them. Some of them have those systems. Can you believe it.

Mikael Hugg:
That it's like a museum?

Mohamed Es Fih:
Are you still.

Mikael Hugg:
A digital museum? Like, wow.

Mohamed Es Fih:
They're still writing.

Mikael Hugg:
It. There's actually not there's actually not many people who can program those things anymore. You know, like all the all the young developers, they have no clue.

Mohamed Es Fih:
And stuff.

Mikael Hugg:
Deal with that.

Mohamed Es Fih:
One. But that but.

Mikael Hugg:
That, yeah, those.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Things are actually unbreakable. You know, they are super predictable. They're very low resource in the they're very hard to hack as well because how you get into that subsystem, you know, so so when.

Mikael Hugg:
You have to physically go to the service server, plug your laptop.

Mohamed Es Fih:
And when you ask these people like the management, you tell them, it doesn't make sense. Why don't you go into, you know, I don't know, SAS software or even a modern software and so on. So they tell you there are a few things. What I heard is one, it took us forever to train our people to use that system. Our people are between 40 and 60 years old. We don't believe that our workforce can take the the change. So sometimes it's a human resources department that comes in say, yeah, training budget is going to blow up. So you have that second you have there. Their legacy system is talking to other legacy systems. So you have a dependency. Unless you can offer a solution to to to their environment. Fix them all and then bring them all together. Then they would move, but they won't really move alone. The third. The third thing is that they actually. I think they're not exposed to the right people like you guys.

Like you need somebody who can have a comprehensive view of the whole business. From from from the origin of the data to the to the end lifecycle of the data, and then show them that nothing will be lost. Everything will be transformed, but nothing will be lost. So whatever you have as of today, whatever benchmark you are at in terms of security, speed, productivity, it can only be better without compromising on security. So now if somebody like you come and tell them and we can use this tool and look what it does and that tool and look what it does. And we can put this layer of security. You can run it on a disk drive airtight. If you don't want to expose it to the internet, you know, you can show them those things that, that that you have the skills to bring them to that journey. And I think that's where they start to unlock their mind and GDPR and privacy policy and. I think it's in my experience, especially in the developing world. It does more damage than it does good.

Mikael Hugg:
I absolutely agree 100%. It. I think it GDPR legislation. It has been the it's going to be the biggest problem in developing Europe to the next level. It's just, you know, hinders everything, especially when we're talking about AI. Yeah. It's just nuts. Yeah. You can you can train good AI when you are restricted from all the data. It doesn't.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Make sense. Like mechanically speaking, the idea of the internet is that it dematerialize this thing and spread them over the world. And you come with a policy that brings back localization of packets like it does. It's like you say, I want air to move. I want water to move in the air. But I want the drops of water in the air to stay on top of Germany and stay on top of the US. Then don't use air as a medium, you know, use a swimming pool or something. Now the damage it does in Africa is very worse than the case, you said. Is that.

Mikael Hugg:
Okay. It's very trying.

Mohamed Es Fih:
So before I move to Rwanda, I was with the United Nations for five years in Geneva. So, you know, our at least my responsibility and my department were about how can you benefit from digitalization and boost your economy as a minister of Ministry of Commerce or other country? So you go you go to certain countries and you tell them, okay, we are here to help you to benefit from e-commerce, digitalization. Yes. Privacy policy. Don't you want to know the benefits and how you can say privacy policy, data localisation? We want the data to stay in our country. Already the discussion is like.

Mikael Hugg:
I am out of the window.

Mohamed Es Fih:
What kind of data localisation you want when you are using Gmail to send us the email? Yeah. You know.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah, exactly.

Mohamed Es Fih:
But now you're not applying data localisation as an individual, but you want to apply it to your entrepreneurs, your companies. Now they cannot use Amazon Web Services. They cannot use Google. Powerful. You know most of the best.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah. You can basically you can even use Google Analytics. And you can't use the, you know, if you want to take your Google Fonts and you don't want to download them locally, then that's GDPR. It's a.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Problem. Yeah. Problem.

Mikael Hugg:
So now that is so. So now they.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Are shooting in the in their own foot because now they are blocking the youth from actually developing their potential because of the data localisation.

Mikael Hugg:
And the only thing is they don't want people to get spam email. That's it's actually what they still gets a different discussion.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Yes it.

Mikael Hugg:
Is. But that's that's the thing you know.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Yeah. Well a spam spam is like I don't know, it's a it's an activity that existed before internet. People will come into new into your box and throw magazines. It's a human activity. So unless you understand it from a human perspective, like the spammer, if he does, it is because there is a return on investment and very little, I call it fightback.

So it's not the technology that creates that. It's it's a human endeavor. So making a policy that blocks a whole avenue of development because of spam, it just shows that there there is no real mature knowledge of the subject. But it's coming up, you know, because they've done that in the last ten years. And then they realize why e-commerce doesn't work in my country because you're blocking all the doors. Yeah. Now they're starting to think, oh, wait, wait, let's relax this let's relax this rule. Let's let them use AI. Let's let them use blockchain. Because unfortunately, the developing countries, when they saw blockchain and cryptocurrency coming in, they freak out. So what they do is that they forbid.

Mikael Hugg:
But yeah, that sounds like a positive thing. You know, for, you know, when you are able to learn this, all this new new technologies like blockchain and I you know, so they blocked the countries blocked those. Yeah.

Mohamed Es Fih:
So so really you have I think you have to live in a developing country to understand the the struggles for example. Yeah. For example, when you if you grow up only like me in France or like you in Finland, you, you never noticed that it's hard to get US dollars. It's hard to get euros because your currency is convertible. It doesn't really matter. But we're in, we're in. You are in an African country with an African currency. You have local money. You want to buy a Facebook ad for $10. You cannot change your local money into that $10. And Facebook is only accepting the US dollars now. You can't access all this.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah, those are the things that you never think about unless.

Mohamed Es Fih:
You expose it. Geez. So all these little things make that because the African economies are a bit more fragile, you know, they really need you know, they call it foreign baskets of currencies. They need some euros. They need some dollars to pay for the oil, to pay for gas for things. And they have so little of foreign currencies that they usually block their citizens from converting their local currency into a foreign currency and access foreign critical services. Sometimes they tax them. So let's say I'm a London company. I want to hire you in Finland or in Estonia or whatever, because you're the best at the best price.

Mikael Hugg:
Right?

Mohamed Es Fih:
That is true. Yes. So I want to hire you. Okay. Mikhail, I make a contract with you when I'm going to hire you. Because it's a foreign service provider. They impose a tax of 20%. Now you're making your people. Paying a premium on something that they could have had cheaper. Therefore, there will be less competitive because now I'm going to hire Michael at plus 20%. My competitor is going to hire Michael at the right price. Of course you can do more with Michael. You know. So sometimes these policies are really, like, hurting the development.

Mikael Hugg:
So so what they do is like that. And then.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Protect.

Mikael Hugg:
What? Why they don't embrace the it's fear.

Mohamed Es Fih:
It's fear of running out of US dollar running out of foreign currency. It's fear of these people will move the money out of the country. We don't have so much money. You know, it's just fear. And unfortunately, that that's the first human reaction. When you don't know something, you fear it. It's changing. But, you know, like a first generation has to be sacrificed. To do like an incredible amount of effort. Make it come back and say, look, I was not going to cheat you. Look how much jobs I created in Rwanda. Now I created the 100 jobs. How do you let me move freely? Maybe with plus two years, we would. We would be 200 in the team.

Mikael Hugg:
To see more. Yeah. So.

Mohamed Es Fih:
So these guys this like this first icebreaker generation, they're the one who will take the pain and hopefully they bring back the change. That's that's what we were doing.

Mikael Hugg:
So in your opinion which countries right now in Africa are the most developed in this sense. Like they are embracing the the newest stuff and you know, the AI and automation and blockchain and etcetera, which are now the top countries for that.

Mohamed Es Fih:
I don't want to talk about South Africa, because South Africa has always been ahead of of the content of the continent.

Mikael Hugg:
We can, you know, take Kenya.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Kenya has really jumped on the wagon. They've done it pretty well. You have Ghana, Ghana, they're doing very well, especially at the payment processing level and so on. Okay. You have Nigeria is is always going to be in the picture just with the sheer size of of their economy. You have Egypt. That is huge. Economy is going up very strongly. Morocco is actually catching up very well. Tunisia was very good until the recent years, unfortunately, but they were very competitive. Tunisia.

Mikael Hugg:
So what happened there?

Mohamed Es Fih:
Democracy came. No, it was good. It was supposed to make things better, but it messed up the whole thing. You know, some people, they just.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah, that happens sometimes.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Some people want a different or a different mode of leadership. Works better with them. You know, it's it's just a human thing. So unfortunately, it takes time to even understand the concept of democracy. Even for the West, it's a 2000 years of struggle from the Greek culture. It didn't come just like that. So yes. So other countries that you need to look out to in terms of progress is in West Africa, Senegal and a lot, a lot, so much potential. But these these are.

Mikael Hugg:
Because the way I see is that, well, if you know well now you know if African countries, they are allowing people to experience a more and learn how to use it, like not just code and create new one, but using it effectively like automation and I. They they are actually becoming like hugely valuable assets. And like as Europeans, we are going to have a lot of trouble because of the GDPR and because, you know, there's so many other stuff, but people don't do that. We can already see now that you can't use Google Barred in Europe. It's blocked. You can use it, but no, no barred.

And for sure there's going to be so much more different kind of AIS that people can't use. And if they are not learning how to use AI and you know, with that automating their stuff, they end up in like Finland and all these countries, we are actually ended up doing things manually. Whereas people in Africa actually, if they are learning how to use and utilize AI effectively and automating their task processes, they actually become hugely valuable. And you know, that is something that's that what I see in future in, in Africa. But I'm just seeing from this, this side, I don't, I don't I haven't lived there. So I don't really know more than that's just my hypothesis.

Mohamed Es Fih:
It's a good hypothesis. And I can share with you an interesting, weird discovery I made. In the African continent is that you would think that the more a country gets regulated, the more it progresses. Which is which is to a certain degree. It's true. You regulate your economy. You know, you need the license for this, license for that.

Until a certain point where you regulate too much privacy policy, data localisation, this and that. Don't touch this, don't touch that. It's in America. It's in Germany. No. But then you don't have the equivalent in your own country. So. So if you block something from outside then you don't have the credit locally. If let's say you don't have a data center and models that are available locally, then why do you block such a beautiful opportunity? And the Europeans are doing the same mistakes actually.

Mikael Hugg:
Oh yeah. Absolutely.

Mohamed Es Fih:
So now when you travel in Africa. So I'll give you a very simple two neighboring countries Rwanda and Uganda. Okay. Pretty similar you know. So. I'm an entrepreneur.

Mikael Hugg:
Both are famous of their history. Yes, unfortunately.

Mohamed Es Fih:
If I'm an entrepreneur right now, after living a two years and a half in Rwanda, if I have a startup ID that is like a little bit futuristic, I will benefit. I will I will do better in Uganda than Rwanda because when I go to Uganda, there is no regulation.

It's like the far west a little bit, you know, there is they haven't regulated everything. So therefore you can pretty much do, you know, you can experiment and do the things. What are we on in Rwanda? They have a lot of regulations, but on top of regulations they have a very they are very good at implementing laws and giving punishment.

Mikael Hugg:
Okay. So they are actually observing and following up with. Yeah, Chris, you can just, you know, not pay taxes and that's it. You know, you have the tax, but if you don't pay, it doesn't help.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Don't pay. In Rwanda, they're really good at implementing whatever law they decide to put. They're very serious. So so it's fantastic because it makes things predictable and so on. But then on the flip side of it is that it hurts creativity, especially when it's a new domain like AI blockchain. The country will need time and expertise before understanding what these things do and for good, and what they do for harm, and like packaging it nicely.

So. So if I go to DRC or if I go to Uganda, I may I may be better off in the first one, 2 or 3 years to experiment with various things. The internet will be maybe less, less good, but if there is Starlink then I don't have a problem. So that's what I wanted to share with you, is that sometimes you would think that the African countries who catch up, regulate, like the developed countries are going to make it first. And I think sometimes you have pockets of zones or countries where actually they are lucky not to be too overregulated and they have more flexibility than us in other countries. It's a it's a very weird thing until you see it in, in front of you. It doesn't make sense.

Mikael Hugg:
Very interesting. Thank you for sharing, sharing this kind of stuff. And you know, it has been amazing to see your your software. And, you know, it's still in appsumo that you can, you know, all the people who are listening today can go and grab their deal.

That was really generous. Deals like, wow, maybe it requires that you, you know, as a user, you know, at least the ideology of how to code so that you understand the logic, you know, how to build stuff. So basically, it's kind of low code in a way you don't have to code. What I understood you'd have to code yourself, but it really helps if you understand at least the logic of coding, you know. Yes. The framework.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Yes and no. I think what it's it's also it explains why you are selling services about automation but not automation programming yourself, just you as an example. Yeah. Why why are you successful successfully in that is because you are able to understand the processes, the business processes before we talk about computer processes, the business processes. So that's where I want to come first is that it's not that it's complicated. Is that you need to clear your business processes first, whatever you're doing online or on the computer. Like is it the right steps? Aren't you doing some loops within yourself, trying to do x and Y and Z? But going to this URL does that job of ten steps that you are trying. So this is 90% of of the failures or the other complication. In my experience.

Mikael Hugg:
You're 100% right. That is true. The most difficult part is always to understand our business processes. That's what we do every day with our clients just trying to even though they they do their work every day. No. Yeah.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Because as we say.

Mikael Hugg:
In French, it's a.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Mess. You have you know, you're driving the bicycle and your head is on the, on the thing. You don't see the road. They need people like you.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah. You don't see forest from the trees.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Yes, that's the English one. You don't see the forest from the trees.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah. Thank you.

Mohamed Es Fih:
So sometimes people come to LA and then we help them with the first steps and we tell them, you know, it doesn't work because you're trying to put a sphere inside a smaller cube. Like, no software will do that. So you have to go there and there and there. And once you have the right shape for the right place, then you can automate.

So we do that. We provide that assistance. Like when you come to LA, like you said, it's a fantastic deal. It's not going to last. The first automation we're in with the customer to be successful because that first automation pays dividends a lot. First, the person realizes that most of the optimizations is in their head. Then they realize that the tool will only do what you tell it to do. Therefore, you have to to be sure of what you want and and and so on. So. So we do that just for that self realization. Once the people they realize that their second automation is is much more fluid. They don't they don't call us so much and they figure it out themselves.

Mikael Hugg:
So you also like actually helping your clients to achieve their goals. That's a little different than compared to some of the other companies.

Mohamed Es Fih:
And that's also where we try to be different in terms of a philosophy like so we're we're not here to just sell a software first. We have to be honest with ourselves, all of us.

We're here to make money. Like, why would you go and look at this? Unless your intention is to make money, convert time into money at the same time, or make new time. So that's the first thing. Like we are clear to ourselves, we and our clients, we want to make money. How can we make sure that when you use our software you're going to make money? Time is money. Money is time. So that's number one. We look at it in this way. The second differentiation is that again thinking of monetization is that you recall maybe when when you are working with a client. We're going to spend 100 hours on developing an automation. Now you've you you've invested 100 hours. They pay you for that 100 hours. Now, that client of yours, they paid 100 hours for an automation flow. And that that's already good value. And they pay you. Now with artillery you can go next second, third, fourth level is that you create the automation. You use it for yourself.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Once you're happy, you compile it into a standalone software. We are almost the only one who do that without charging.

Mikael Hugg:
That's. Yeah, no.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Other software does that. There was automation that did it before for $500 per compilation, $500 per compilation of $400. Okay.

Mikael Hugg:
That's true.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Yeah, they stopped it altogether because they don't want you to create your own software is not just an automation. Software is an automation software making software. So now now that you have.

Mikael Hugg:
Factory building.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Factories, it's a tooling. It's a tooling. It's a tool that makes tools. So now when you think of that, now that the bargain is even better, the value is even better. So let's say you deliver that automation your or you teach your client once you're good with that automation. Also you develop expertise around that automation. How about you turn it into a software or a SaaS. And you sell it to your competitors and can make money because you're already two years ahead. So Attila will allow you for the same amount of investment you did on one flow to convert it into a standalone software, convert it into a SaaS, a service, and then when you when you how you say in English, when you.

When you reach the market, when you saturate your market, then give them an e-learning. Teach them how you could do this. Now you sell the e-learning about that thing.

Mikael Hugg:
Exactly.

Mohamed Es Fih:
And then when? When once they are satisfied and they stay with you, then you tell them. How about I give you strategic advisory and consulting? So you see, there's three more layers of monetization out of the same time that you have invested in that flow. That's that's, I think, what makes us different, that we invest on our clients so that they're successful. Yeah. And we give to our clients a frank and self realization that we are all here to make money. And we want you to make more and more and more and more money of that time that you invested with.

Mikael Hugg:
Well. That's amazing.

Mohamed Es Fih:
It's a lot of work. Please. Come in and join us.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah, absolutely. Exactly. So I recommend every, you know, all the people go to artsy com and, you know, give it a spin.

Mikael Hugg:
You know, it's it's really good. Hey, thank you very much. Thank you so much for for taking part of this one. You know. This was, uh.

Mohamed Es Fih:
Thank you. It was experience. Thank you. Thank you very much. Bye.