How the right support can give you the know-how you need to succeed. 

When you think of what a start-up needs, you might think of something like a business plan, a financial model or a roadmap! All are important elements to try to get funding and start a business.

But, what do you do when all your founders are amazingly talented creatives, who don’t really have a background in business?

Adam Wa Mishmish started in 2016 as a fun idea to create songs and animations in Arabic for kids, so they can love and learn the Arabic language in an easy and engaging way. 

Luma, Lina, Ibrahim and Lutfi: musicians, writers, and artists. With the power of their imagination they created the magical world of Adam Wa Mishmish. None of these founders had a degree in business, or had much experience in implementing strategies for a business to thrive.Yet, when you remember that 90% of start-ups fail, and 45% don’t even last 5 years,  we seem to have beaten the odds: we are now in the 6th year of our business.

So, how did we overcome our knowledge gap? By joining incubators that helped us gain the know-how that we needed to survive.

What do I mean, ‘know-how’? In short, it’s experience and expertise. 

Luma, our CEO, went looking for it. With a vision to take Adam Wa Mishmish global, she sought out the help of local incubators and their experts in her community in Jordan, beginning her journey in creating all the required  plans that she and the founders needed to really make it. Starting with Abdel Hameed Shoman, Oasis500 and INJAZ  in Jordan, Luma as the CEO and Lina as the COO, began learning and accumulating the business know-how for our company to thrive. These experiences helped us develop everything we needed to successfully tell our story, and put it into practice to get more and more support from investors to fans alike. 

After our local success, we decided it was time to go global! We were fortunate to apply for and be invited into the DMZ incubator, part of the Toronto Metropolitan University through the LEAP program at Injaz, which aims to help female lead companies. With an amazing array of professionals – from finance gurus to marketing specialists – who dedicate their time to start-ups who are trying to change the world, the DMZ has created countless opportunities for Adam Wa Mishmish to pitch, learn from other start-ups and benefit from their professionals and entrepreneurs in residence. We are particularly grateful for all the support and experience we got with Marketing, organizational structure and financial modeling, helping us develop a plan to create our Arabic learning app, which is the best Arabic guide for parents and children to learn and love their mother tongue (have you checked it out yet? Download it here!).

For anyone else considering making the jump into starting your own business, we really recommend seeking out support from incubators like the DMZ. The experience helped us learn, grow, and fill in some of the gaps in our skill sets needed to build a successful business. Thank you DMZ, and others from earlier in our journey!