Scale by AI, an Egyptian start-up, originally the brainchild of Computer Engineer and Marketeer, Nour Eldin Zoghly. In December 2023, Zoghly joined forces with his good friend, Electrical Engineer and Business Developer, Ahmed Fakhry. This is the story of how it sometimes could only take a team of two to bring an idea to life.

If there is one thing that we could learn from start-ups, it is that smaller teams, even if it is just two people, can be all it takes to bring out an idea, an innovation that changes the shape of the market. This week we sat down with Co-Founder of Scale by AI, Nour Eldin Zoghly who told us the story of his startup, a project built on the passion for content creation, an obsession with Artificial Inelligence (AI) , and an unbreakable bond of partnership.

Scale by AI is a marketing startup aiming to provide efficient solutions for customized content creation for B2B customers. In a nutshell, this startup of two promises to provide businesses with a fully functional marketing team powered by artificially intelligent chatbots that could produce a diverse collection of content both in English and Arabic. The target is to automate the marketing and promotion processes of a business to make it more efficient and effective.

While it may seem perfectly normal for a Computer Engineer to be interested in an idea relating to Artificial Intelligience, yet this was not the main impetus that brought the startup to life. With an experience of over 12 years in the field of Marketing, Zoghly demonstrates a rather interesting career shift, one that will play a great role in the start of Scale by AI.

“I started my professional life in Computer Engineering as a Project Manager for around four years, my career shift came by coincidence,” says Zoghly. The computer engineer turned marketeer goes on to explain that he had always had a passion for writing, which allowed him to always have a “parallel career” from the very start. During his professional beginnings, Zoghly wrote s about budget traveling, making him one of the first to have done this in Egypt, “suddenly, my writing went viral and sooner or later I made the career shift to content creation in around 2016,” says Zoghly.

His creative side has earned him spots in Egypt’s most buzzing platforms such as Shorouk News, Al-Ahram, and the online platform The Glocal. Slowly but surely, this passion for writing eventually grew to become a seasoned understanding of content creation and what it takes to make your content “sell”.

When the buzz surrounding AI began, I immediately became obsessed with it. I started learning, reading, and sharing my thoughts about the transformational effect of AI. Eventually, a marketing agency reached out to me to help them incorporate AI into their model. From then, the idea of Scale by AI was born, says Zoghly.

This was the moment Zoghly pointed out the niche in the marketing field, a need for an all inclusive marketing suite fully integrating AI. During this time, he was already leaving his job at a French sales technology company, so it was the right moment to jump into a new transformative journey. “There, I reached out to my current business partner, Ahmed, who is also one of my oldest friends.”

The pair have previously worked together, teaming up in various projects where usually Zoghly would handle the product side, while Fakhry would take care of the business development aspect – the same mix that started Scale by AI.

“I still haven’t gotten over the anxious part of starting a business, but it has always been something I wanted to do. This time it just felt right. Change is not something I run away from, I think it is inevitable,” remarks Zoghly on jumping head first into the world of entrepreneurship. Scale by AI is currently still in its very early stages, in fact, the team of founders are currently in the process of hiring their first software developer, beginning the official expansion of the technical side of the startup.

Scale by AI brings the best of both of Zoghly’s professional worlds, combining his engineering background as well as his deep connnection to the field of content creation both personally and professionally. Nonetheless, it might seem counterintuitive for a creative person to be starting-up an AI-powered business based on content creation.

With AI, I think it is adapt or die. Do I think content creation will completely perish? No. But I do believe certain types of content will become fully reliant on AI, especially topics related to business. However, I think this will give an even better edge to personal writing and storytelling. AI creates conventional writing but not personal experience and wisdom, emphasizes Zoghly.

In the bigger picture, Scale by AI is Zoghly’s entrepreneurial endeavour in finding a gap in the market for a certain need, but on a much smaller scale, it is a personal attempt to adapt to change as a marketer and a creative. Nonetheless, Zoghly highlighted that there is still much needed to be understood about AI that is beyond the scope of the current reseach which is constantly changing by the day. This is why keeping up with the research is paramount for a startup like Scale by AI to survive.

As part of navigating the new terrain of entrepreneurship, Zoghly and Fakhry decided to partake in the Spring 2024 cohort of AUC venture lab. While both are experienced professionals, it was key to find the right guidance to set the tone for moving forward with the startup. “Many of the concepts were not new to us by virtue of our professional experience, but being surrounded by other businesses that are at the same stage as well as being exposed to experienced mentors made a great difference for us,” highlights Zoghly. This was not the first time the pair had heard of VLab, they have many friends who had initiated startups through the Lab, so it presented itself as an important station to stop by.

“The most important lesson that I’ve learned was that we don’t know anything. Assuming anything is wrong and you have to test everything,” emphasizes Zoghly regarding the main lesson he learned since launching the startup almost a year ago. He also underlined the importance of choosing carefully who to work with as it affects the work culture of the place and is instrumental in maintaining a diligent work ethic which is especially needed in the start-up phase of any business.

The fact that Scale by AI has successfully survived as well as managed to expand to the Saudi Arabian market within less than a year is a testament to the power of teamwork when combined with expertise. Most importantly, the example of Scale by AI shows that no matter what the difficulties and challenges are, you have to, as Zoghly puts it, “Play on.”