Two careers, one problem.

I started in social media research in Singapore, at a company monitoring conversation across six Asian markets for Nestlé, Unilever and Shell. The Arabic side of that system barely worked. The tools had been built for languages that behave differently: they could not handle dialect, could not handle Franco-Arabic, and returned sentiment scores that any Arabic speaker could see were wrong. I rebuilt it. That was the first time I understood the problem that has followed me since — most of the toolkit arriving in this region was designed somewhere it was never tested.

That became the next decade. At Crowd Analyzer I built the insights and reporting function from nothing, delivered more than three hundred custom research reports for telecom, banking and the public sector, and helped raise $6M by turning what the data actually said into something an investor could underwrite. The hard part was never the analysis. It was that Arabic media intelligence had no accepted standard, so every report had to argue for its own method before it could argue for its findings.

Then I stopped analysing companies and started running one. I came back to Crowd Analyzer as COO after its closure in 2021, reopened Dubai, Cairo and Riyadh, took the team from two people to over a hundred, launched three products and generated more than $1.5M in SaaS sales inside two years. Running the function taught me what advising it never could: which recommendations survive contact with a payroll date, and which are just correct.

The two halves are the same job. Arabic media intelligence was about taking something regional and messy that the standard toolkit could not read, and making it legible enough to decide on. SaaS operations in this region is the identical problem wearing different clothes — Silicon Valley playbooks that assume buyers who say no directly, payment rails that work, and urgency that arrives without a regulator forcing it. I build the version that works here, and then I teach it, because a framework nobody else can run is just a consultant keeping his job.