There are a couple of moments Mohamed Aly particularly remembers when he thinks about the long journey to bring his dream of starting a company to reality.
One is when the Egyptian, who immigrated here in 2004, saw his wife looking at a mess of advertising circulars in preparation for the arrival of their second child, and only daughter, in 2011. The next is when he held his first investor's check for $50,000 in his hand, only a month after he'd left Yahoo Research to found his company.
And the third is when he saw shoppers actually using the software developed by his 22-employee Santa Clara company, Seeloz.
In the midst of a campaign season in which anti-immigrant rhetoric is steadily rising, Aly's story is also a reminder of how much economic power immigrants generate. The company yesterday launched an app aimed at small chains and independent grocers that delivers personalized coupons to shoppers on their mobile phones based on their previous purchases. Big consumer companies like SC Johnson and Diamond Foods pay for the coupons.
Seeloz has raised more than $3 million, from investors including Citizen.VC and Felda Wellness Corp. What's particularly interesting about Aly's story is how this data scientist settled on the market to target as a beginning -- he hopes to scale up to other markets and eventually he says, change lives the way people like Yahoo's Jerry Yang have.
Aly, who came to the United States as a 24-year-old with a degree in computer science from Alexandria University in Egypt and a scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh, approached the question of creating a company in an unusually methodical way. He interned at Google during his PhD program, and then went to work at Yahoo! as a senior research engineer, working on behavioral targeting software.
In 2011, he noticed his wife going through advertising circulars, looking for deals on baby items in anticipation of the arrival of their second child and only daughter. He realized that users online are used to personalization, but that most brick-and-mortar stores weren't able to personalize their marketing. "It's all around leveraging point of sale data," he thought to himself. "The real data, is who is buying what when where."
The company has not exactly pivoted, but steadily narrowed its market. Aly first looked at retailers, and then realized that they weren't funding marketing -- those dollars came from manufacturers. He also realized that there were opportunities to bring personalization to several pools of marketing dollars, from commercials to coupons, but decided on coupons, or as he calls them, offers.
"Focus is the key, magical word," he said.
The company tested a product that matched manufacturers and retailers; then Aly hit on the idea of grocery stores. "The average American family goes shopping 1.6 times a week," he said.
And, then, he narrowed down the market still further, to a niche that wasn't already served by technology platforms: small chains and local groceries, of which there are more than 20,000. Seeloz generates revenue by taking a percentage of the discounted price when an item is sold and an offer redeemed.
Here's how this data scientist describes the process of finding a market:
"When you examine different data sets, for example belonging to multiple retail verticals such as apparel & grocery, and you encounter multiple behavior symptoms for shoppers (or users in general), you'd know that you won't have this kinda one-time tuned then automatically reapplied modeling machine."
"This means, you'll have to deal with each problem (in this case each industry vertical) as a completely separate one. This would limit you from leveraging the findings from one problem in solving the other one. For a data-driven software platform, this would indicate that, at least for the first couple of versions from the product, you're tackling a large market and you may wanna narrow it down so that you reach a single homogeneous problem to solve first, then you move on to the next one, and so on."
Aly is an example, of course, of the kind of immigrant who can have a profoundly positive impact on the United States -- despite the current backlash against immigrants, especially those from the Middle East.
"Immigrants have a long history of starting successful businesses in the United States. From Alexander Graham Bell to Sergey Brin, immigrants have created some of America’s most iconic companies. In fact, more than 40 percent of the Fortune 500 companies in 2010 were founded by an immigrant or the child of an immigrant. Yet, despite their vast economic contributions, U.S. law provides no dedicated means for immigrant entrepreneurs to launch innovative companies in the United States," says a Kauffman Foundation report. The report argues for a startup visa, which it says could create 484,383 jobs within 10 years.
Aly left an established career path in Egypt, arriving in Pittsburgh with entrepreneurial dreams. He was already thinking about Jerry Yang and Yahoo and the idea of building a big company.
"I had this from Day 1," he said. "There's having the guts to do it -- people in Egypt have that -- and then here, you don't need to be inheriting wealth from your parents. You can actually do it. You can pick up the phone, and people will actually listen to your idea."
