CrowdInk just sat down (virtually) with Ahmad Ktaech, founder of the Ebbu App, to talk entrepreneurship, tech, and new media. The Ebbu App is changing the way we consume online news. It’s not about what is trending today, it’s about what trending for each person and what is quality content.
CrowdInk: What was the inspiration behind the Ebbu App?
Ahmad Ktaech: I was frustrated with how hard it was to find great articles after they’re no longer considered ‘news’. It turned out that I wasn’t the only one. Friends, family, and colleagues shared in my irritation. That pushed me to explore what an anti-breaking new app could do.
I started seeking answers for questions like, “how much great content do we miss?” “What happens to all the great articles that are never read?” “How hard is it to find articles that are a day old?” “Two days old?” “Do readers actually care about reading articles that are no longer on the homepage of their favourite media publishers?” The answers all led to the creation of Ebbu.
CI: What was the biggest challenge in moving from inspiration to actual development of the app?
AK: Quantifying the problem, understanding the market, and building a strategy for how to test the viability of my solution to this problem. It’s the mental switch from, “I have the answer to this problem,” to “how can I tap into my market to crowdsource a part of the answer to this problem?”
CI: What are your goals for the business in the next 5 years or so?
AK: I want to change the way publishers value content and make it easier for readers to discover content that’s value is not determined by how ‘new’ it is, but by how good it is.
CI: What would you consider your biggest success in the business thus far?
AK: Getting 41% more engagement time on Ebbu than on standard news apps.
CI: If you could give one piece of advice to aspiring entrepreneurs, what would it be?
AK: I have 2 pieces of advice. The first one is from Charles Darwin: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change.” The second is from Drew Houston (Dropbox): “Don’t worry about failure, you only have to be right once.”