By Mohamed Alaa El-Din / Daily News Egypt
SOURCE: Daily News Egypt - MINT platform graduates 12 new start-ups
EG Bank’s MINT Platform is preparing to graduate 12 new startups. MINT is a platform dedicated to the young and curious, enabling youth to access the world of banking, accelerate their business, and unleash their potential. This is a youth space to explore and build their future.
Ahmed Samir, MINT Incubator Program manager, said that MINT aims to help start-ups develop themselves to achieve growth which contributes to youth support who represent the largest group of Egyptian society.
Daily News Egypt sat down for an interview with Samir, the transcript for which is below, lightly edited for clarity:
What type of services offered by MINT for entrepreneurs?
The MINT programme is financed by Egyptian Gulf (EG) Bank. It aims to support entrepreneurs and youth within the age group of 18 to 35. This support includes financial services offered by the bank and non-financial services. Through these services, we aim to help young people who represent about 50% of the Egyptian society to deal with banks and help them grow their business.
What non-financial services do you provide to start-ups?
There are three main points of services we offer to start-ups, the first of which is guidance through training, where the owner of the startup company meets with someone who has 10-15 years’ experience in corporate management to discuss the project, get advice, and answers to their questions.
We also help the emerging company develop an action plan, which is then reviewed by a mentor for assessment and notes. Together, they develop a timetable regarding phases for their work that they are targeting to achieve.
We also offer companies workshops with specialists to help start-ups develop their own marketing plans that help them to develop clear marketing plans suitable for the market and nature of their work.
There are many other services too. We provide workshops for over 13 specialties, including digital marketing, branding, negotiation skills, attracting funding, presenting ideas, and pricing.
Which parties collaborate with you?
We are keen to cooperate with mentors from different sectors who have experience in running a new business, whereby they can understand the journey of startups and help them grow.
When selecting mentors, we also bring them from a different sector from that of the start-ups, as a means for them to not worry about conflicts of interest or information leakage.
What type of criteria company becomes approved to be subject of your programme?
At first, we do not focus on the sector in which emerging company operates, but the most important thing is that there is an opportunity for growth for this company and to be new and provides a solution to a problem that exists in society.
For example, a company called Gedar (Wall) is one of the companies that benefits from our programme even though it offers services that are not related to the technology sector.
The company is made up of a group of young people who draw on walls to give offices in the companies an aesthetic appearance that helps improve the productivity of work according to recent scientific research.
We have found a great opportunity for the growth of the company, due to the presence of a large number of young people from the faculty of Fine Arts, in addition to having a need in the market for such services, all of which increase the chances of growth of the company in the market.