How to start a business with no money, and the only failure that counts

The first man to take the microphone was 30, an IT graduate, three years of the war without steady work, now in Cairo with several business ideas and unable to pick one. He asked how to start a business with no money and no clear direction, and Aziz began by telling him the ideas themselves are the good news. Plenty of people in these sessions have capital and no ideas at all.

Then the image he uses for being spoilt for choice: you walk into a restaurant, the menu has 350 items, you cannot work out what you want, and you sit there until the hunger passes and you order a coffee instead. His instruction was blunt. Write the list, however many are on it, pick the one where you already know people who can help, pray your istikhara, and start. Do not keep turning it over.

The reasoning matters more than the instruction. In business you fail and fail and fail, he says, and he fails at something every day. Each failure teaches you something you did not know. The one failure that teaches nothing is not starting. He ended by promising to ask the man next week what he chose and what he did, and said that if the answer is still I am thinking about it, the advice was worthless.

The room disagreed with itself on capital, in public, which is the most useful thing in the session. One woman with years of trading behind her advised nobody should open anything without a year of rent and a year of running costs in hand, because otherwise the business has no time to reach profit and the founder is broken by the disappointment.

The next man to speak had started a print shop with 500 dollars. He bought one printer, rented a place, and did not have the following month's rent for the house. A year later he had four presses. The last speaker on the point, an agriculture student from the University of Khartoum, said he had started with zero Sudanese pounds, and that his profit in the month of May was 4,000 dollars. He still has no office. The stamp is in his bag.

Aziz did not referee, and he took the second position. Fear of next week's rent is itself part of the business, and he pointed out the pattern he keeps seeing: people whose families are comfortable try things, fail, and learn nothing from it, because nothing was at stake. Later in the session a woman who has never studied business split the Arabic term for capital into its two halves, head and money, and said the head brings the money. Capital does not fall from the sky. It comes from your effort, from a plan clear enough that you believe it yourself, and from then sitting in front of people and asking.

A biomedical engineer working in Saudi Arabia described a bad situation at work, a legal case he is bringing, and a choice between going back to Sudan and starting again somewhere else. Aziz told him to keep his temper cold, and then told him not to rush out of the job.

His argument was not caution for its own sake. Once you have owned a company, nobody asks you anything, and returning to a job after that is extremely hard, which is part of why the job now feels unbearable. So use it. The job you are in is the bank that funds the thing you are building, and it should be the last job you ever take. Build the relationships in Sudan slowly, find the people you can genuinely trust there, and let having a plan give you the patience to sit in a job you dislike.

He was equally clear about what the Sudanese market costs to enter, because he paid it. For the first six years of Sudan Digital he had not a single Sudanese client, because he refused to pay what is required to get in. The clients came later, without tenders, once the company could say no with a straight face.

If you want to enter any partnership, you want to enter it from the strong side. The strength comes from your audience.

The advice he repeated more than any other, to a 26 year old selling cars, to a trainer in Saudi Arabia who cannot find anyone interested in her courses, and to a woman importing contact lenses who is frightened of appearing online, was the same: hold the job and build content in the field you want to be in, with your face and your name on it. He said plainly that if he were building his own business again today, with most people not knowing who he is, this is exactly what he would do, which is why he was there at eleven at night answering strangers.

The audience is not the customer. The audience is the route to the customer, and the thing that puts you on the strong side of any partnership you later want. He told the woman with the lenses that if she posted daily for six months she would have more than a hundred thousand followers, and reminded the trainer that at the start nobody gets views and everyone loses confidence. Nobody skips that part.

An engineer who left a job of twelve hour days to open her own contracting company asked whether she should go back to being an employee. His answer was the least comforting thing he said all session, and he flagged it: it does not get easier.

There is a price for building something of your own and it is not financial. It is paid in your own head. The problems do not shrink as you grow. Whether you are at step one or step 300 there are problems, and only their quality changes. Not everyone can pay that, and there is nothing wrong with deciding you cannot.

What he put on the other side of it was freedom, which he called the most valuable thing a person can have, and one observation for the woman asking. She had already opened the company while holding down the job, so she had shown she can carry it. The decision is hers, but on the evidence she has already paid once.

One last thing about the session, since it says something about how he works. People kept sending him money and gifts through the platform while he was speaking. He stopped twice to tell them not to: hold your money for the people who need it.