From Venta Apps to GoTogether — 15 Years of Building
A founder's journey through cross-platform mobile CMS, food-tech, and finding purpose in Islamic travel infrastructure.
The Beginning
I wrote my first lines of production code in Alexandria, Egypt. That was 2011. I didn’t know it then, but I was starting a path that would take me through three countries, five ventures, and a fundamental question: what’s worth building?
Venta Apps — The Mobile CMS Era
My first co-founded venture was Venta Apps, a cross-platform mobile CMS. The pitch was simple: let anyone build a mobile app for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone without writing code.
We were building in the no-code space before “no-code” was a category. The product worked. People used it. But I learned a critical lesson:
Building tools for everyone often means building for no one in particular.
The business generated revenue, but it lacked a clear wedge — a specific problem so painful that users would pay anything to solve it.
Zatona Eats — Food-Tech and Flat6Labs
Next came Zatona Eats, backed by Flat6Labs. End-to-end meal planning, ordering, and delivery infrastructure. I led product and engineering.
Food-tech taught me about operations complexity — the gap between a working app and a working business. Software is the easy part. Logistics, supply chains, and unit economics are where startups live or die.
The experience across Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut gave me exposure to how the US market operates. Different scale, different expectations, different speed.
Finding the Problem Worth Solving
Between ventures, I kept coming back to a personal observation: the Umrah travel experience was broken.
Millions of Muslims travel for Umrah every year. The demand is massive and growing. But the infrastructure behind it — hotel bookings, package assembly, B2B distribution — was stuck in spreadsheets and phone calls.
This wasn’t a technology problem looking for users. This was millions of users waiting for the right technology.
GoTogether — Building for Purpose
GoTogether is the culmination of everything I’ve learned:
- From Venta Apps: focus on a specific market with a specific pain
- From Zatona Eats: operations matter as much as code
- From consulting: enterprise infrastructure beats consumer apps for sustainable business
The technical stack reflects this maturity. Allotment, our B2B booking engine, handles wholesale hotel inventory across 120+ hotels. ZATCA-compliant invoicing for Saudi commerce. Typesense-powered search returning results in under 50ms.
The Lesson
Fifteen years taught me that the best products come from the intersection of personal conviction and market need. I’m building GoTogether not because the travel-tech market is hot, but because I understand the problem from the inside.
If you’re a founder still searching for your thing — keep building. Every venture teaches you what the next one needs to be.