While a good business idea is often one that solves a problem, the challenge for entrepreneurs is not in the solving, but identifying that problem in the first place.

 

For Beirut-based entrepreneurs Rami Hallal and Ralph Choueiri, who have been friends since school, their “problem” was how to help people who live in a traffic-choked city – where long working hours are the norm – find time in their day to get their car washed.

 

Blink My Car, which Hallal and Choueiri created with co-founder Joseph Khalil, allows users to order car washers to their doorstep with a few clicks on a smartphone, and pay for it via the app, or in cash, once the wash is complete.

 

It is a simple idea that captured the imagination of the Phoenician Funds, which offered up US$1.2 million in seed funding earlier this year.

 

EARLY BEGINNINGS

 

Blink My Car CEO Hallal explained how he and Choueiri came up with the concept. They had at first considered developing a mobile maintenance service – but realised that to make the idea viable, they needed to provide a more regular service, so they came up with car washing.

 

“We realised that people had to drive to their local shopping mall to get their car washed,” he said. “But traffic means that that can take an hour out of their day, and then they must wait at a place that they did not even want to be in the first place, just to get their car washed.”

 

The next part of the solution was to offer car washes not only at home, but while vehicles were sitting idle at customers’ places of work during weekdays.

 

Hallal said: “People drive their cars to work, then their cars were just sitting in car parks all day, and this is dead time,” he said. “We thought, why not use that time?”

 

They also observed motorists relying on their building concierge or security guard to wash their car, so they decided to make the service professional and high quality by training washers, whom they refer to as “partner specialists”.

 

The next problem to solve was staff. The answer turned out to be delivery riders – moped-riding workers who know the streets well from crisscrossing the city daily delivering takeaway food, but who also had quiet periods prior to the lunch-time and evening rushes when they could also work for Blink My Car.

 

Once the business took off, the startup was able to recruit the riders as full-time staff, paying them a basic wage which is above the Lebanese minimum wage (currently $6,344), with 70% of the price of each wash also going to the washer.

 

“Partners can take on as many washes as they want,” explains Hallal, who said the average is between seven and 10 washes per day. No staff member is expected to work on holidays, he said, but some choose to do so to boost their income.

 

CASH INJECTION

 

Blink My Car was first launched in January 2016, with much of its first year spent establishing the technical side - the responsibility of “tech guy” Khalil.

 

The seed funding, awarded earlier this year, was the cash injection Blink My Car needed to take the company to the next level, expanding the number of users in Beirut, and venture into new territories.

 

The award came via the Phoenician Funds, a Beirut-based venture fund firm, on the impetus of Banque Du Liban’s initiative Circular 331 – which is aimed at providing the funding and tools to develop the country’s start-up ecosystem. Blink My Car is a textbook example of the good Circular 331 is doing, allowing an early stage project to take off. The company now offers bookings via a Facebook Messenger bot, and Hallal says there are ambitious plans to grow at a rate of 20% per month.

 

With funding established and workers in place, the next stage was to go about convincing motorists that they want an on-demand convenient, eco-friendly car wash. For Hallal, the answer was to focus on quality.

 

Existing car washing firms studied by Blink My Car did not place emphasis on quality – using the same microfiber to clean the entire car body, and then using it for the next wash, and so on, spreading dirt particles and dust from part to part and car to car, increasingly the likelihood of damage or scratches.

 

Blink My Car partners use clean products for each part of the car, one for windows, one for car body, one for bumpers, to avoid spreading dirt and grit and offering a high-quality finish.

SUSTAINABILITY IN A CITY USED TO WASTING

 

The sight of car wash waste water running down the street from apartment building car parks, in a country where many suffer from water scarcity during the summer, was enough to convince them that using as little water possible was the right solution, not only from an environmental but a practical point of view, as customers could not allow waste water to be run off into their workplace car parks.

 

The Blink My Car partners use just one cup of water, as opposed to the 250l of water often used in a car wash, and as well as the micro fibre brushes, they use eco-friendly surfactants – compounds which act similarly to a lubricant – to remove dirt and dust.

 

Working in this way has opened Hallal’s eyes to the need to save water.

 

“We suffer water shortages in Lebanon, yet people do not save it. They turn on the shower in the morning and they do not think about how long the water is running,” he said. “People think water is here, and that is it, but it is not,” he said. “The only way to keep water on Planet Earth is to save it.”

 

Hallal says Beirut's 10 Blink My Car partners had, as of August 2017, carried out 4,000 washes, with the bulk of the app’s business happening in the previous three to four months. The seed money has seen Blink My Car enter early stage operations in Dubai, with plans to expand further afield, with Saudi Arabia the app’s next potential destination.