Hazim Mohamad is the co-founder of CoffeeSpace, a Tinder/Hinge-like app to find your co-founder and meet others exploring entrepreneurial ideas.

They have just surpassed 100k swipes on their app as of right now! A fun fact would be that it’s hard to bring ideas to life alone. Hazim sat on an idea for two years, but it was only when Carin reached out (by luck) that the two started exploring together and building.

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👋🏼  How would you explain your job to someone outside tech?

Being a founder is unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced. Basically, whatever the company needs, if no one else in the company can/wants to do, then by default as the founders you’ll be the one who’ll have to do it.

The range of things that my co-founders and I do on a day-to-day basis is so broad that no two days are ever the—and that to me is what makes the role so interesting.

The highs and lows are extreme, but that emotional roller coaster is just part of the ride.

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🧐  What's something about you or your job that would surprise us?

It’s not a surprise per se, but I do think it’s paradoxical—the job as a founder generally means you can work from anywhere, anytime.

But what happens in practice is that you find yourself working everywhere, and almost all the time.

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🏆  What has been the biggest highlight of your career so far?

I would say the journey over the past 6-9 months for CoffeeSpace would be the biggest highlight yet

We had to pivot from the prior version of the idea, which was tough, but since then it’s been progressing better than expected—from getting the first 10 paying users within the first month (before building anything), to launching the mobile app in March this year after an extensive beta testing phase with early users, to now passing the 100k swipes and 4k matches mark within 4 months of launch.

It’s been quite the ride and we’re excited each day to keep pushing ourselves even further to serve our users better.

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🔍  What's a startup trend or space you're watching this year?

There are 3 trends in particular that we are excited about, and which we believe will spur even more folks to build:

1) Increasing adoption of no-code and AI tools

2) Side hustle & gig economy becoming mainstream

3) Post-COVID environment has made remote collaborations a lot more common

All 3 makes building easier, regardless of skill set, current commitments and their geographical location so aspiring entrepreneurs should leverage this and start tinkering

As we espouse in CoffeeSpace, it starts with just talking to others about your idea, as people who do talk about it (instead of just thinking and leaving it at the back of their mind) are at least 10 times more likely to actually build.

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💼  What advice would you give someone starting out in your industry?

Some of the main things I’ve learned are crucial as an entrepreneur:

1) Resourcefulness: after going through the journey of building CoffeeSpace since June last year (and a couple of different ideas before that), I’ve learned that you can do a lot with little resources, and especially in the earliest stages of a start-up that’s very crucial.

2) Being able to learn fast and being agile: the main advantage a start-up has is speed, since in a startup you can just try to experiment on something quickly and validate/decide to proceed or otherwise while in bigger companies it might take weeks to months to do so.

3) Being customer-centric: the most important people you need to serve and make happy is your users

It’s famously said one 2 things matter for a startup to succeed: 1) Talk to users, 2) Build the product. As long as you keep on talking to users and make iterations to the product to make it better based on their feedback, you’re optimizing the odds of building something that’ll be loved and that your users will rave about.

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🗣  What's one thing you can keep talking about for hours?

Stories about the founder journey, and finance/portfolio management.

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🎥  What's your favorite movie/TV show?

Favorite movie would be Dark Knight, and for TV show it’s Sherlock

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🍨  What's your go-to ice cream flavor?

Vanilla, has always been and will always be