Newsletter #36
Hear from Taimur Abdaal about Why He Built Causal 🎙️ and read our Muslim Tech Fest Recap 🤖
Salaam to all 👋!
Welcome to the June edition of the DD Newsletter - the place to go for your round-ups, updates, and everything in between. Here we'll round off what has been happening in our community and look ahead at our upcoming events and initiatives!
As usual, the newsletter is jam-packed with updates, lots of stuff to share, and a few cool things worth checking out. This edition includes information about upcoming events and campaigns, a Community spotlight, interesting reads, and our favourite meme of the month. You won't want to miss it.
Stay safe and in good health!
Why I Built This - Causal 💷
This month we held our third ‘Why I Built This’ event with Taimur Abdaal, founder of Causal.
‘Why I Built This’ is our podcast series where we interview founders and builders, from our community and beyond, to understand the stories and inspiration behind their journeys. We hold these events in person to get the community together to hear the stories directly, ask insightful questions, network, and enjoy food. Thank you to UsTwo for hosting us.
During the interview we were able to hear from Taimur about the motivation behind building Causal - the finance platform for startups - and hear more about his journey to raising $20m in funding from a range of high-profile investors including Naval Ravikant, and other great angel investors.
This was our third in-person ‘Why I Built This’ Event after hosting the founders of Muslim Census and Auralyze and they’ve all been hugely successful and sold out. So make sure to follow along on social media to be informed when tickets go on sale for our next event and come join us to hear the inspirational stories behind these impressive founders.
Deen Developers events sell out quickly so make sure to follow us across all our social platforms to stay up to date with our latest events and activities
Additional Highlights
Eid Mubarak from the team at Deen Developers 🕋
The waitlist is now open for Buildathons batch 3. Join to stay up to date with all Buildathon announcements
Congratulations to Anterior on raising their $20m Series A
Muslim Tech Fest 🧑🔬
This past month also saw the return of Muslim Tech Fest 24 - the go-to destination to connect with thousands of industry pros, founders, and leaders in the Muslim Tech community.
We were well represented at the startup expo in the festival with a number of our buildathon and Forge graduates setting up exhibition stands to show off their amazing startups. In fact, 60% of the startup expo were startups who began their journeys with Deen Developers! Equipped with fresh branded merch, custom stickers, and slick product demos, the teams were able to share their startups with a huge audience and show off the amazing solutions that the Deen Developers community have built.
We were also promoting Deen Developers with our own booth and accompanying DD-branded donuts where we were able to tell our story and all the great things that we support. After hearing from us and seeing all the successful startup showcases we officially launched the Buildathon Batch 3 waitlist for anyone who’s been inspired to think about their next idea and turn it into a reality.
We would like to thank Muslim Tech Fest organisers, as well as all of our startups that set up their own exhibition stands, and finally the wider Muslim Tech community for turning up, being engaged, and making it an amazing day for everyone involved.
As mentioned the Buildathon Batch 3 waitlist is now live so make sure to join to get all the updates as we look to put the next batch of companies through the 7-week programme to turn an idea into a startup.
Community Spotlight
Mail Bandit 🐙
This month we want to highlight another graduate from our Buildathon Season 2 cohort: Mail Bandit.
Rayhan, Mehdi and Sami founded Mail Bandit to help companies elevate their email marketing game and increase the total number of clicks and revenue generated.
Their technology uses AI to improve conversions by swapping different email variations of live campaigns in realtime to figure out which emails are resonating most with customers and minimising A/B testing losses. They’ve already built an integration with Klaviyo to make it even easier to switch on and start using the Mail Bandit AI to improve campaign conversion!
The team are currently rolling out their platform to as many companies as possible and so have a special offer for readers of the DD newsletter. If you know ayone with an e-commerce store then point them in the direction of Mail Bandit by reaching out to the guys above and mentioning that you came via Deen Developers. As a reward Mail Bandit can give away a years free subscription to the platform worth £1500!
Other Spotlights
Calling all University Students, Startup Founders and Mentors:
Redwood Founders has released their Summer Launchpad Programme
Iman published a quran reader called "Spatial Quran" for the Apple Vision Pro. For certain verses you can view the objects in 3D from viewing a path to seeing the Kabah 🕋 to a path laid out in front of you.
Ahmad is building an event organisation platform that is tailored for play (think Meetup but specifically for sports/hobbies)
The Community Spotlight section is an opportunity to share announcements, job openings, and anything else that’s worth highlighting.
Post on the #03_show-and-tell channel if you have something to share.
Slack's Digest
Interesting Articles Shared
Meme of the month
Let’s just leave it that 😅
Have you got a funny meme? Post it on the #08_memes channel!