It’s been a little while since we shared an update on the status of the YaMabrook mobile app. And we have very exciting news that YaMabrook has officially launched in the Apple App and Google Play stores! Woo hoo!

For the next couple weeks, we’re taking time to celebrate the occasion and collect feedback from our early adopters. We have big dreams and ambitions for this app, and we’ve already got some great updates planned, so we hope you’ll follow along.

Some background and context

YaMabrook was born out of the desire to create a culturally relevant mobile app for young people in and from the Middle East. We settled on the topic of gift giving. The act of giving and getting gifts play an important role in Arab culture, and is a universally positive experience. We felt strongly that we wanted our product to have a positive vibe.

First, though, we needed to understand our prospective users.

Through our surveys and interviews with target customers and our own familiarity with Arab culture, we collected many data points. Here are some of them:

• Arab culture is highly social, and celebrations are a big deal
• Gift giving is widespread and important to men and women, though women are often responsible for selecting and purchasing gifts
• The gift giving process in Arab culture involves more etiquette than in Western culture. The choice of gift is important. Gift givers and giftees do not want to risk offending the other.
• Redundant gifts are a common issue, as gift givers don’t always have a clear idea of what the giftee needs or wants
• Gift choices are often determined by gender
• Gift givers take a lot of pleasure in pleasing the giftees
• Budget and convenience are big concerns for gift givers
• Privacy and protecting one’s online identity is always a priority – especially for women
• Online purchases in the Middle East are often paid COD (cash-on-delivery), but the market for e-commerce, and ultimately online payments, has huge growth potential.

Identifying a problem and a value proposition

Understanding our users was a great start, one that brought us close to a value proposition. But to make our product worthwhile to users, we needed to solve a problem. 

In developing YaMabrook, we decided to focus on solving the problem of redundant gifts. After analyzing the market, our product leads chose to do this by building a wish list app for people to share gift ideas with their family and friends, and to enable those people to claim gifts – either alone or with others. 

Our product choice opened up many prospects and angles for exploration, but we focused on three major areas for the initial launch:

• Providing a platform for collecting gift ideas and building and sharing wish lists
• Making the experience fun and social
• Giving users granular control over privacy protections

The challenge with launching a new direct-to-consumer product can be identifying which features to prioritize. Once we identified the three areas above, the feature prioritization process became a bit easier.

When you download YaMabrook, what you see is just the tip of the iceberg. And, true to the agile process, we’re allowing flexibility for the product to evolve over time. The coming updates will bring some great new features and design improvements based on user feedback and ongoing QA testing. 

Download YaMabrook today

We invite you to visit your favorite app store, download YaMabrook, and give it a whirl. Whether or not you’re part of our target audience, we’d love to know what you think! Questions, comments, suggestions, compliments, and critiques are always welcome. Send your email to hello@yamabrook.com

YaMabrook is led by Ihssan Abukhalaf and Batool Abukhalaf, with major contributions by the 24Online engineering team and the Baianat branding team.