In a market hijacked by local brands, where everyone is launching something, we noticed a different gap. Not another brand, but the missing infrastructure behind all of them. A place where entrepreneurs could finally find the service providers and partners that turn ideas into real businesses. LaunchPad Expo was born from that gap, the one no one talked about but everyone felt.

Two years ago, we sat down to map out the gaps in Egypt’s events landscape. After weeks of studying trends, one issue kept appearing. Access to information. Companies, brands, startups and even established businesses were all struggling to find the service providers they needed to grow.

When I founded The Blues Agency over six years ago, I saw the same problem up close. The agency market was expanding fast, but something did not add up. How does a brand actually research and meet agencies to find the right fit The process was almost comedic. Most founders start with a simple Google search to find the “best” Agency in Egypt, land on a list of top agencies, then realise everything is out of budget. They go back, delete the word "best" and start lowering expectations.

But this was never limited to marketing agencies. It applied to every service-based industry in a country with a massive population and heavily saturated markets. With over 110 million people, every category is full. It becomes almost impossible for a brand to evaluate dozens of providers and trust they made the right choice.

Legal, accounting, recruitment, marketing, finance, logistics, software. Every service sector suffers from the same issue. A founder simply does not have the capacity to meet everyone. This is where the idea of LaunchPad Expo was born. Bring all the service providers across the entire business lifecycle under one roof and cut the lead time for finding a partner. That is why the name LaunchPad made sense. The launchpad is where rockets take off, and we wanted this to be the place where brands do too.

After shaping the concept, the next challenge was finding a venue that was not just a venue but a place that aligned with innovation and entrepreneurship. It had to feel like the home of ideas. That is when we approached The GrEEK Campus. In every sales call, we say the same thing: “The GrEEK Campus is not just a location. It is the center of innovation in Egypt and arguably the MENA region, a place where many of the region’s leading startups were born and grew.”

My partner Karim and I come from very different backgrounds. I’ve spent my life in marketing, sales and partnerships. He comes from operations, finance and product development. We’ve been best friends since high school, so creating this together felt natural. Our roles were clear. I focused on positioning, partnerships and storytelling. He focused on systems, structure and delivery.

Selling the concept was not easy. Most of the industries we approached had never taken part in an expo before. We were not selling booth space. We were selling the idea of an exhibition that did not exist. Exhibitors want visitor traction, and visitors want exhibitors. We had to build both at the same time. Early partners, ticket sales, more partners. It was a constant loop.

We refined the strategy, built the brand and aligned every touchpoint. Through strong outreach, we onboarded some of the biggest providers and sponsors in the region.

But LaunchPad was never built on vision alone. Execution is what carries the weight, and that is where Karim takes over.

Karim Saber

From here, the story shifts to the part most people never see. The machinery behind the event. The spreadsheets, the venue coordination, the floor plans that changed week after week. This was the world I lived in long before LaunchPad ever had a stage.

Coming from a family rooted in trade fairs, I grew up seeing how exhibitions succeed and how they fail. It taught me something simple but important. Ideas can attract attention, but operations decide the outcome. LaunchPad had to deliver on every promise we made to sponsors, exhibitors, speakers and visitors. The number of event companies in the market is endless, but what separates them is the precision and quality of their operations. That became the foundation of my responsibility.

My experience was never limited to operations. Working as a financial analyst at Enterprise taught me how to build and read numbers with discipline. An expo is a financial challenge before it becomes anything else. Every forecast has to make sense. Every quotation has to fit the wider model. Because this was our first edition, I had to build everything from zero. Market research, supplier benchmarking, pricing strategy. The economics of every square meter had to be right before a single booth was sold.

There was another layer to all of this. My experience as a product manager at Paymob shaped the way I approached LaunchPad. I learned how to build systems that scale and how to design processes that survive pressure. I learned to think like a user. LaunchPad had visitors, exhibitors, speakers and partners. Each one needed a seamless path and a predictable journey. Product thinking became operational thinking. The event became a real product with thousands of users moving through it at once.

One of the biggest challenges was the space itself. People assume exhibitors simply get placed in a hall. In reality, there is a science to it. Maximising exhibiting space without suffocating walkways. Creating natural paths for movement and conversation. Turning an empty venue into a functioning ecosystem. Through my family’s background, we brought in some of the best operations specialists in the country to complete the foundation.

Then came the production agreements, supplier management and hiring the right ushers. All of this was happening quietly while the world waited for the two big days.

And those two days are not the finish line. They are the starting point. The part where every last-minute request, every technical need and every exhibitor concern has to be handled without hesitation. The part where months of planning become a lived experience.

Because at the end of the day, execution is what delivers everything we promised.