Project : Mavara, built in the middle of the pandemic

It was 2020, the start of covid. People were frightened and morale was low.

I had been inside leadership development for years, and I could see two things at once: managers in Iran wanted this, and Iranians living abroad wanted it in Persian.

We built Mavara quickly. E-learning, with products in leadership development and in economics.

The first year

All of it went up in that year. The e-learning. The commerce side. The products designed, first for individuals, then for organisations.

The part I did not expect to build was the classroom itself. We ended with a fully integrated interactive learning system, where people in a live online class could work through an exercise together and talk while they did it.

At that time Google Meet and Zoom had none of that. So we implemented all of it ourselves.

What it cost and what it returned

We reached product-market fit inside the first year, with a team of eight.

Loyalty and value-based pricing lifted retention by sixty percent. A redesign of the interface grew monthly active users by twenty-five percent. Income more than doubled in the second year.

Building a classroom was not the plan. It was what was missing between the product we wanted to sell and the tools that existed.

Why I let it go

After I moved to Germany, Mavara kept my head in Iran. Every day of it.

Then the protests of 2022 started and the internet in Iran was cut. I was trying to land in one country while my working hours belonged to another.

I decided that if I wanted to settle here and work here, I had to let Iran go completely. I wound Mavara down and started learning German.

Some things do not end because they failed.