A bootstrapped MENA founder's take on the gap between Shopify and Salla, and why "free to start" matters more in MENA than the discourse admits.
It's 2026 and a merchant in Cairo, Amman, or Dubai still can't launch a serious online store the way a merchant in Toronto or Berlin can.
That sentence sounds dramatic. I wish it weren't true. I've spent the better part of a decade building software in this region, and the gap is real. Not because MENA merchants are less ambitious or less technical, but because the tooling assumes a market that isn't ours.
I want to talk about that gap, what I learned trying to close it, and what I've come to believe about building SaaS for an emerging market.
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