Kilawari started with messages.
Not a business plan.
Not a market study.
Messages.
“Do you know a driver?”
“I am looking for work.”
“Do you know a guide in this city?”
“Someone told me to contact you.”
“Can you connect me with somebody?”
Once or twice, this is normal.
When it keeps happening, you eventually realize you have accidentally become part of a system.
My own work in tourism and the visibility I built online meant I knew a fair number of people around the industry.
Drivers, guides, operators and people trying to get into tourism would contact me.
When I knew somebody who could help, I would sometimes make the introduction.
That feels useful.
It also creates a problem.
Because now the next person asks you.
And the next.
And suddenly information that should move directly between two people is moving through your Instagram inbox.
That is not a network.
That is one tired person forwarding messages.
The problem was real, but my role in it was wrong
The obvious temptation would have been to make the middleman role more organized.
Keep a spreadsheet.
Create lists of drivers.
Store phone numbers.
Remember who is looking for work.
Become better at matching people manually.
I did not want that.
Partly because I already have actual work to do.
But more importantly because the industry should not depend on knowing the right person who knows another person.
Tourism in Morocco has a lot of capable people.
What it does not always have is a clean way for those people to become visible to each other.
Somebody may be a good driver and simply not have access to the company currently looking for one.
Somebody may need a local guide but only know people in another city.
Someone may be looking for their next opportunity while an operator ten kilometres away needs exactly what they do.
The connection exists in theory.
Finding it is the problem.
So Kilawari became a network
The idea behind Kilawari is deliberately simple.
If you work in Moroccan tourism, you should be able to represent what you do.
If you are looking for work, you should be able to say that.
If you need somebody, you should be able to say what you need.
Then the right people should be able to find each other and speak directly.
That last part matters to me.
I do not want Kilawari to recreate the same problem digitally by placing another unnecessary gatekeeper between people.
The useful outcome is the connection.
Not making everybody ask permission for the connection.
Building from a problem you actually have
I like projects that begin this way.
You encounter something repeatedly.
You try the obvious manual solution.
The manual solution starts becoming ridiculous.
Then you ask whether the underlying process could be better.
That does not guarantee the product will work.
Building something because you experienced the problem is useful, but it does not magically mean you understand every other person's version of it.
The danger is building an extremely efficient solution to your own specific annoyance.
So Kilawari still has to prove itself through use.
Do tourism professionals understand it quickly?
Do people create useful profiles?
Can somebody actually find the right person?
Do work requests contain enough information to be useful?
Does it stay simple as more people join?
Those questions are more interesting than whether I can add another feature.
I would be happy if Kilawari made me less useful
This is one of the slightly strange things about the project.
Success means people stop needing to ask me for certain things.
That is good.
If somebody needs a driver and Kilawari helps them find one directly, there is no reason for me to be part of that conversation.
If somebody is looking for work and can make themselves visible without sending private messages to everybody they know, even better.
The network should become useful because of the people in it.
Not because Abdel happens to know somebody.
That is why I built Kilawari.
Or, more accurately, why I started building it.
The messages were already there.
I just got tired of pretending my inbox was infrastructure.