In February 2026, a conversation in our studio kept returning to a particular kind of unfairness most employees in the job market, and most recent graduates, in our region have run into. The global job market runs almost entirely through a single platform, and that platform monetises every direction of the relationship at once. You pay a subscription to apply for a job. The company pays a subscription to search for you. You pay another tier to be visible to recruiters at all. The platform is not in the business of supporting employees or improving the labour market. It is in the business of charging both sides for the right to find each other, and that is a different business, with a different incentive, dressed up as the only place hiring is allowed to happen.
We started, the way we usually do, with the most important decision and worked outward. The most important decision was that the platform we wanted to build had to be free at every layer. No pay-to-apply. No pay-to-search. No premium tier deciding whose profile is allowed to surface. Whatever the model turned out to be, money was not going to be the currency anyone paid to be seen. Free is not a feature on this app. Free is the entire stance.
The question that followed was what should take money's place, because attention on a hiring platform is finite and the question of who appears at the top of a search is the whole product. The answer we kept arriving at was influence. If a professional wants their profile surfaced to the companies that hire in their field, they have to commit a defined number of hours every month to teaching the next layer of people behind them. A senior computer engineer mentors graduates and self-taught switchers. A designer runs hours of critique for juniors. A copywriter teaches the field they spent ten years learning. We set fifteen training hours per month as the floor for top visibility, and visibility scales upward from there, not by how much you paid this quarter, but by how much you gave back this month.
What the training actually looks like on the platform is a complete online course, recorded and uploaded to the instructor’s profile. A senior professional records a course they would otherwise sell, posts it to the app, and from that point on it is free for anyone, anywhere. Any user, in any field, in any city, can take the course end to end at no cost and leave structured feedback on the instructor, the curriculum and the value of what was taught. The platform then reads the whole body of work behind the profile: hours delivered, students completed, ratings returned, and the candidates the instructor helped place. The profiles built on top of that material are the ones surfaced to hiring companies, and the instructors who carry the field receive serious support from us in return: money, introductions, and commissioned work routed through the agency.
We then added a layer for companies that need someone immediately, because the slow funnel of profile to recruiter to call is exactly what makes the existing model feel like a tax on time. A hiring manager opens the app, opens a map, and sees professionals near them in real geographic proximity. From the map they can request a short, immediate piece of advice from a candidate, on a real problem the company is currently solving. The advice is the interview. The advice is the work sample. A short call in the open decides whether the manager wants to continue the conversation. We wanted hiring to start with a useful exchange, not with a recruiter inbox.
The reputation layer is what makes the rest of it self-policing. A professional's rating on the platform comes from two streams: the structured training hours they ran, with feedback from the people they actually taught, and the wider community impact attached to their work, including the candidates they mentored who later got hired. The number on a profile is not paid-for visibility. It is earned, measurable, and reversible if the hours dry up. The professional is competing on their generosity to the field, and the field is the judge.
We are designing the platform now. The front and back interfaces come next, the technical partner conversation is open, and the legal structure will follow. We are not taking a percentage on the hire, we are not selling candidate data, and we are not introducing a premium tier later through a side door. We have written about this idea here for the same reason we wrote about Kis Ruz, Beshrab and the workplace solidarity platform: the agency funds this, the agency runs this, and the agency wants its practice on the record. A recruitment platform that bills both sides is not the only possible answer to a labour market problem. Influence works. We will ship it soon, inshallah.

In November 2025, a conversation in our studio kept circling back to two observations about giving in Egypt that did not sit well together. The first was that a lot of people in our country would give if they could, but quietly believed their twenty pounds was too small to count, so they did not give. The second was that a lot of families in our country were going days without food, in towns and villages where no campaign and no charity feed ever reached them, and nobody on a phone in Cairo knew their names. There was a country full of small money on one side and a country full of unmet hunger on the other, and the two were not talking.
We started, the way we usually do, with the name. The smallest unit of help that still moves a family from no food to food in our region is a bag of rice. The Egyptian Arabic for that is kis ruz. We made it the name of the app because the name had to be the entire pitch: a sack of rice is enough, the price of a coffee is enough, anyone can give. We did not want to brand the platform with the language of philanthropy, because philanthropy is what made the twenty-pound donor feel small in the first place.
From there, the architecture wrote itself. The home screen could not be a feed of polished campaign posters. It had to be a map. Egypt, drawn as the country it is, with pins on the governorates currently most behind on food. The donor sees the scale of the need before they see a request. From the map, they drill into a governorate, then into a single family with a name, a head of household, a count of children, a circumstance the local charity has verified. The donation goes to a person, not a cause.
The hardest decision was the payment layer, and the most important one. If the app only worked for people with a credit card, the whole project was a Cairo-only project, and we did not want a Cairo-only project. So we partnered with Fawry. A donor can pay inside the app, at any Fawry branch, or at any Fawry machine sitting in a corner shop. The family receives a code by SMS, walks into the nearest store, shows the number, and walks out with the food. No card, no bank account, no app on the family's side, no friction. The donation finishes its journey in a shop the family already passes every day.
We built the platform two-sided from the first sketch. Donors get the map and the product grid; charities get a dashboard. Two tabs show, family by family, who has been fed and who has waited too long. A monthly chart counts products delivered, families reached, families still in need. The number that matters on Kis Ruz is not money raised, it is days of hunger closed. We wanted the partner charities to be measured on the same axis the donors are, so the platform read the same on both sides of the screen.
The last layer we added was the one that surprised us. We built groups, aliases, and a 24-hour challenge mode, because giving turns out to be more sustainable when it is sociable. A team in Cairo nicknames themselves the Ninja Turtles and races a team in Alexandria to close the food gap in Asyut before the timer runs out. We were nervous at first that competition would cheapen the act, and the opposite turned out to be true. The leaderboard adds urgency without adding noise, and it makes the donor feel part of something visible rather than alone with a notification.
Kis Ruz is non-profit at every level. We are not taking a percentage on the donation, we are not pricing the product margin, and we are not selling data. We are still finalising the legal structure of the non-profit and the government coordination on subsidised product pricing, so that a 20-pound rice on the app reaches the family at the same shelf price they would pay in a shop down the road. The app will be on every phone in Egypt very soon, with no campaign and no sponsor logo on the front. We have written this here for the same reason we wrote about Beshrab and the workplace platform: the agency funds this, the agency runs this, and the agency wants its practice on the record.

In June 2025, a conversation in our studio kept circling back to a number nobody in our region talks about honestly. Quiet, daily deaths from drug overdose and untreated alcohol dependence among people who can read, who carry phones, who have families, and who never once see anyone speak to them plainly about what the substance they are using is doing to their body. The awareness materials we could find were either fear campaigns with no follow-through, or polished, medicalised language that the actual audience does not use. We watched a teenager scroll past one of those PSAs and roll their eyes. The platforms felt embarrassed about the subject.
We started, as we usually do, with language. The name of the platform is Beshrab, the Egyptian Arabic verb for he drinks, he smokes, he is on it. Every family with an addict knows the word. It is what they say at the kitchen table when they are worried, frustrated, or grieving. We decided early that every page on the platform would speak in that register: vernacular Egyptian Arabic, no English fallback, no clinical softening. If the audience uses one word for what is happening, the platform should not invent a politer one.
From there, the visual stance fell into place. We sketched a substance library where every drug gets its own page, opened with a live counter of the deaths attributed to it that day in our region, and a gaunt outline of a body with the bodily and mental damage drawn over it in nine plain cards. No metaphor. Temporary paralysis. Cardiac ischemia. Hallucinations. Loss of mind. Bleeding. Death. The reader maps the damage onto a body that looks like their own, and the page closes the loop with a single button: ابدا اتعالج, start treatment.
We knew very early that awareness without a next step is useless, and that next step had to be one phone call, not a maze. So we partnered with a working addiction treatment centre and built the handoff directly into every substance page. One button starts the first counselling conversation. We committed at the same time that G7M would cover the cost of treatment in full for any patient who cannot afford to pay. Recovery has to be free for the people the platform is for, or the platform is decorative.
The other audience we built for is the family. The parent who has just found a foil. The sibling whose brother has not come home in three days. The wife who does not know whether to confront, hide, or call someone. We added a parallel route inside the platform written for that reader, with the same plain language, the same lack of judgement, and the same one-step handoff to a counsellor. The family path matters because in our region, the family is almost always the first responder, and they are almost always under-equipped.
Beshrab does not carry our logo on the front. It is not a service we sell. It is not a portfolio piece in the usual sense. The brand on the page is its own, in vernacular Arabic, on a black ground, with a typography system tuned to feel urgent without becoming theatre. The reason we are writing about it here, instead of waiting for launch, is that we want our practice on the record: the agency funds this, the agency runs this, the agency pays the treatment bills. That is the entire commercial model, and there is no other.
A year in, the platform is in build and launching soon. We are still adding substances to the library, still refining the family path, still working with the treatment centre on the handoff. The site will go live quietly, without a campaign and without a sponsor logo. If it helps one person make the first call, the year was worth it. If it helps a thousand, we will keep building it for the next ten.

In September 2023, a conversation in our studio kept circling back to the same uncomfortable observation. Every office we walked into had the same structure: well-paid senior staff working at desks upstairs, and the people who keep that office running below them, the cleaners, the security guards, the cafeteria team, the maintenance crew, on salaries a fraction of what the senior staff earned. The two groups sat in the same building every day, and the gap between them stayed invisible.
We started sketching a platform that could close that gap without anyone leaving the building. The thinking was simple. If a senior employee could quietly redirect a small daily amount of their own salary, two, five, twenty pounds, to their junior colleagues with the heaviest need, the cumulative effect across hundreds of staff would be significant. The platform would not be a charity. It would be a private act of solidarity inside one workplace.
We designed the distribution to be need-led, not first-come. Funds would land first with the colleagues whose situations were hardest: large families, medical treatment, illness, dependants. The list would update monthly. We also decided early that no copy of the platform should ever share data across companies. Each company would receive its own isolated build, its own logo, its own database, its own employee directory, and full ownership of the privacy chain.
We designed and built the platform end to end. The interface is in Arabic with full RTL layout, deliberately simple so a cafeteria worker and a director both reach the donor screen in two taps. The donor side shows your daily commitment, the colleagues you are helping this month, a six-month chart of how many people your contribution has reached, and one button to change or pause your giving. The reporting side gives the company a monthly view of growth and impact without ever exposing who is donating what.
After the idea was developed, we did not pitch it through a normal commercial proposal. We presented it to several companies who had partnered with us, free of charge, as a gift. The response was immediate enthusiasm. Each interested company received its own white-labelled copy with their logo baked in, deployed on their own infrastructure with their own database. We do not take a fee for the build, the hosting or the maintenance.
The hope behind the project is bigger than any single company. We wanted to plant a healthier kind of competition inside workplaces, where employees compare not job titles but how much they have lifted each other. Where solidarity is the metric. Over time, the people on the lowest rungs of an office salary scale do not just receive help, they become self-sufficient, and the building they work in starts to feel less like a hierarchy and more like a family.
The platform is live today, gifted to multiple companies, and we continue to evolve it. A working demo runs at socialimpact.g7m.org. The project still does not have a public brand, on purpose. It is not ours to claim. It belongs to the companies that run it and the colleagues who use it.

In April 2022, a conversation in our studio went somewhere uncomfortable. We were noticing the same thing on every supermarket trip across MENA: the products our families and our children reach for first are also the products quietly cutting their lives short. Sugar, salt, additives, ultra-processing. The public conversation around it stayed polite. The shelves did not.
We did not have a name for what we wanted to build. We did not have a client, a brief or a budget. What we had was a stubborn feeling that brand language, the thing we sell to clients every day, could be turned around and used against the brands that needed challenging. We agreed in the room to start that week.
We began with research. We pulled together the products that show up in MENA homes most often, from Coca-Cola and Pepsi to Maggi, Nestle, Twix, Skittles, Cadbury, Haribo and Stella Artois. For each one we mapped the documented health impact, organ by organ: heart, kidneys, liver, pancreas, intestines, bones, teeth. Every disease entry was written twice, once in English and once in Arabic, with the same plain-language register so the message would not feel translated on either side.
The character work came next. We knew an awareness platform with no body to point at would land softly, so we designed four 3D characters, a man, a woman, a boy and a girl, deliberately neutral and deliberately recognisable, so visitors could meet themselves or their family inside the experience. We modelled the underlying anatomy as well, the organs that would surface when a product was selected, so the harm could be seen and not just described.
We prototyped in the studio over a handful of intense days. Early versions were rough: paper sketches, then clickable mockups, then a brittle web prototype that crashed if you switched characters too fast. Each pass tightened the interaction. Pick a product, the platform stamps it BOYCOTT, the affected organs glow on the body, a short note explains what is happening inside. Three steps. No friction. No medical jargon.
Then the web build. We engineered the front-end ourselves, end to end, with a full RTL layout so the Arabic version was a first-class experience instead of a mirrored afterthought. Bilingual switching had to be one click. Performance had to be light, so a poorly connected phone in a small town could still load the platform. Search and category filters were added so a visitor could find a product the way they actually shop.
The visual identity arrived late on purpose. We wanted the platform to be uncomfortable before it was branded. Once the experience felt right, we landed the name: Deadly Products. A blunt mark, an off-balance figure, a red and black palette that refuses to feel friendly. The wordmark stays out of the way of the message.
The site is quietly working. Without paid promotion, traffic has come in from places we did not plan for, Bosnia, Turkey, Germany and the United States alongside the MENA audience we built it for. The conversation is bigger than we expected, which keeps us building.
The platform is live at deadlyproduct.com today. It is non-profit, ad-free, and will stay that way. We continue to add products, refine the health notes, and keep both languages in step. The idea that started in our studio in 2022 has not stopped being uncomfortable, which is exactly why we keep working on it.