“You won’t believe the number of hats I wear”, said Khaled Yusuf, LavaLoon’s CEO. LavaLoon is one of Frappe’s Silver Partners based in Egypt & KSA. Khaled has been running the company’s foundation since 2004, 13 years before it was officially registered in 2017. Last week, in a more than candid conversation, Khaled and I discussed his tales of entrepreneurship, his passion for programming, and the importance of new mindsets.

Khaled began his coding journey at the age of seven. In a time when computers weren’t commonly accessible, Khaled’s father inculcated an early passion for programming in him. With this unwavering support, Khaled accessed all the resources he could to develop a lifelong expertise and respect for the craft. Even during university, Khaled pushed for special assignments and exceptions to freelance with companies.

Khaled’s programming jobs as an undergrad were just the tip of the iceberg leading to the rest of his career. He graduated in 2001 as a civil engineer and the very next day began working at a pure software company. From then on, he worked with all kinds of companies, big and small. His statement at the beginning of our conversation proved true. Khaled managed projects in government sectors, private companies, in consulting, in tech development, you name it.

“In my experience, it is rare to find someone who has been on both sides. I’ve been doing it for as long as I can remember. If you want to describe the pillars of my life in three words, they would be ‘crazy’, ‘diversity’, and ‘integration’. This is what I built LavaLoon with.”

Khaled's talk at the British University of Egypt to launch the Business Information Systems Major

We then moved on to discussing the origins of LavaLoon. After a dozen stints in as many companies, Khaled and his colleagues settled into entrepreneurship. In the beginning, Khaled played technical and commercial roles. LavaLoon’s co-founders utilised their past experience of projects with Oracle and Microsoft solutions.

As a part of the official setup of LavaLoon, in 2017, research for their critical decision led them to ERPNext. In comparison to the popular systems they had been implementing, Frappe Framework and ERPNext seemed like a dark horse. But trusting his knowledge of ERPNext and combining it with his vast experience in the area, LavaLoon took a risk on it.

“Many people ask me why I would move to a lesser-known software. Not just for LavaLoon, but offer it as a service too. If I’m honest, it was a big and scary risk. But I believed in the potential and had to see it through. And I am glad I did.”

Frappe & ERPNext Egypt Meetup

Closer to 2020, during LavaLoon’s first stint as a Frappe Partner, Khaled and his team were working mainly on Cloud. Despite being early adopters and partners, Khaled felt like the product wasn’t an exact fit. LavaLoon decided to part ways as a partner, simply because the timing wasn’t right.

Eighteen months later, they became a partner again. With ERPNext and Frappe Cloud evolving with new features, Frappe’s direction had changed. LavaLoon wasn’t the same company anymore, either. They had a stronger team and a new focus on localisation. This approach was highlighted by the KSA Compliance app. Even though there were 9 other competitors on the market, Khaled’s team took a risk. They built the best KSA Compliance app they could and now top the charts with 1700+ downloads in the region.

“We want to keep making better products. With so many players in the market, it is always a risk, but these risks bring better results. We even invested USD 150,000 in a POS app when there were tens of others on the market. But we did it differently, took a risk, so we succeeded.”

Khaled’s ‘risk-taking’ measures aren’t the only changes he’s making. Internally, LavaLoon holds close a culture of empowerment. Their passionate team of twenty members are encouraged to take ownership with open limits and explore their potential. LavaLoon’s team is as “crazy” as their CEO and takes pride in their ability to always choose to do the unexpected.

Another constant at LavaLoon is their internship program. Khaled appreciates the potential he sees in juniors and mentors them to grow in their careers. He also trains engineers from scratch, imparting an early interest in programming, akin to his own story. These practices didn’t just show up, though. They stemmed from an emerging need for Khaled to don some of his hats onto other people.

“Our team thrives on challenge. We want to do massive work with integrations, faster rollouts and effective localisations. If I were going to delegate the things I had been doing, I needed to build a team that was capable of handling it.”

LavaLoon's Dish Party: If Lavaloon were to run a second line of business, it would be a restaurant owing to their frequent dinner parties!

In context of future plans, the most exciting part is the impending growth of LavaLoon AI, a vertical that would innovate with integrations in ERPNext. Moreover, Khaled wants to strengthen ERPNext’s position in the Middle East and drive awareness through education and evangelism. LavaLoon has already introduced ERPNext and the Frappe Framework at the British University in Egypt, hoping to recruit promising candidates.

“More than just growing the company, I also want to grow with the community. I want to collaborate with partners on shared projects and propagate the idea and benefits of open source while smartly investing in it.”

We closed with our usual quick questions:

What makes Frappe products worth it?
They are real, open-source products which give freedom, agility, and scalability. The Frappe Framework itself powers all the products along with any needs for customisation or integration. Moreover, there’s a growing community with great support.

Why should customers choose LavaLoon?
LavaLoon brings a balance between business and technology. We have proven success with over 25 ERP enterprise projects. We have a solutions mindset with many innovative SaaS products like LavaPOS, LavaHub, LavaDo & LavaCard.

One lesson you’d want to share with the world
Madness innovates the world, so whatever you dream of, as long as it’s good for humanity, do it, even if it looks impossible or crazy!

Before I ended the call, Khaled threw in a bold and cheeky line that summed up his conviction.

“If someone says ERPNext isn’t suitable for enterprises or not as good as other ERP systems, just give me 30 minutes with them.”