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El-Fatatry says gulf investors should look locally for opportunities, rather than at established companies such as facebook.

Ultimately, however, El-Fatatry's plan is to develop Muxlim into a flexible brand that cuts across different industry sectors. "Muxlim is a whole vision to push any products that will enhance the Muslim lifestyle," he says.

"We see the brand developing into something that is  recognised in the Muslim community, like the Virgin brand. If in the future we would like to diversify, one area we would look at is branded credit cards that allow you to make payments and gain discounts in online and offline stores, and cheap internet telephony services. We are a very ambitious company. We haven't executed 1% of the things we want to do."

For the moment, El-Fatatry says the US and Europe - which make up well over half of the site's users - offer the largest potential returns for the company, and that targeting other countries will require a different approach: "Our strategy in Muslim-majority countries will be more about persuading people that the internet is not about credit card fraud and adult websites. In the 1990s, it took me two or three years to convince my parents to get the internet at home, because that's what they thought it was about. Also, in Muslim-majority countries, all restaurants are halal and it is really easy to practice Islam in the way you wish. The need to come to a website to enhance your Muslim lifestyle may not be as evident."

Nevertheless, El-Fatatry's task of steering Muxlim through to profitability comes during at a worrying time for start-ups, with investment capital and revenue streams drying up.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, US venture capital firms invested US$7.1billion in the third quarter of 2008; 7% less than the previous quarter and 9% less than the same period in 2007.

El-Fatatry says Muxlim has enough cash from a Series A financing round in late 2007 to last "for another twelve months or so", but says it is likely to need more before it reaches break-even: "I look at our company as one of the lucky ones, as we still have enough cash to last us for quite a long time. We are not in a desperate situation. We are making revenues from different channels. Most of our assets aren't even launched yet, and there is the potential for those to succeed very highly. We naturally are looking very cautiously at the environment around us. But we are one of the lucky ones, at least for the time being."

Although El-Fatatry says the Gulf could prove to be the company's next source of capital, he doesn't regret his move away from the UAE - where he says there is less of an entrepreneurial spirit than Finland.

"There is a whole culture of ‘hey, let's try to do something' here. When I was in the Gulf, that culture was almost non-existent. It was very rare to meet a guy who wanted to build his start-up from scratch, but there were loads of people that wanted a job at IBM or Microsoft. That paradigm shift needs to happen at some point."

El-Fatatry doubts whether recent reported talks between Gulf investors and social networking giant Facebook will cause that shift to take place: "When investors start to actively be involved in that kind of investment, it will raise their awareness that there are local opportunities. But it is very easy to go for a Facebook, which is already established, and buy a stake in it at any price."

He continues: "Getting a stake in Facebook does not build an ICT environment in your country. The innovation will still be happening outside the country and all the good stuff that could happen will not be reflected on the local economy. It will be noticed at some point that there will need to be a push towards more locally-bred innovations. And I'm not just talking about innovations for the local market, because it is very small. There needs to be innovation in products that span the whole world. That's when things start to get interesting and people start dedicating their lives to making sure they work out."

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