Inside the Dubai-born app that is trying to reunite communities

Hayi, which means neighbourhood in Arabic, is an app that connects neighbours, community managers and local businesses – essentially creating a hyperlocal platform for social activities when Covid permits.

Its co-founders Rene Morgan and Chris Darnell told Arabian Business that Hayi is currently available in 13 test neighbourhoods across Dubai and has close to 2,300 verified users.

The main events the young duo have organised through Hayi so far are the neighbourhood clean-ups where eco-friendly neighbours get “the chance to meet while engaging in an activity to keep their community safe and clean.”

There have been 10 to 15 cleanups organised in different neighbourhoods across the city to date.

Other events will include pet-friendly events, fitness boot camps and children’s workshops, in an attempt to target all demographics that might exist in a community, said Morgan and Darnell.

What made you think of coming up with a concept like Hayi and what is the market need for it?

RM: Dubai’s biggest asset, being such a dynamic city, also has its downsides in the terms of that people don’t have a social or family network like they are used to back home.

Nowadays, especially during Covid, mental health has become more of an issue with people struggling with isolation and depression, especially in these dynamic modern cities, and so we are really trying to combat that.

We’re trying to create a strong sense of community, not just online but offline as well when it comes to events. We’re looking to partner and collaborate with a lot of the community managers around the region and we’ve already partnered with Nakheel.

Hayi app connects neighbours, community managers and local businesses

CD: Our vision is to digitise neighbourhoods: We can digitise the friendship experience through Facebook, the professional experience through LinkedIn, and now we see digitising neighbourhoods as the next step.

We’re doing that by providing a platform and connecting all relevant community stakeholders. This includes the neighbours themselves, of course, but also the community managers and small businesses.

We’re looking to offer local small businesses an accurate hyperlocal marketing tool. Digital marketing for small businesses is extremely expensive and is relevant now more than ever in the time of Covid.

What is your competitive edge?

RM: There is currently a need to connect among neighbours as is seen by the multitude of Facebook groups there are.

But Facebook groups, especially in Dubai, are filled with fake accounts and spammers and it really depends on the quality of the admin and how much time they put into that Facebook group for it to be relevant.

Also, a lot of these admins and even members have left the country leading so they are basically Zombie groups.

The interesting development we’ve seen with WhatsApp quite recently is that neighbours are quite conscious about sharing their personal phone number and also, with the recent developments in terms of privacy of information, we’ve seen them splitting through to other platforms.

So we’ve gotten positive feedback for our app in that it protects data privacy and it’s an app specifically tailored to local communities; we even have an interactive map per neighbourhood, split into sub-communities so it’s very much tailored to that neighbourhood experience.

Through Hayi, community managers can send updates to all the tenants, local business can offer hyperlocal discounts for their area, we can even have a marketplace… there are so many different things that we can do to fully tailor and fully optimise it so it’s for the residents.

Among the events organised through Hayi are the neighbourhood clean-ups 

How did you raise funds initially?

CD: We’re self-funded with bootstrap to date. Very recently, we started looking to raise our seed round.

What’s your business model?

RM: It’s entirely free to join the app. Where we’re looking to monetise is through our businesses discount section. We’re giving businesses free rein across all neighbourhoods to select the ones where generally their key demographic reside.

We’re trying to give a little bit more power and put the marketing decisions into the businesses’ hands where they’re able to select where most of their customers are and where they are likely to yield the most results. What those businesses essentially sign up for, is being able to promote their local businesses discounts.

We feel that’s going to be strong going forward. During Covid, but post-Covid as well, a lot of businesses are ramping up their promotional offers to re-spark consumer spending and we feel they’ll be quite a strong surge with that.

CD: We will start monetising in the next few months.

What was the impact of coronavirus on Hayi?

CD: For us, it was a nice opportunity to see that early engagement. It gave us quite a strong and early surge of neighbours who, maybe out of fear and a little bit of confusion for the entire pandemic, were trying to connect online through an app they had never heard and people they had never met, the only thing they know is that they’re all in the same community.

RM: I think also on the human level, everyone started valuing human connection. As soon as we launch a new neighbourhood, we get dozens of posts, and messages saying this is so amazing, I want to connect with people.

During this pandemic, we also got an ex-Careem member as a CTO who is managing our tech team.

How are you doing your marketing?

RM: It ties into our collaboration with the community managers. Our recently established partnership with Nakheel, on the event side of things, gives us the opportunity for Nakheel to promote us on their behalf. So with the social initiative, for example, Nakheel’s promoting across the 300,000 residents in neighbourhoods across Dubai, because we’re going to be doing neighbourhood cleanups and social initiatives in each neighbourhood.

Otherwise there is self-promotion, word of mouth, and the cleanups we do which give us the chance to interact with users and get their feedback.

What are your expansion plans?

CD: Because we were born and raised here, the real passion comes from being able to provide this for Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the UAE, but once we raise funds and expedite our growth, we would take this MENA wide for sure.

RM: This is such a great place for entrepreneurs at the moment. The government’s vision of a smart city is fantastic, and that’s exactly what where we see fitting in digitising neighbourhoods.

What is the best advice you’ve ever been given?

CD: Taking initiative and just giving something a shot. If you’ve got an interest and passion to change something, there’s no better time than now. Don’t hold it off or let life get you down: the worst thing that happens is it doesn’t work out and then that’s just a building block that you learn from.

We’re super young, 25, and we’re very early on our journey but the journey wouldn’t have started if we didn’t take that first step.

RM: One of my favourite quotes is “Somebody is always creating the future so why can’t you be that somebody that’s creating a future?”