Kurdify Business Plan
Version 1.1, July 17, 2026. Confidential. Prepared by Kavalsia Inc. Traction figures pulled live from the platform on this date: 10,579 businesses, 226,276 reviews, 12 cities. Update from /api/stats before every investor send. The narrative order for every pitch lives in positioning.md (Kurdish Sorani and Kurmanji, Arabic, English); this plan follows it.
1. Executive summary
The idea starts with data. We hold the largest structured dataset of Kurdish commerce anywhere: 10,500+ scraped and enriched businesses with 226,000+ indexed reviews across 12 cities, growing continuously at near-zero marginal cost. Inside Kurdistan that data powers Kurdify; for Kurds outside, across Canada, the US, and Europe, the same engine powers KurdConnect. One dataset, two brands, two markets.
On top of the data we are building the proper platform and digital infrastructure Kurds have never had. Kurdify is a Sorani-first platform for the Kurdistan Region of Iraq: every business gets its own page with its Google reviews and complete information, plus a loyalty points economy that converts into QR discount coupons, events setup and ticket sales, an influencer program with levels, marketplaces built with world-grade design and technology (with AI woven in for market insights), jobs, real estate, news, a Kurdish-language AI assistant, and payment rails that actually work in Iraq (FIB, ZainCash, crypto, international cards).
The market gap is total: Yelp and TripAdvisor do not operate in Iraq, Google Maps coverage is thin and not in Kurdish, and Stripe and PayPal do not serve the country. Local commerce lives in Facebook posts and WhatsApp groups. Kurdify replaces that with structure, trust, and payments.
Distribution is our unfair advantage. Behind Kurdify stands Kavalsia, our marketing agency, which has worked with 50+ businesses and over $100M in marketing and development spend for US, UK, and Canadian companies. The strategy is deliberate: give as much free value as possible to people and businesses (free verification, free pages, free tools), monetize visibility and offers on top. The offers-and-promotions engine is the part Groupon proved, but fueled by an in-platform points economy so the loop retains users instead of burning merchants. The endgame is the points system becoming a financial rail: a bank partnership that lets the diaspora move money into Kurdistan through points, up to buying property, a car, or anything at home (roadmap, stated as vision).
The company is pre-revenue with revenue rails live and tested. The raise is $500,000 on a YC Post-Money SAFE at a $6,500,000 valuation cap, funding 18 months: public launch in Erbil and Sulaymaniyah, 400+ paying businesses, mobile apps, and a seed-ready revenue line.
The long-term product is the playbook itself: near-zero-cost data acquisition, a trust and payments layer as the moat, and a repeatable vertical for every nationality with a large diaspora (Persians, Filipinos, Ethiopians, Vietnamese). Remittances alone exceed $600B a year; nobody owns the commerce layer around them.
2. Company
- Operating today: Kavalsia Inc. (Canada). Kurdify currently operates under it.
- Planned structure for the raise: a holding company (Delaware C-Corp via Stripe Atlas or Clerky, or ADGM/DIFC in the UAE) owning the KRI operating company ("Kurdify KRI"). International investors invest in the holdco; Iraqi/KRI investors can invest locally with lawyer oversight. Two documents are signed at incorporation and never skipped: IP assignment from the founder to the company, and the 83(b) election (if US structure).
- Founder: Sia (Siavash), Kurdish, based in Toronto. A developer since a young age, now full-stack; wrote 100% of the product, shipping at unusual speed with Kavalsia's AI-accelerated Nexus engineering system. A decade in digital marketing and ecommerce acquisition (media buying at Toronto agencies, then Kavalsia, his own agency): 50+ business clients and over $100M in marketing and development spend managed for US, UK, and Canadian companies.
- Ground partner: Hazhar, Erbil. Works directly with business owners in the KRI; leads local sales and verification.
- Engineering leverage: Kavalsia's internal Nexus engineering system is why one founder shipped this surface area in months. The same leverage applies to every future vertical.
3. Problem
- Inside Kurdistan: no reliable way to find and trust businesses. Discovery is word of mouth; commerce runs through Facebook and WhatsApp, unstructured and unsearchable. There is no verification layer and no local-language UX.
- In the diaspora: millions of Kurds in Europe and North America cannot find their community locally, and their spending power (travel, real estate, gifts, events) has no structured rail back home.
- For businesses: 200,000+ SMBs in the KRI cannot be found, verified, or paid online. Global platforms skipped the market: no Yelp, no TripAdvisor, no Stripe, no PayPal.
4. Product (live at kurdify.app)
| Surface | What it does | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Directory + Top 5 | 10,900+ enriched listings, 15 categories, quality-ranked, city/category filters, 4 languages (Sorani default, Kurmanji, Arabic, English) | Live |
| User accounts + loyalty | Points for signup, reviews, referrals, claims; tokens convert to discount coupons redeemed by QR at verified businesses | Live |
| Reviews + moderation | 226,000+ indexed reviews; native reviews go through admin approval; real top-reviewers leaderboard | Live |
| Business dashboard | Claim flow, services, plans, sponsored placements, ad performance stats, payments with receipt proof | Live |
| Owner (god) dashboard | Payments queue, moderation, pricing controls, feature gates, live site control, project tracker | Live |
| Events ticketing | Free and paid events, QR tickets, organizer scan and check-in, attendee management | Live, verified end to end |
| Kurdish AI assistant | /ask answers in Sorani by text or voice; agents council mode | Live |
| WhatsApp AI agent | Multi-tenant agent businesses subscribe to; per-client number, brain, and voice | Built (KVS client panel) |
| Payment rails | FIB and ZainCash (manual confirm + receipt proof), crypto, Dodo Payments for diaspora/international cards | Live |
| Verticals | Jobs, real estate, autos, marketplace, news, daily magazine | Live / phased |
| KurdConnect | Diaspora mirror app sharing the same engine, seeded with Kurdish-owned businesses in Canada | Live (sister site) |
Data pipeline: proprietary scraping and enrichment (OpenStreetMap, Google Maps, business websites and socials) that builds and enriches a city at near-zero marginal cost, overnight, with automated verification and pruning of dead listings. This is the core cost advantage: directories are won on data acquisition cost.
5. Market
- Wedge (SAM): the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, 200,000+ SMBs, ~6M residents, near-universal smartphone penetration, commerce currently on Facebook. At 2% of SMBs paying an average of $40/month, one region is roughly $2M ARR before any transaction revenue.
- Second ring: the Kurdish diaspora, 2M+ households with Western purchasing power across Germany, Sweden, the UK, Canada, and the US. Their homeland spending (travel, property, gifting, events, remittance-adjacent flows) has no rails today.
- TAM: the global diaspora economy. Remittances alone exceed $600B/year. The playbook (scrape, verify, monetize with local rails, bridge the diaspora) repeats for every large diaspora nationality. Ten verticals at Kurdify's model is a $100M+ revenue platform.
- The rail that captures it: the endgame is a bank partnership that turns the points system into a money-movement rail, so a Kurd in Toronto or Stockholm tops up points and they are spent in Erbil: at a restaurant, on a car, on property, on anything at home. That is the remittance-adjacent flow with a commerce layer attached, and it is why the data, verification, and loyalty layers are strategic rather than just a directory.
Why now: local fintech (FIB, ZainCash) just made online payments possible in Iraq without Stripe; AI collapsed the cost of building for a "small" language; no incumbent has moved.
6. Competition and moat
Direct structured competitors in Kurdistan: none. Google Maps has sparse, unverified data and no Kurdish UX. Yelp and TripAdvisor do not operate in Iraq. The real incumbent is Facebook groups and Instagram DMs.
Moat, compounding in this order:
- Data: the largest structured, enriched dataset of Kurdish commerce anywhere, kept fresh by an automated verify-and-prune pipeline.
- Language: Sorani-first UX is the trust signal, not a translation layer.
- Payments: FIB/ZainCash integration plus diaspora card rails; a genuine barrier to entry that global players will not build for this market.
- Two-sided loyalty loop: consumer tokens redeemed at verified businesses raise switching costs for both sides every month.
- Verification network: ground-verified businesses (free verification contract as the land-grab, paid visibility on top).
7. Business model
Consumers are free. Businesses pay for visibility and trust; transactions add a take rate.
| Revenue line | Pricing (live in product) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Subscription plans | $450/year (Pro), $650/year (Pro+) | Plan gates advertising eligibility |
| Sponsored placements | $500 to $1,300 per slot | Homepage, directory inline, search; ML-ranked ad engine built |
| Paid business setup | $280 one-time | Concierge listing creation |
| Banner / lead / website packages | $99 / $1,000 / $500 | Productized services |
| WhatsApp AI agent | monthly SaaS per business | Multi-tenant, per-client brain and number |
| Events ticketing | % fee on paid tickets | Ticketing shipped end to end |
| Diaspora commerce lane | transaction take | Roadmap: travel, real estate leads, gifting |
| Verification | FREE (contract) | Deliberate: verification is the land-grab and trust layer, not a toll |
The Groupon comparison (use it, then break it): the offers-and-promotions layer (scoring system plus discounts) is the part of the model Groupon already proved consumers and merchants want. The difference is structural: Groupon rented demand to merchants one coupon at a time and burned them on margin; Kurdify's coupons are funded by a points economy users earn inside the platform, sit on top of a free verified listing (so the merchant's baseline costs nothing), and every redemption strengthens the directory, the reviews, and the data instead of a one-off deal.
Unit economics target at launch: blended ARPU per paying business ~$35 to $40/month; sales cost per acquisition ~$25 to $60 (ground sales + WhatsApp outreach); payback under 2 months; churn managed through the loyalty loop driving measurable foot traffic (coupon redemptions are visible proof of value to the merchant).
8. Go-to-market (summary; full plan in marketing-plan.md)
- Erbil first, then Sulaymaniyah. Ground team led by the Erbil partner signs businesses with the free verification contract; paid plans and placements are the upsell once the merchant sees traffic.
- Consumer pull: token/coupon economy, giveaways, Top-5 lists, daily magazine and news, Telegram channel, influencer program with levels.
- Diaspora: KurdConnect cross-promotion, community organizations, Newroz and cultural events, diaspora-investor community round.
- Product-led: every WhatsApp AI agent, ticketed event, and verified badge is distribution.
9. Operations and technology
- Deliberately boring, cheap stack: vanilla JS frontend, zero-dependency Node backend, file-backed stores, Cloudflare Pages. Runs on near-zero infrastructure cost today; the raise funds a proper database and supervisor before scale (identified and scoped).
- Data operations (scraping, enrichment, verification, news) are automated and run overnight at near-zero cost.
- Payments are manual-confirmation with receipt proof today (correct for the market's transfer-based rails), with API automation on the roadmap as FIB/ZainCash merchant APIs are activated.
- Moderation: reviews require approval; advertiser ID verification is enforced; no fake reviews or engagement, ever (hard platform rule).
10. Team and hiring plan (first 18 months)
| Role | When | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Founder (product, growth, engineering) | now | Toronto |
| KRI sales lead (partner) | now | Erbil |
| 2x ground sales reps | month 1-2 | Erbil, Sulaymaniyah |
| Community + content manager (Sorani) | month 2 | KRI |
| Support / operations | month 4 | KRI |
| Mobile engineer (contract) | month 5 | remote |
11. Financial plan
Pre-revenue today; rails live. All projections are targets, not commitments.
Use of funds ($500k, 18 months):
| Category | % | $ |
|---|---|---|
| Go-to-market (ground sales, ads, influencers, events) | 35% | $175k |
| Product (mobile apps, credit economy, diaspora lane) | 30% | $150k |
| First hires (KRI team) | 20% | $100k |
| Legal, entity, compliance | 8% | $40k |
| Infrastructure + reserve | 7% | $35k |
Projection scenarios (paying businesses at blended $35/month average, plus placements/setup/ticketing):
| Milestone | Conservative | Base | Strong |
|---|---|---|---|
| Month 6 (Erbil live) | 60 paying, ~$2k MRR | 120 paying, ~$5k MRR | 250 paying, ~$10k MRR |
| Month 12 (2 cities) | 200 paying, ~$8k MRR | 400 paying, ~$16k MRR | 800 paying, ~$32k MRR |
| Month 18 (seed-ready) | 400 paying, ~$15k MRR | 800 paying, ~$32k MRR | 1,500 paying, ~$60k MRR |
Base case exits month 18 at roughly $380k to $450k annualized revenue including placements and ticketing, with the 2%-of-SMBs long-run target (~$2M ARR from the KRI alone) still ahead, plus the diaspora lane untouched.
Burn: ~$25k to $30k/month average post-hiring; $500k covers 18 months with reserve.
12. Funding ask and terms
- Instrument: YC Post-Money SAFE, Valuation Cap Only (no discount).
- Cap: $6,500,000 post-money. $500k target = ~7.7% dilution.
- Minimum cheque: $10,000. Pro-rata rights at $50,000+. No board seats or vetoes at this stage.
- Close: rolling; sign and wire as investors commit.
- Path: grants and cloud credits first (0% equity), angel SAFEs bundled via SPV (Odin), optional diaspora community round (Republic), then a priced seed with a MENA or Canadian VC once revenue is live.
13. Risks and mitigation
| Risk | Mitigation |
|---|---|
| Payments are transfer-based and manual | Receipt-proof queue already built; FIB/ZainCash merchant API automation planned; crypto and Dodo cover diaspora |
| Single-founder execution risk | Ground partner in Erbil; first hires front-loaded in the plan; Nexus system multiplies engineering output |
| Political/regional instability in the KRI | Asset-light, remote-first ops; diaspora revenue lane is geographically diversified; holdco holds IP outside the region |
| Facebook inertia (merchants "already have a page") | Free verification contract removes the entry cost; coupon redemptions give merchants measurable proof within weeks |
| Regulatory (securities, local business law) | Securities lawyer in each jurisdiction before any signature; local KRI lawyer for the operating company; no pooled "fund" structures, SPVs via licensed platforms only |
| Data freshness | Automated verify-and-prune pipeline already running against Google Maps |
14. Milestones and KPIs (tracked in the owner dashboard)
- M2: entity structure complete, first grant applications filed, Erbil ground team hired.
- M4: Erbil public launch; 1,000 claimed or verified businesses; first 100 paying.
- M8: Sulaymaniyah launch; loyalty loop live at 200+ verified merchants; mobile apps in beta.
- M12: 400+ paying businesses (base case); ticketing revenue live; monthly investor updates unbroken.
- M18: seed round opened on live revenue; diaspora commerce lane pilot (travel or real estate leads).
Weekly KPIs: verified businesses, paying businesses, MRR, coupon redemptions, WAU, ticket sales, CAC by channel, runway.
This document is for information only and is not an offer of securities, nor legal, tax, or investment advice. All investment terms are subject to definitive documents reviewed by counsel.