🎯 How Tabby bootstrapped customer acquisition

Hi friends 👋

Two weeks ago, Tabby made history.

On the off chance you’ve been living under a rock — the regional BNPL poster child announced a $160M Series E funding round at a $3.3 billion valuation, making it MENA’s most valuable fintech and the second most valuable internet company regionally full-stop.

The company’s ascent over the past six years has been nothing short of meteoric.

With a bumper public market listing on the Saudi stock exchange imminently on the cards, I don’t think it’s overstating it too much to say that Tabby and its sage-like, revered CEO, Hosam Arab, have cultivated a cult-like following.

Tabby now supports 40,000+ brands and merchants — including giants like Amazon, Adidas, IKEA, Samsung, and Noon — and has propelled its user base to 15 million customers across KSA, the UAE, and Kuwait, marking a 50% increase since the company’s last raise in October 2023.

Look, we are absolutely chomping at the bit to tell the Tabby and Hosam story at length, in all its glory, but we’re restraining ourselves today to allow the time to do it the justice it rightly deserves. So, it’s coming sooner rather than later — we promise!

But that doesn’t mean we can’t break the BNPL leader’s rapid ascension into instalments (if you’ll pardon the irony).

With that in mind, we’ve decided to kick off a new premium series, Strategy Breakdowns, by putting Tabby’s early growth strategy under the microscope.

The idea behind the series is simple: identify a core strategy integral to the success of a MENA-based company, distill it into three succinct key takeaways, and then give you the chance to jump down a rabbit hole with three high-signal resources to learn more.

Our aim to keep the format and length punchy and concise, without compromising on nuance.

Let’s dig in 👇

The masterplan

A TLDR explanation of the company’s growth trajectory

Tabby is well on its way to becoming a “compound startup”.

What’s this new buzzword I hear you ask?

Well, originally coined by Parker Conrad (Rippling), it describes a company that doesn’t just solve one narrow problem – it builds multiple point-solution systems into a unified product, tackling bigger challenges for users along the way.

I think that Tabby’s growth can be broken up into three broad acts, which help to illustrate this a bit more clearly:

• Act 1: BNPL – Use lending as the wedge to bootstrap consumer demand and build merchant affiliations.

• Act 2: Tabby Shop – Evolve into a discovery tool for consumers and an advertising hub for merchants.

• Act 3: Digital Banking – Expand beyond spending to savings, remittances, and investments for consumers, plus upfront capital for merchants’ growth and working capital.

So, to differentiate itself from other regional BNPL providers and stay ahead of the competition, Tabby is gunning to be a compound startup/ecosystem for all things shopping, consumer payments, and savings.

They started by hooking people in with BNPL, and then retaining them and increasing their lifetime value (LTV) with additional services, all the while compounding data that will enable the company to optimise economics further down the road.

But for the purposes of today’s breakdown, we’re going to be focusing exclusively on Act 1 and how Tabby built its early traction.

The strategy

A TLDR explanation of the strategy

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