Investor relations
Chouf App is a shipping product, not a plan. It gives the Chouf area of Mount Lebanon its own marketplace and its own trades directory, so a household can buy what it needs and reach the right tradesperson without a two-hour trip out of the mountain.
This page covers the business and how we work with the people who back it. Round terms are shared privately.
One brand and one PWA shell over one geography, carrying three lines of business. They share an audience and a map; they are not one promise.
A marketplace fronting stores that already trade in the Chouf. The customer orders, the order routes to the right shop, the shop fulfils, we coordinate delivery. We never own stock, so there is no warehouse and no inventory risk on the balance sheet.
A curated list of Chouf tradespeople, searchable in Arabic and English. The user taps to call or message the right person from inside the app. It is a contact handoff — no in-app chat, no escrow, no job guarantees to underwrite.
A managed online presence for Chouf businesses and opt-in individuals: a page we build, publish and keep accurate on their behalf. Consent-based, revocable, and billed on a recurring fee rather than on order volume.
This is not a city model shrunk to fit a district. It rests on conditions that are true here and are not easy to copy in.
The round trip from a Chouf village down to Beirut, Aley or Saida costs most of a working day in fuel, traffic and time off. That cost is what creates the order. It is a feature of the terrain, so it does not erode.
The Chouf is a compact set of towns and villages with dense family and trade networks. Word of mouth already works here; the product makes it searchable rather than replacing it. Full coverage is a reachable goal, not a funding problem.
Every indexable surface ships as an English and Arabic pair. Residents, returning diaspora and summer households all land on a page in their own language, which is where a translated-later product loses them.
Stores and tradespeople sign on the strength of who is asking. An operator known in the Chouf, backed by people known in the Chouf, onboards supply that an outside competitor has to buy.
Nobody owns "Chouf marketplace" or "Chouf services" today. The gap is being filled town by town, and the reference content that fills it compounds into the brand.
The product is in the hands of users. This is the current state, not a roadmap.
A progressive web app installable on iOS and Android, built to stay usable on the connectivity a Chouf village actually has rather than the connectivity a demo assumes.
A store-aware catalogue and multi-store cart on the shopping side; a bilingual trade taxonomy with synonym search and tap-to-contact on the directory side.
Every town and village in the Chouf has its own page covering where it is, what it is known for, its history and what is reachable from it — each with an Arabic mirror. This is what earns the organic search that brings users in.
A tradesperson’s number is revealed only inside the app, after a user tap. The build fails if a phone-shaped string reaches published HTML, so the contract cannot quietly rot as pages are added.
An assistant surface that answers by intent — what someone needs, in their own words — instead of making them guess the right category.
Three lines, each proven elsewhere, each workable at the size this operation actually is.
The product is largely built, so capital funds operating runway rather than a build. There is no inventory to finance, no warehouse to lease and no headcount to carry. Costs are hosting, domains, model and API usage, translation, and marketing inside the Chouf — print in the town centres, geo-targeted social, local partnerships. Growth is bounded by the district, which is the point: this is a market that can be won without a war chest, and a low burn keeps the cap table clean and the product honest.
Kept deliberately simple, and written down before anyone signs.
The legal vehicle is settled with the lead investor before signing rather than presented as a fait accompli.
These are real. An investor page that omits them is not worth reading.
We start on cash on delivery and direct store payment rather than assuming a working card rail, and settle the commission with each store on the terms and currency it prefers.
The catalogue is store-aware, availability confidence is shown at card level before the tap, and checkout is built for partial availability and substitutions instead of hiding them until after payment.
Providers carry a verification recency rule, get re-checked on a cycle, and lose ranking when that check lapses. A directory that decays quietly is worse than a small one.
What would have to be copied is the part that is not code: the relationships, the town-by-town reference content, the Arabic surface and a team that lives here. That is slow and expensive to buy from outside.
Local help from the start, written playbooks for store onboarding and provider verification, and a codebase and content set treated as transferable assets rather than as one person’s knowledge.
The Chouf is the current product and the anchor. Everything beyond it is direction, stated as direction.
Questions about the business, the numbers, or the terms — start here.
Investor relationsAsk for the brief
Get in touchThe product, the brand, and the reference content layer covering the Chouf. It deliberately does not own stock: stores keep their inventory and we orchestrate the order, which is what keeps the model light and the downside small.
Not on this page, on purpose. Terms move, and a public page that quotes them is wrong the moment they do. Ask for the investor brief and you get the current terms in writing.
Because the build is largely done and the market is a district. The capital funds operating runway, not construction. Raising more than the plan needs would cost equity to buy speed the market cannot absorb.
Information rights are part of the agreement: a regular report covering revenue, orders, directory coverage and the operating metrics the business is actually run on — not a curated update.
No. The live product serves the Chouf area of Mount Lebanon, and that is where the current thesis, content and partnerships sit. Larger markets are a later step, entered only once the Chouf model is proven.
A tradesperson’s number is never published to a crawler; it is revealed inside the app after a tap. That costs some search traffic and is the reason people list with us at all. The one exception is a Presence subscriber publishing their own details, by consent, revocably.