Co-founder & Chief Marketing Officer · 2024–2025 · Built through Antler, Dubai
WealthKarma: a product with no natural trigger
The situation
The UAE has no government pension. Several million expats are self-managing retirement with no default option, no trusted advisor, and no idea they have a problem until they're fifteen years from needing the money.
Every other retirement product in the world hooks onto an enrolment moment: a new job, a payroll deduction, an employer match. In the GCC there is no such moment. Nothing in the system ever prompts anyone to start. Which makes it a marketing problem before it's a product problem. The demand is real and the urgency is zero.
The company was built through Antler's Dubai cohort in 2024, with a co-founder I'd met during my MBA at HEC Paris five years earlier. That matters to how the work ran: an Antler cohort compresses validation into weeks, so there was no room for a research phase that didn't end in a decision.
When I arrived
When I left
A product with no natural trigger
Education as the entry point
No defined buyer
Four evidence-based personas across UAE and KSA
Value proposition untested
A test-and-iterate loop with landing page variants
Retirement framed as a chore
A gamified path people came back to
What I built
The go-to-market from zero, as co-founder and CMO.
Four evidence-based personas (Indian, British and Filipino expats in the UAE, plus an Indian expat in Saudi Arabia), each with income band, family situation, buying triggers, pain points and channel preferences. Not demographic decoration: the Filipino nurse supporting family in Manila and the British finance manager buying UK property have almost nothing in common except the missing pension.
A value proposition methodology with an explicit test-and-iterate loop: landing page variants, A/B tests, focus groups, interviews, surveys, then refine and re-test.
A gamified engagement model: Karma points, level badges, streaks, redeemable against wellness and lifestyle partners. Content strategy and lead magnets built on retirement-planning search demand. Lifecycle journeys and partnerships across employers, financial advisors and the fintech ecosystem. Shariah-compliant investing as a first-class content pillar rather than a footnote.
The judgment call
Making education the entry point rather than the product.
Since the market provides no trigger, we built one. Three-minute modules, a readiness assessment, streaks to bring people back. Gamification here wasn't decoration. It was the substitute for the enrolment moment the market doesn't have.
The assessment does the qualifying, and it does it while the user thinks they're just learning where they stand. By the time the product is mentioned, they've already discovered the gap themselves. Nobody likes being told they're unprepared for retirement. Most people are fine finding out.
Frameworks installed