The Untold Lessons of Building Sarwa

In this edition of Founder’s Hustle, we sit down with Mark Chahwan, founder and CEO of Sarwa, the Middle East’s leading investing platform which recently surpassed AED 20 billion in cumulative trading volume. The story of how Sarwa began is familiar, but this conversation dives deeper. Mark shares candid insights on customer validation, product development, fundraising, and, above all, why founders need to trust their gut.

Early Days and Regulatory Breakthrough

Mark and his co-founder, Jad Sayegh, initially treated Sarwa as a side project, working weekends to develop a business plan and a basic prototype. Their vision, true to the name “Sarwa” (Arabic for wealth), was to make investing effortless by automating it through a robo-advisory platform. 

Early on, licensing requirements, especially a $500,000 capital hurdle, felt like a daunting barrier.  “I remember feeling pretty demotivated when I found that out, it just felt insane for a startup like ours.” At that point, the project still felt like an exciting yet distant dream.

But the game changed when Sarwa got accepted into a government accelerator and regulatory sandbox, which lowered the capital requirement drastically and signaled a more flexible environment. Becoming the first company to graduate from the Dubai Financial Services Authority’s (DFSA) sandbox was a major milestone that shifted Mark’s mindset from uncertainty to determination. 

Story-Driven Customer Validation

Looking back, Sarwa’s path to customer validation was unconventional; built on gut instinct, anecdotal evidence, and early investor signals.

Mark understood from the start that the problem was huge, not niche. In the Middle East, most people who earned a salary faced significant barriers when it came to investing. Many defaulted to gold and real estate, largely because regulations made traditional investing inaccessible.

With this in mind, Mark and his team set out to validate their assumptions by engaging with a wide range of voices: ecosystem players, friends, family, and consultants. The consistent feedback painted a clear picture; there was a real, pressing need for a solution like Sarwa.

Even while still working full-time in Montreal, Mark began receiving commitments from angel investors in the region. Venture capital interest soon followed, and then of course, the team got accepted into the DFSA accelerator.

Reflecting on this early validation, Mark notes, “The validation wasn’t financial; it was narrative-driven. The story we had built was enough to move us forward.”

Bringing on a 3rd Co-Founder

From the start, Mark and his co-founder Jad naturally divided their roles to play to their strengths. Mark took on the product and user experience side, focusing on designing user journeys, onboarding flows, and laying out what design had to look like for Jad. Jad led the technical architecture and engineering build, especially around critical areas like security.

However, as they poured energy into product development and working with regulators, marketing efforts lagged behind. Recognizing this gap early on, they brought in Nadine Mezher as a third co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). This decision ensured that while Mark and Jad continued refining the product and build, Nadine could focus on building long-term, trusted relationships with customers.

When Success Felt Out of Reach

One of Mark’s toughest moments came after raising a $1.3 million pre-Series A. The media was buzzing with announcements and congratulations, but inside the team, the reality felt very different. Mark recalls, “We were getting all these ‘congrats’ messages, and the media was hyping us up. But we had literally eight customers. We kept asking ourselves, are we wasting everyone’s time?”

At that point, Mark and Jad had already moved to the UAE, and the slow initial traction felt frustrating. Opening an account still took around 40 minutes online, a decent start, but far from seamless. Mark describes the early growth as painfully slow, and the doubt crept in: “Your brain naturally thinks linearly. Even if we doubled those eight customers every month, it still felt like a long road ahead.”

Despite the struggle, Mark and his team found ways to latch onto smaller wins such as attracting top talent, and onboarding experienced advisors from prestigious firms like UBS and McKinsey.

They also adopted a growth framework popularized by Paul Graham: aiming for 5% weekly growth in the number of users. This shifted their mindset and gave them a clearer picture of progress. “Once we started hitting that 5% weekly growth, it completely reset what ‘good’ looked like. It helped remove a lot of doubt and showed us we were actually moving at a really healthy pace.”

Multi-Channel Customer Acquisition Journey

In time, Sarwa honed a multi-channel acquisition strategy. Search engine marketing became a major driver of registrations, capturing high-intent prospects actively searching for investment options. But the journey didn’t stop at sign-up; each lead was nurtured through a coordinated flow of welcome emails, personal calls, and invitations to educational webinars.

High-value prospects were connected directly with financial advisors, adding a layer of trust and personalization. Referrals also emerged as one of the most powerful and enduring growth levers, with happy customers bringing in friends and colleagues.

In the company’s earliest days, PR played a strong role in boosting awareness, but over time, Sarwa shifted away from chasing media coverage. Instead, it invested in publishing deeper, more valuable content, an approach designed to lead with authenticity and deliver lasting trust, rather than just quick press hits.

Feature Experimentation vs Product-Market Fit 

For Mark, one of the biggest product lessons was that product–market fit isn’t a one-time achievement, it’s something you have to keep earning. 

Sarwa’s early thesis was simple: customers wanted fully hands-off, passive wealth management. They spent months on “feature experimentation work”; adding and refining features to improve the product and deepen customer engagement. 

But post-COVID feedback from customers, VCs, and market signals revealed a bigger adjacent opportunity: active trading. This was a textbook case of what Mark calls “product–market fit work”; testing entirely new value propositions.

Shifting from “wealth management only” to “wealth management plus brokerage”, and eventually to brokerage as the primary offering, meant more than launching a new product line. It required a complete repositioning of the brand, company culture, and operating model from a passive, long-term mindset to a dynamic, daily engagement platform. As Mark puts it: “I don’t think we’d be as big, or even still here, if we hadn’t pursued this adjacent opportunity and had instead just stuck to being a robo-advisor.”

Approach to Roadmapping

Today, Mark’s approach to roadmapping is much shorter-term, a change cemented by the shock of COVID-19. “Plans can really fall out the window, and there’s absolutely no value in thinking too far ahead,” he says. 

Instead of locking in multi-year product timelines, Mark zeroes in on the “big themes” for the rest of the year, grounding priorities in customer feedback while filtering for what truly matters. He stresses that customers rarely hand you a fully formed product request; often, you have to read between the lines. For instance, clients asking for “more personalization” were, in reality, signaling a desire for a self-directed trading platform. 

Mark also cautions against being swayed by the loudest voices, especially when they aren’t the most valuable customers. “In wealth management, the most vocal clients aren’t always the ones driving most of the revenue,” Mark notes. To counter this, Sarwa runs targeted campaigns to proactively engage its most valuable users, ensuring the roadmap reflects their needs first.

Fundamentally, roadmapping is a balance of growth-focused initiatives, product–market fit work, feature experiments, and infrastructure upgrades — what Mark refers to as “executing on the infrastructure initiatives engineers are lobbying for.”

Volatility as a Growth Engine

Interestingly, Mark came to appreciate volatility not as a threat, but as a powerful growth engine. In wealth management, stable products like savings accounts or diversified robo-portfolios tend to limit volatility, and, in turn, engagement. But volatile products spark excitement, drive conversation, and keep users coming back.

“The most successful wealth tech products often thrive on volatility,” Mark explains. “Crypto’s boom, for instance, was largely fueled by its insane price swings, those swings drive client engagement, dominate headlines, and create momentum that no marketing campaign can match.”

The key, he notes, is surviving the lows. Many platforms rode the crypto highs but collapsed during the crash of 2022. Those that endured emerged stronger, with loyal, highly engaged user bases.

For Sarwa, this insight also shapes product decisions: embrace products where volatility works in their favor. After all, in Mark’s view, volatility can be the best marketing function a fintech could ask for.

No Meeting Policy

When it comes to founder-to-team communication, Mark prefers a light and flexible communication style that avoids overburdening the team with unnecessary meetings. “I hate meetings,” he admits, explaining that he usually meets with the entire team every six to eight weeks. While they experimented with weekly check-ins, they quickly abandoned the practice to avoid forcing updates and micromanagement. Instead, the company relies heavily on an open-door culture through Slack, where anyone can easily reach out to discuss ideas or challenges in real time.

Mark’s philosophy is to strike a balance between trust and visibility—giving team members autonomy without losing visibility, and keeping communication efficient so it doesn’t detract from actual product building.

Lessons on Fundraising

Mark’s approach to fundraising evolved over time. He realized that understanding the psychology behind VC decisions is crucial—investors are making long-term bets without seeing returns for years, so creating a genuine sense of urgency is essential. Sarwa successfully did this by packing investor meetings into a condensed timeframe, turning fundraising into an intense, focused sprint rather than a prolonged marathon. He also recognizes how herd mentality and FOMO often influence funding rounds, making timing and momentum key factors in securing investment.

Another important lesson Mark shares is that fundraising is not a side project: “The worst thing you can do is have all founders juggling fundraising alongside full-time jobs. The CEO needs to step back, go all in, and then return to day-to-day operations.”

Contrarian Beliefs

Mark holds a contrarian belief that pricing is fundamentally misunderstood in many startups in the region; too often, companies offer free or heavily discounted services, undermining their own sustainability. 

Coupled with this, he questions the rush to raise venture capital without fully considering if it’s necessary. Emphasizing the importance of macroeconomic realities, Mark points out that the startup landscape is shifting; IPOs are rare and acquisitions are limited, making the traditional playbook of rapid fundraising and scaling less reliable. 

In this challenging environment, he believes many founders would be better off pursuing a leaner, more capital-efficient path, bootstrapping or steady growth, rather than chasing the high-growth, $100 million revenue model that VCs typically expect.

Trust Your Gut!

One of Mark’s final lessons for founders, and the most important one, is to balance listening to investors with trusting their own instincts. Early on, it’s easy to overweigh advice from VCs. After all, they’re your lifeline, often come with big reputations, and have seen potential where others haven’t. 

But Mark warns that not all advice fits your unique business, especially when it comes from those who haven’t built or deeply lived your vision. Sometimes, following conventional wisdom too closely can lead you astray. Founders need the confidence to discern when feedback aligns with their mission, and when it doesn’t, and to push back when necessary, especially around critical areas like governance and company culture. 

Ultimately, success comes down to trusting your gut to lead authentically while thoughtfully weighing outside input. As Mark puts it, it’s about balancing data, feedback, and intuition, and having the courage to move forward even when the path isn’t perfectly clear.

Read more of Mark’s lessons and stories on his Substack!

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