Few months ago I bumped into a LinkedIn post by Mohamed Aboulnaga, one of Egypt’s tech visionaries, he was explaining what it means to build a “Phygital” business. I liked the concept so much because it touches on a root difference between two separate worldviews: Building a product that is digital, versus building a product that is physical+digital, i.e phygital.
Full digital means totally online: you don’t have any on-ground operations + all your campaigns, payments, and product development are done on machines.
Phygital is like the best of both worlds. That’s when your product is mostly digital but is utilizing one or more real-life interaction components.
Being aware of the differences between digital & phygital is central to a product vision, because it teaches you what games you’d like to engage in:
Not only that, it also closely correlates with another worldview difference: Local vs Global.
What I’ve come to realize is that fully digital products have way less friction to serve a global vision & community, as opposed to phygital. And although Phygital comes with many bottlenecks, it works so well in many regions, like in EG (the original argument of the post’s author).
Derek Sivers, a serial entrepreneur & philanthropist, explains it so well in this now 11-yr old short essay:
If you’re local, you focus on your community, doing things in-person. But this means you have less time to focus on the rest of the world.
It was nice to find an intersection between 2 worldviews: Global Focus & Fully Digital Businesses.
Since I graduated 4 years ago, I always had this dream of building something on-ground. Something that profoundly strengthens sense of community and wellbeing. So late 2019 me & some friends looked into launching something that is a smaller version of https://www.lycheeegypt.com/ – We went several milestones before calling it quits (since then the project has been on my radar, for when I have the needed resources & time).