Sa’ed Anabtawi, Product Director, WOLF, discusses how using data effectively can help SMEs make smarter decisions to grow more quickly.

What is your business?

WOLF is the company behind WOLF Qanawat, a social audio platform for the Arab world. WOLF Qanawat is a space where entertainment, interaction, and community thrive. The app was specifically created for Arab-speaking users, bringing together people from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq, amongst other countries, creating an online home to create and belong. The app has attracted millions of engaged users since its launch in 2020.

Tell us about your role at WOLF

As Product Director, my role is responsible for helping the business attract new users and continually engage with existing users. My role involves creating a compelling value proposition that aligns with the behaviour of existing in-app communities. By interpreting, contextualising and applying data, the company has significantly enhanced its new user journey, doubled retention, activation and revenue rates, while reducing churn.

How important is data to an SME?

Data is absolutely critical to an SME, but the importance lies in how it’s collected, understood, and used to evolve and enhance the offering. Unlike large enterprises that may have dedicated analytics teams and vast resources, SMEs often have to be smarter and more efficient with the information they capture.

Having data means that rather than trying to convince your market they need something, you’re giving them something you know they need, or want.

Start-ups thrive on customer feedback and trouble-shooting, and it’s not something you outgrow. Keep seeking it out at every stage and be brave enough to ask the questions that might reveal hard truths — that’s where real growth happens.

Ultimately, if you have an audience there that is already engaged with your brand, and you can offer them even more value, they’ll stay with you and help you grow your revenue.  Ask them what it is you need to know about your brand, because they hold the intel.

How does WOLF use data?

 At an organisational level, we align all of our efforts with our overarching mission and clearly defined KPIs, which are continuously monitored to track performance and guide strategic decisions. For new user acquisition and activation, we closely examine the user funnel, identifying key actions required to lead users to a point at which they truly recognise the value of our product. Every new feature we develop is accompanied by a dedicated analytical dashboard that tracks adoption rates among both existing and new users, while also measuring performance against predefined KPIs. We ensure that both quantitative data, such as usage metrics and retention, and qualitative data, like user feedback and satisfaction, are integrated, whether we’re validating a feature during its early stages or evaluating user sentiment after its release. This holistic approach, combining both data types, provides a robust foundation for data-informed decisions and ensures our actions are driven by deep, meaningful insights rather than assumptions.

Analysing user activity, gauging what people like, use and spend money on, as well as elements of the app that are less popular or seeing a downward engagement, gives us real-time data that we can use to evolve the app offerings. An example of this is how we recently elevated an experience in our app by evolving a dedicated football hub into a new sports hub.

Football has always been a sport that is loved, supported and celebrated globally and within our app. However, over the last year since launch, we have gauged that our hub community is expanding its sporting interests and offerings from a mainly football focus into many other activities, including Taekwondo, kickboxing and MMA, as well as health discussions and nutritional suggestions.

Observing this trend, we decided to transform the football hub, which launched in February 2024, into a broader sports hub, taking the community on a bigger, better and more exciting journey, whilst strategically ensuring our community stays engaged, entertained and expanding constantly.

At the moment, there are almost 100,000 sports hub users from the MENA region. These user numbers reflect the focus of targeting new audiences, specifically our burgeoning Iraqi user base, and so far we have managed to engage more than 20,000 new Iraqi users since January 2025. The success of the sports hub is evidenced by more than 35,000 new users this year.

This development was on the back of user demand and a growing interest in sport more generally. This is a great example of how we are led by our users and not market trends.

What’s next for WOLF?

We’ve recently launched several exciting new games and are closely tracking user data to ensure a seamless entry experience. Starting from the first marketing touchpoint through to gameplay. In parallel, we’re analysing conversions and engagement within the existing community, with a strong focus on retention, sessions, and monetisation trends, allowing us to optimise both the gaming and broader community experience.

In addition, our closed beta users and volunteer community play an active role in the rollout of every new game. This helps us identify areas for improvement and guides enhancements before wider release, ensuring each game is both enjoyable and well-tuned to our audience.

What excites you about the tech industry?

The evolution of this industry excites me every day. Look at social networking usage, how these platforms were initially used and how they are being used today – they’ve changed significantly. Social networking platforms have evolved from connecting friends and family to empowering content creators, facilitating communities, and amplifying social activism. They have become integral to modern life, shaping communication, building global connections, and promoting positive change. It excites me to understand where this industry is heading and how user behaviours will evolve. 

With 17 years of experience in product, marketing, and tech, Sa’ed Anabtawi began his career after graduating from Webster University with a double major in Business Administration and Marketing. What followed was a journey shaped by resilience, from navigating the 2008 financial crisis to helping co-found Baaz, the first Arabic social network.

 Sa’ed has worked across marketing, startups, and social media platforms, with key roles at SOCIALDEALER and later Baaz, where he spent a decade building and scaling a bold vision in a competitive global landscape.

At WOLF, Sa’ed continues to grow in a hybrid role that bridges regional insight with global experience, validating everything he learned and continuing to shape what’s next.