Jinn: A New Tech Resource to Entrepreneurs
What does a school full of entrepreneurs need? Three Babson undergraduate students Waseem Shabout ’19, Arpit Bansal ’19 and Gabe Ficht ’19, the founders of Jinn, can tell you that full service software development is in high demand.
Jinn is an on demand full service software development company. Their goal is to work with tech entrepreneurs, whether just starting out or looking to grow, to build their final product.
“We really work to bring out the human side of technology so to remove the usual technical communication barrier between the developers and entrepreneurs,” says Shabout.
The Idea
The Jinn team met during their first year at Babson, all living on the same floor of their residence hall. They quickly realized that they had a common passion for innovation and technology. In their first year they collectively failed at starting four other businesses, while learning ample lessons along the way.
Each member of the Jinn team was doing freelance tech or design work and competing in hackathons all across the country. They started working together on small projects and also founded Babson CODE, a club on campus that was granted housing this past year.
The Babson Connection
After coming together, they finally decided to solicit help and guidance from the Arthur Mr. Blank Center for Entrepreneurship at Babson. There they registered Jinn and decided to figure it out as they went. They knew they wanted to provide full service tech services, they just weren’t sure how.
As a provider of full service web development, app development, digital marketing and tech consulting Jinn had to start gaining clients. This is where the collaboration with the Blank Center became a mutually beneficial relationship. The Blank Center was full of entrepreneurs trying to get their businesses off the ground and Jinn became their number one resource for technology.
“Our time with the Blank Center really forced us to learn how to engage with clients and fully understand how their business operates in a quick amount of time,” says Shabout. “This left us better equipped to give advice on how their technical infrastructure should operate.”
The Learning Lessons
Just as any entrepreneur does, the Jinn team has learned a lot in their first few months in business. “With growth comes large amounts of work, and if you really want to be able to keep up you need to hire quick and hire well,” says Shabout. Without their team of developers and project managers they would not be able to take on nearly as much work and satisfy as many clients.
Shabout says as unexpected as it sounds the Jinn team truly learned a valuable technical skill set from their business education at Babson. “We are taught from our first year at Babson to go out into the world and look and find things around us that could be more efficient or done in a different way and create a business that solves that problem, this directly relates to system optimization in tech.” This helped the team realize, and many of their clients realize, they are more prepared technically than they thought.
The Future is Bright
With the original pool of automatic clients from Babson Jinn was able to grow and build their network rapidly in their first few months. Since conception, Jinn has had a steady growth rate of 250% per month in projects. They have also been hiring at least one developer or account manager per week onto their team to manage all their clients.
In the future, Jinn is looking to expand on their campus model and bring their services to other colleges and universities across the country. They are currently already working with Cornell University and are in talks with many other campuses to bring Jinn’s services to their student entrepreneurs.
“We really think that the world needs more innovators, and with technology becoming a quintessential part to any growing business our goal is to really see the innovation continue and the technical barrier nearly disappear,” says Shabout.
The Team
Shabout is from Dallas, Texas and is the designer of the group, he manages legal matters as well as branding both internally and externally. Bansal is from Mumbai, India, and he is a full stack self-taught developer. He manages the team of Jinn developers as well as manages how the internal management software operates within their supply chain.
Ficht is from Newburyport, Massachusetts is also a developer and is responsible for growing the entrepreneur and government contracts for Jinn. The final member of the team Arjun Bhatnagar is a student at Babson but also cross-enrolled at Olin College of Engineering. He works with the team to vet developers and project managers and manages the proprietary development software.
The Jinn team is also made up of many developers and account managers from all around the world that work on individual projects. The team is growing rapidly and they are adding new roles constantly.
The Jinn team can now be reached at their website or their hotline at 1-866-448-7698.