Everyone in Cairo is a founder now. Open Instagram for five minutes and you'll find a guy with one drop of hoodies, a ring light and "CEO" in his bio. Some of them are genuinely talented and I'm rooting for them. A lot of them though want the title without the years that come with it and they talk about building a brand like it's something you announce. This bothers me.
**I'm not saying nobody should start. Start today if you want. But if you're going to call yourself a founder then at least respect what the word costs. mostly it costs time, and a lot of it. Nobody posts that part because it doesn't make good content.
I've been building ICE since 2019. I've told bits of this story before but never the whole thing in one place and today someone asked me how long it took ICE to "blow up" which honestly made me laugh. So I thought I'd write down how it actually went, roughly in order, the way I remember it.**
2019, the start
ICE started as an accessories store with no investor and no backup plan. Chains, rings, pendants. The iced out hip hop look that Egypt didn't really have a home for back then. I was selling piece by piece and learning everything the hard way. Every order felt like a big deal because it was.
The early years
I was the marketing team, the designer, the packaging guy and customer service, sometimes all in the same hour. If a customer was angry at 2am, guess who answered. I don't recommend it but I also wouldn't trade what it taught me.
The music years
Hip hop in Egypt was taking over and I wanted ICE sitting inside that culture. That idea has put ICE into projects that i would have never imagined taking part of. I got to work on campaigns with Afroto and Mohammed Ramadan and pushed one hip hop artist past 20 million impressions on TikTok. If you'd told the 2019 version of me that, I doubt he'd believe you.
The page nobody knew was mine
I grew a niche Instagram page called 
The last two years
AI changed the whole game for me. I started producing ads and brand content with AI video, for my own brands and for clients in jewelry, real estate and hospitality. I'm also marketing director at Escape Away Hospitality now. Same eye I built at ICE, different world.
2026
My partner Omar joined the accessories side and we're raising capital to take ICE to the next level. Seven years in. Still not an overnight success I suppose.
Do the years or drop the title
So...back to the CEO bios. Build something, get it wrong, fix it, do it again for a few years and then call yourself whatever you want. I'll be the first to clap. Until then maybe just call it a side project, there's no shame in that.
Build it slow, own it forever - flyboiilii