Aysha: my year since Idea Factory

During her third year of studying Medicine, Aysha Ingar applied to and won our Idea Factory competition and £2,000 prize money to boot! Now she’s juggling her studies with being on our King’s20 Accelerator as the Founder of start-up app Muslimah. Here, she reflects on her experience.

I had the idea for Muslimah in the summer of 2018. The Muslimah app provides Islamic services for Muslim women and allows the user to integrate the many aspects of faith with day to day life. It came out of my own experience as a Muslim woman, but I had no idea how to start or turn it into a business.

I started speaking to a few people about the idea and a friend who’d been to the Idea Factory launch messaged me afterwards, saying: “I think you should sign up for this.” So I booked a drop-in session with Rachel Stockey (Head of Entrepreneurial Skills) to find out more and told her about Muslimah and the six features I wanted to launch. She asked me if I had to cut it down to two, which two would they be? This made me realise I could launch much sooner than I thought; in that 30-minute meeting I went from thinking my idea would take a few years to launch, to thinking I can do it within the year.

On the day before the final Idea Factory pitch, I remember feeling like I still couldn’t effectively communicate my problem. We’d been sent templates and articles about what would make a good pitch and I managed to attend two workshops, but it felt overwhelming. Rachel reassured me though, saying that if I said it was a problem that I faced, people would just trust me, and she was right.

When it was my turn to pitch, I remember feeling tired, but also very ready. I remember thinking: I want to tell everyone about Muslimah and what this app is about.

Since then, I’ve definitely worked at a much faster pace and I’ve learned so much. I met the Queen when she visited King’s and I’ve been very fortunate to join the King’s20 Accelerator. It has been extremely important in helping me find my feet and the boost from the whole process has been amazing.

At times I struggled with imposter syndrome, thinking that if I made a wrong move it would be a reflection on me, but this has also been eased through opening up and speaking to people.

Now I’ve got a team of eight dedicated volunteers developing the app features and collating information about prayer spaces. We have launched with two features: the ‘prayer space locator’ and ‘Islamic period tracker’, and Muslimah is available to download for Android and iOS devices.

Find out more about Aysha’s business, Muslimah at: muslimahapp.com Check out our Idea Factory competition, which we launch in December each year, at: kcl.ac.uk/entrepreneurship