From Dinner Table to Acquisition: How We Built True Wills

In November 2019, my close friend Mohamed Suleman invited me to his house for dinner. Mohamed is a solicitor by day and an Islamic teacher by night, and someone I had known for years through our community. He had an idea he wanted to walk me through.

He had been approached by a second-degree connection about building an online Islamic will for Muslims in the UK. Knowing I was the "tech guy" in our circle, he wanted my input. His proposed approach: build it on Wix.com.

I chuckled inside. As an ex-full stack engineer and product manager with ten years of experience, I had thoughts about Wix. But I also had a genuine reaction to the idea itself: I liked it. Not because it was obviously viable, but because it was a real problem, it was underserved, and it was a chance to do something meaningful for a community I cared about.

So I said yes.

Why the problem was worth solving

The UK is home to approximately 2.7 million Muslims. From the market research we conducted, only around 10% of Muslim adults had a written Islamic will. That means roughly 1.1 million Muslims in the UK were leaving one of their core religious obligations unmet, not out of indifference, but because the options were poor.

The traditional route meant visiting a specialist solicitor and paying significant fees. The few online options that existed were limited in functionality and often left users confused about whether what they had created was compliant with both Islamic principles and English law. Meanwhile, non-Muslim platforms like Farewill and Beyond.life were reaching millions of users and raising serious investment. Muslims had been left behind.

The gap was clear. The question was whether we could close it.

Setting the intention before writing a single line of code

Before we got into research or design or technology, we sat down and agreed on why we were doing this. That conversation shaped everything that followed.

We were not building True Wills to make a billion pounds. We were building it to create a lasting impact on the Muslim community. To make it possible for ordinary Muslims to fulfil a religious obligation without it costing them a fortune. To leave something that would outlast us and keep generating benefit long after we had moved on.

In Islamic thinking, that is a sadaqah jariyah: a continuous act of charity. That framing was a north star for every difficult decision we made later.

From research to reality

By Spring 2020, we had completed market research, a detailed competitor analysis, a product strategy canvas, and a clear picture of what the MVP needed to do. All three of us had full time jobs. Two of the founding team had never built a SaaS product before. We carved out a few hours each week and moved steadily forward.

The design process started with brainstorming sessions on Miro, lo-fi wireframes in Balsamiq, and working through the end-to-end user journey together. We then commissioned a close friend to build the hi-fi designs and the core design system, using Google Material Design as a reference.

For the technology, we chose a React frontend with a Python and Django backend, hosted on AWS. We used Stripe for payments, Segment for event tracking, and Amplitude for product analytics. The stack was chosen to be API first, scalable, and something we could build on properly rather than patch indefinitely.

Bootstrapped from a director's loan, we were mindful of every pound spent. We leaned heavily on our own skills rather than outsourcing.

Getting the Islamic compliance right

One of the things I am most proud of from the True Wills journey is the rigour we applied to the religious compliance of the product. We were not willing to launch something that was legally valid but Islamically questionable.

We worked with a group of UK based Islamic scholars whose input was invaluable: Dr Mufti Abdur-Rahman ibn Yusuf Mangera, founder of the Whitethread Institute; Shaykh Haitham Al-Haddad, who serves as a judge for the Islamic Council of Europe; and Shaykh Mohammed Daniel, founder of Cordoba Academy.

Their involvement was not a tick-box exercise. It shaped the actual structure of the Islamic will template and gave us credibility with the communities we were trying to reach.

Launching in Ramadan 2021

Our go-to-market strategy had two routes: direct to consumer, and via charities and partners. We started with direct to consumer to build social proof before approaching institutions.

In the months before launch, we ran monthly webinars educating Muslims on the importance of writing an Islamic will. We posted across Facebook groups and Muslim community platforms. We sent WhatsApp broadcasts and asked friends and family to do the same. One of the co-founders spent two days at the Halal Food Festival handing out leaflets. We experimented with Facebook ads and found them surprisingly effective.

By the time we soft-launched in March 2021, we had around 100 leads who had attended our webinars. We used their feedback to refine the platform before opening it to general availability.

The full public launch came in Ramadan 2021. The response was overwhelming in the best possible way. We had built something people actually needed, and they found us.

The Deen Developers accelerator

Midway through the pre-launch period, I stumbled across the Deen Developers Accelerator on LinkedIn during lunch. The application deadline was midnight that same day. Mohamed and I jumped on a call that evening, filled out the application, and submitted it just in time.

A few weeks later, we were accepted into DD Accelerator A21: their first ever programme. Seven weeks of workshops, mentor sessions, and talks from some seriously impressive people in the Muslim tech space: Shahzad Younas, founder of Muzmatch; Ismail Jeilani and Mujavid Bukhari, co-founders of Scoodle; Muhammad Altalib and Ibrahim Khan, co-founders of Islamic Finance Guru; and Dr Imran Mahmud, former co-founder of Nye.

The programme validated what we were doing and stretched how we were thinking about it. The pitch night at the end felt like our own version of Dragons' Den.

The exit

We were not looking for an acquisition. But after launching and gaining real traction, we began exploring investment. What followed was a candid education in what investor conversations actually look like in practice, including some offers that looked attractive but did not feel right.

We eventually found Wahed. They understood the Muslim consumer deeply, had the engineering and marketing resources we lacked, and shared our values completely. The acquisition was not just commercially sensible. It was the right home for what we had built.

I stayed on as a Product Consultant during the handover period, working with both Wahed and iWills Solicitors, the UK's leading Islamic wills and probate firm who became part of the same ecosystem.

What it all meant

The co-founding team gained things from this project that have shaped how I think and work ever since: how to validate a product with a community, how to build with genuine care for who you are building for, and how to navigate an exit without losing what made the thing worth building in the first place.

We may not be millionaires from it. But we built something that helped thousands of Muslims in the UK do something important for their families and their faith.

That was always the point.