Why We Sold True Wills (and Why It Was Never About the Money)

I want to be honest about something: when we first started True Wills, an acquisition was not the plan.

The plan was simple. Build something that made it easier for Muslims in the UK to write an Islamic will. Keep it affordable. Make an impact. We had no grand exit strategy and no ambition to become millionaires from it. The intention was different from the start.

So how did we end up being acquired by Wahed? And how do I feel about it looking back?

The investor conversations nobody talks about

After launching in Ramadan 2021 and seeing real traction, we started exploring investment. We had built the platform bootstrapped, funded by a director's loan, which meant we had been extremely careful with every pound we spent. We knew investment would help us scale what we were building.

What followed was a steep education in what investor conversations actually look like in practice.

Some conversations were excellent. Investors who understood the Muslim consumer market, asked sharp questions, and gave us genuine feedback even when they passed. Those conversations made us better.

Others were harder to navigate. We had investors who were interested in the platform but not the mission. They wanted to strip back the Islamic compliance angle and go broader. We had conversations where people wanted significant equity for what felt like very little in return. We had a couple of offers that looked attractive on paper but would have meant handing over control to people who did not understand who we were building for.

We walked away from all of those. Not easily, but clearly.

The thing about building a values-driven startup is that the wrong investor is genuinely worse than no investor. You can rebuild momentum. You cannot undo a cap table.

When the right conversation happened

The conversation with Wahed was different from the first call.

Wahed already understood the Muslim consumer deeply. They were building a broader ecosystem of financial and planning tools for Muslims globally. True Wills was not just an add-on for them; it was a natural and strategic extension of what they were already doing.

They had the resources we did not: engineering capacity, a marketing team, distribution, and regulatory infrastructure. Things that would have taken us years to build independently, they already had.

And critically, they shared our values. The conversation was never about stripping back the Islamic compliance or making the product more "mainstream." It was about how to take what we had built and reach more Muslims who needed it.

That alignment made the decision straightforward.

What a mission-led exit actually feels like

I have read plenty of startup exit stories. They tend to follow a pattern: the numbers, the negotiations, the champagne.

Ours felt different. The thing I kept coming back to was not the commercial outcome. It was whether our original intention was still intact. Were we handing this over to people who would steward it properly? Would the Muslims who relied on the platform continue to be served well?

The answer to both was yes. And that mattered more than anything else in the deal.

As part of the transition, the founding team stayed on for a consultation period to hand over to the Wahed team properly. I continued to provide product expertise to both Wahed and iWills Solicitors, the UK's leading Islamic wills and probate solicitors who became part of the same ecosystem.

The reflection I keep coming back to

We started True Wills with a clear intention. We were not doing it to make money. We were doing it because over a million Muslims in the UK did not have a written will, and that felt like a gap worth closing.

Looking back now, I think the intention protected us. It helped us walk away from the wrong investors. It helped us build a product that was genuinely useful rather than just commercially optimised. And it helped us find an acquirer who understood what we had built and why.

We may not be millionaires in this world, but hopefully in the hereafter. If you know, you know.