Live in production · rouad.com
CASE STUDY · CUSTOM SAAS

We built an entire B2B operating system.

Rouad is a bilingual, multi-tenant SaaS platform we designed, engineered and shipped end-to-end. Seventeen production modules covering how a serious firm operates — from prospecting to invoicing to WhatsApp inbox — running on our own infrastructure and used every working day by our own agency.

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SOUND FAMILIAR?

You've built a business. Your tools didn't keep up.

Every deal lives in a different WhatsApp thread and nobody knows what's next.
We rebuild the same quote every time a lead comes in — from scratch.
Accounting is on paper, sales is on Excel, HR is in someone's head.
We tried three SaaS tools; they don't speak Arabic properly and they don't talk to each other.
By the time we chase a follow-up, the deal is cold.
Every new hire needs a week just to figure out where things live.
Tell us what your team spends its day on
THE SCALE

What «operating system» actually means.

Not a marketing metaphor. Concrete surface area — shipped, versioned, running.

17+
Production modules
Each with its own screens, permissions, notifications and workflows.
230+
Database migrations
Every schema change tracked, reversible, deployed via CI.
100%
Bilingual coverage
Arabic RTL + English, every string, every screen, every export.
24/7
Live operation
Auto-deployed on every push; the agency runs on it in real time.
WHAT WE BUILT

Seventeen modules, one product surface.

Each module was scoped, designed, engineered, tested and shipped by the same team you'd hire. Not off-the-shelf plugins bolted together. Every panel below is what the module looks like in the live product.

01MODULE

Lead generation + Apollo scraping

Scrape B2B contacts by industry, geography, seniority and keywords via Apollo. A shared lead pool rotates automatically so no lead gets served twice inside the tenant.

OUTCOME · Full B2B database access at 40% of the retail Apollo seat price.
02MODULE

Pipeline / CRM

Deals move through stages, get assigned to owners, carry follow-ups, and roll up into pipeline reports the sales leader actually reads.

OUTCOME · Every deal has one home — no more «which WhatsApp did I discuss this in?»
03MODULE

Quotes + auto-numbered proposals

Branded quote templates with computed totals, discount lines, VAT by branch, and public shareable PDF links. Numbering is serial across the whole tenant.

OUTCOME · Time-to-quote drops from a day to two minutes.
04MODULE

Contracts + e-signature

Author a contract, spawn signable instances for each party, and collect per-party signatures via public share tokens. Automatic email delivery, soft-cancel, serial numbering.

OUTCOME · Signed the same day — no PDF ping-pong.
05MODULE

Full accounting

68-account chart, 4-way VAT classification, invoices, expenses, OCR upload, attachments, P&L, balance sheet, cash flow and trial balance reports. UAE 5% and Saudi 15% by branch.

OUTCOME · Books close monthly on their own — no separate accounting software.
06MODULE

WhatsApp Business inbox

Live two-way inbox via the real WhatsApp Cloud API — webhook + polling + 24-hour window handling, mobile-first design, team-shared conversations.

OUTCOME · The team stops screenshotting WhatsApp threads to each other.
07MODULE

Email + WhatsApp campaigns

Cron-driven send worker with dynamic send-windows, stuck-row sweep, open/click tracking, and campaign performance dashboards.

OUTCOME · Send window, subject line and delivery health — one screen.
08MODULE

HR + attendance

Employee records, roles, attendance tracking, and role-based permissions with tenant-scoped feature gates.

OUTCOME · Payroll owner sees who's in, out, or on-leave without asking.
09MODULE

Cost calculator

Editable pricing templates with fixed + per-unit line items and per-template margins. Sales team scopes a project and gets a defensible price instantly.

OUTCOME · Sales quotes at margin without needing the founder in the room.
10MODULE

Event proposals builder

Templated event-quote engine that renders branded, RTL, printable PDF proposals plus a public share link. Full country-aware entity + VAT logic.

OUTCOME · Event proposal turnaround: hours instead of days.
11MODULE

Library document templates

Fillable prose documents with computed fields, formula fields, edit-via-form, public share tokens, page numbers — turned into branded PDFs.

OUTCOME · One source of truth for every operational document.
12MODULE

Domains + hosting orders

Customer-facing module to request domains, hosting and email, with live RDAP availability checks and staff fulfilment queue.

OUTCOME · Whole domain intake handled inside the platform — no separate ticket tool.
13MODULE

Supplier portal

Login-free supplier gateway with per-company self-registration links, sealed-bid project tenders and award (الترسية) flow. Email + WhatsApp one-tap contact.

OUTCOME · Vendors bid, get evaluated and awarded — all without an account.
14MODULE

Projects + tasks

Board view with multi-select, tag/date filters, bulk actions, and person-assignment — a full task engine, not just a to-do list.

OUTCOME · Multi-select + bulk assign replaces 20 individual clicks.
15MODULE

Follow-up centre

Editable list of key clients with next-follow-up date, request, value and owner — for nurturing long-tail relationships that never fall through the cracks.

OUTCOME · «I forgot to follow up» stops being a valid excuse.
16MODULE

Web push notifications

Locked-phone notifications for iOS PWA and Android, with auto-provisioning and fan-out to every registered device per user.

OUTCOME · Real-time alerts on the phone without opening a browser tab.
17MODULE

Rouad Connect (in-product SEO service)

In-product SEO snippet ingest that snapshots the customer's site and produces AI recommendations — a service inside the service.

OUTCOME · Recurring value the platform delivers without an extra vendor.
HOW WE BUILT IT

From spec to a live product running an agency.

Not a demo. Not a prototype. A production system, versioned, shipped, and used every working day.

01

The spec — what a Saudi/UAE B2B firm actually needs

We started from the real workload: how leads come in, how they're qualified, how proposals get sent, how invoices get chased. Each module mapped one workflow — not one screen. This is why Rouad reads as an operating system, not a bag of tools.

02

The infrastructure — self-hosted from day one

Rouad runs on our own VPS (Frankfurt), with self-hosted Supabase, PostgreSQL and Storage. No SaaS lock-in on the layer below the app. Auto-deploy via GitHub Actions to production on every push to main — the whole pipeline is ~2.5 minutes.

03

Arabic-first, English-parity from the first line of code

Every string ships in both Arabic and English via the i18n layer. Every RTL layout was designed in RTL, not translated from LTR. Latin numerals, MSA-only Arabic (no dialect), masculine verbs in shipped UI — the discipline any serious Arabic product needs.

04

Live iteration on a real business

The moment a module is stable it enters the agency's own workflow. Bugs surface in real cases. Features get validated against a real P&L. This is why the 230+ migrations are hardened — every one of them survived contact with a paying invoice.

THE THREE PATHS

Three ways to solve this. Only one leaves you owning the system.

Most teams try to close the operations gap one of two ways. Here's why the third — building the thing — ends up costing less over eighteen months.

Stitching SaaS tools

HubSpot + Zoho + Slack + Zapier + …
Monthly cost (seats × tools × 12)
USD 2,500–6,000 / month
Arabic quality
Machine-translated at best
Cross-tool data flow
Zapier chains, break silently
You own the data
No — each vendor keeps it
One place for the team
No — six tabs and a group chat
Custom to your workflow
No — you shape yourself to theirs

Monthly retainer agency

Marketing + dev agency on retainer
Monthly cost (retainer + build)
USD 4,000–8,000 / month
Arabic quality
Depends on the freelancer that week
Cross-tool data flow
Someone else's stack, always
You own the data
Only what they export for you
One place for the team
No — reports live in Google Docs
Custom to your workflow
Only inside their template

We build your own Rouad

A single system, yours to own
One-time build (phased)
Scoped to your workflow
Arabic quality
MSA-first, designed in RTL
Cross-tool data flow
One database, no glue layer
You own the data
Yes — self-hosted, exportable
One place for the team
Yes — single sign-in, every workflow
Custom to your workflow
Yes — the software fits you
TECH STACK

Modern, boring, and completely ours.

No custom framework. No exotic dependencies. Standard stack chosen so the codebase stays maintainable by any competent team five years from now.

Frontend
  • Next.js 15 (App Router)
  • TypeScript
  • Tailwind CSS v4
  • React Server Components
  • next-intl (bilingual RTL)
Backend
  • Supabase (self-hosted Postgres)
  • Row-level security
  • Node.js API server
  • REST + typed clients
  • Cron-driven workers
Integrations
  • WhatsApp Cloud API
  • Apollo B2B
  • HubSpot
  • Zoho Mail (IMAP/SMTP)
  • OpenAI (grounded model calls)
Ops
  • GitHub Actions auto-deploy
  • PM2 process manager
  • nginx reverse proxy
  • Frankfurt VPS
  • ZATCA + FTA-ready invoicing
ARABIC-FIRST

Not «Arabic support». Arabic-first.

Rouad was designed in Arabic and translated into English — the opposite of how most SaaS ships. Every design decision, from typography to number formatting to notification tone, respects Arabic reading before it respects any other language.

MSA (فصحى) throughout — no dialect leaks into shipped copy.
Latin numerals in Arabic (123, not ١٢٣) — matches how enterprise finance actually reads numbers.
Masculine verbs in shipped UI (اضغط, not اضغطي) — neutral, ungendered.
RTL layouts designed in RTL — not mirrored from an LTR draft.
IBM Plex Sans Arabic — no letter-spacing, no monospaced Latin numbers breaking Arabic joining.
Rouad now runs everything our agency does — leads, deals, quotes, contracts, invoices, payroll, campaigns. If we can build our own operating system, we can build yours.
The Darb Productions team · Riyadh + Dubai
THE NEXT STEP

Want us to build your operating system?

Tell us what your team spends the most time on. We come back with an architecture note and a phased build plan — no discovery invoice, no consulting theatre. If we take the project, you get the same team that shipped Rouad.

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