Unready is where everyone starts.

The third list

Crushed first, then a method

In 2017, I was accepted into one of the most selective academic programs in my country. Barely. Morocco's preparatory classes, the CPGE, are a two-year pressure cooker modeled on the French system. Students compete for spots in top engineering schools. There is a first admission list for the strongest applicants. Then a second list. I was on the third.

I arrived motivated and got crushed anyway. The pace was brutal. I fell behind in the first weeks and stayed behind for months. Low grades, little sleep, and a question I never said out loud: am I the only one who feels this lost?

Nobody handed me a method. So I built one. Little by little, in my second year, things turned. I learned how to learn, found a rhythm, climbed the rankings, and graduated from EHTP, the École Hassania des Travaux Publics, one of Morocco's top engineering schools.

I did not start with an audience, a budget, or a business degree. I started with a problem I knew how to solve.

The school

Recording courses for the exams I had just survived

While still finishing my engineering degree, I started recording courses for the exact exams I had just been through. It made no sense to anyone around me. It made complete sense to me: I knew precisely where students got stuck, which chapter made them consider quitting, what they typed into a search bar at midnight. I was not guessing what to include. I was answering a younger version of myself.

That project became YOUNESS SCHOOL, founded in 2019. It is a fully online education company for students in preparatory classes for engineering and business schools: recorded courses available day and night, live sessions with experienced teachers, coaching on the TIPE research project, training on work method and productivity, and a community. Since 2019 the school has coached more than 2,000 students directly, reached more than 20,000 through free content, and let more than 5,000 try the platform through free trials. Our students are in Morocco, France, Tunisia and Mauritania.

I started everything alone: recording, editing, publishing, marketing, selling, supporting. Today the school runs with a small core team and expert teacher collaborators, on a platform I chose for boring, practical reasons: content security and a mobile app my students can use offline, which matters when the connection is unstable. Teachable, the platform, later published a case study on how the school was built on it.

No office. No investors. No inherited money. No loans, and no interest, at any point. That last part is not an accident. It is the rule.

The way we sell

Diagnosis, not pressure

At YOUNESS SCHOOL we sell through conversations. A student writes to us; we ask about their level, their goals, their constraints; then we recommend what fits. Sometimes a single course instead of the full pack. Sometimes, when it is not a fit, nothing. That habit, recommending less than we could sell, has been our best salesman. Students trust the diagnosis precisely because it is visibly not a script.

The same standard runs through delivery. Support speed is the thing students praise most, which tells you how rare it is. Refunds are honored without a fight. Payment plans split the price and never charge for the splitting. I still answer student messages myself more often than my calendar approves of.

The book

Business, described like an engineer would

When the business started working, people began asking me how. I gave honest answers and watched their eyes glaze over, not because the answers were complicated but because they were scattered. A bit about products, a bit about websites, a bit about ads, a bit about selling. Pieces, no picture.

Engineers are trained to hate that. When a system has many moving parts, you do not describe it with a mood board. You describe it with a model: the smallest set of variables that explains how the whole thing behaves. So I did to business what my professors did to physics. I compressed everything that actually moved revenue, and everything that turned out to be noise, into one equation with seven variables. Five that generate income: Value, Storefront, Marketing, Sales, Delivery. Two that multiply it: Team and Technology. One filter under all of them: integrity.

That equation became The Business Equation: a short book, three playbooks and eight mind maps, written for professionals who have a real skill and no product yet. It is the book I wish someone had handed me in 2019.

The standard

Where the rule comes from

My rule for what is worth building comes from my faith, and I have never once regretted it commercially. A business passes if the customer ends up genuinely better off, if everything about the exchange is honest with no interest-bearing debt engineered into the model, and if it would still make sense when it only wins because the customer wins. Day-trading schemes, deceptive dropshipping, anything where my gain requires your loss: deleted from the list without regret.

You do not need to share my faith for the equation to work for you. You only need to share the standard. What remains after the filter is not just permissible. It is stronger, because a business that only wins when customers win generates the one marketing asset money cannot buy: people who insist their friends buy from you.