What Happened in the Middle East

How Alarmy took the Middle East by storm with the "Ramadan Alarm"

The Spark

Why we turned our eyes to the Middle East

Alarmy is a global service, but aside from our primary markets (like the US and Korea), we had never hyper-targeted specific countries. During the process of setting the Viral squad's Q1 install goals, "global expansion" rose up as a major initiative. When we ran the simulations, we realized that hitting our install targets would require contributions from countries we hadn't really tapped into yet.

Which country could we make a splash in?
While chatting casually about this, the topic of Ramadan came up.

"Installs seem to organically bump up every year during Ramadan, so there's definitely a need there.
Plus, Middle Eastern countries have strong income levels and large populations, right?
What if we proactively approach them this time with a massive marketing campaign?"

We all agreed it was a pretty solid approach. But up to that point, we were purely talking about marketing. We never imagined we'd end up planning a specific feature or an in-app promotion.

This "Ramadan Marketing" eventually evolved into a producting project called the "Ramadan Alarm," which drove 300,000 installs in a single month.

The Development

We thought it would be "easy" to make an even bigger impact if we paired it with the product. (Red Flag)

As we researched Ramadan, we found that there were many problems that seemed trivial on the surface but were actually quite inconvenient. One of the biggest struggles for those observing Ramadan is how easy it is to miss the pre-dawn meal (Suhoor). If you miss it, you can't eat anything for the rest of the day, making the hunger pangs pretty brutal. However, this was a problem Alarmy could solve incredibly simply. Waking people up in the morning is our core specialty, and all we had to do was calculate the sunrise time and automatically set the wake-up alarm accordingly.

The more we researched, the more confident we became that the Product-Market Fit was an absolute match. (We ended up learning so much about Ramadan...) The fact that there were already "Ramadan Alarm" apps with over 100 million downloads showed there was plenty of need.

We thought we could whip up a "Ramadan Prayer Alarm" in no time by simply adapting Alarmy's existing "Habit Alarm" or "Pill Alarm" features.

The Crisis

Everyone has a plan until they look at the codebase.

Adding another alarm type was not a simple task at all. In fact, it was incredibly convoluted. We really shouldn't have underestimated the time required to mess with the "alarm" logic... It was an "oh crap" moment.

Meanwhile, the timeline was tighter than expected. Influencers needed to actually use the "Ramadan Alarm" when creating their content, meaning it had to be deployed a full week before Ramadan started. Realistically, we only had exactly one week.

The Climax

It takes a village to target a specific country.

As mentioned earlier, the sheer effort to launch the Ramadan Alarm feature was massive. But once we started sprinting, we realized that targeting specific countries wasn't just about releasing a new feature and calling it a day. It really took a village.

1. Strings

• Looking at Arabic, we realized it's not all just one Arabic...? We had to find the right localized Arabic for various Islamic countries.

• We heard Egypt uses Egyptian Arabic (a dialect) instead of Modern Standard Arabic, but they actually prefer Standard Arabic in apps...? We had to pinpoint the language they were most accustomed to when actually using products.

• During QA, it took twice as long because we couldn't even read what the words or numbers were. Multiple teammates had to swarm the QA process late into the night.

2. RTL

• Middle Eastern countries use RTL (Right-to-Left) instead of LTR. We already had basic RTL support in place, but we needed to verify if RTL was applied correctly in every nook and cranny of the product. Upon checking, we found quite a few missing spots.

• On top of that, Arabic numerals are apparently LTR. Getting this all sorted out was another headache we had to manage.

3. Major Device Distribution

• The devices frequently used by Middle Eastern users were different from the models we had thoroughly optimized for in the past. There were a lot of low-end Chinese devices.

• We had to check and handle whether the alarm would reliably ring on their devices, and whether we needed to request any additional device permissions.

4. Subscription Pricing Adjustments

• Since we were expecting a huge influx of users, we needed to verify whether the subscription price shown to them was locally appropriate. If the price was absurdly high, it wouldn't just mean a lack of conversions—they might abandon the app entirely.

5. Mobilizing All Marketing Channels

• Because we had never sourced influencers in Middle Eastern countries, we had to mobilize every available channel. We collaborated with agencies, painstakingly did direct seeding one by one, and used TikTok's platform (TCM) in parallel.

• In terms of selling points, since we didn't know what would resonate, we prepared multiple variations—from highly hooking creatives to ones purely explaining Alarmy's new feature. Especially because there were so many countries, it took a ton of time to work backward from our targets, allocate the budget, and set things up per country and per creative. This required a massive media mix, not just a one-off campaign.

• Beyond that, we had to make airtight preparations for store listings, CRM in-app messages, and in-app banners.

The Conclusion

A month where we truly became a "whole village"

- 300,000 installs generated during the period
- DAU increased by 1.5x compared to before
- Maintained Paid ROAS while averaging a CPI of $0.11 (42% better than forecasted)
- Around 30 influencer content pieces in total. One hit 200K views, another 100K!

Ultimately, everyone pulled together and we made it happen.

The metrics were great, but many teammates mentioned they were most proud of getting this done as "one team" throughout the process.

During the project, we met weekly to sync on progress and align on next action items, allowing members from different teams to operate like a single team. Plus, the daily updates of target and leading metrics pumped into our Slack channel helped everyone stay focused on a shared goal and maintain the same level of intensity. Thanks to this tight-knit collaboration, even amidst the chaos, we were able to flexibly adjust our strategies and tasks to deliver the best possible outcome.

Still, there were definitely a few areas with room for improvement.

We gathered feedback on how to drive even bigger growth for next year's Ramadan, which largely boiled down to two points.

1. If we had met our global users earlier

We prepared hard, but deeply understanding another country is incredibly difficult unless you've lived there. Once we launched, we realized that even within Islam, there are various sects and languages. While it was effective to gather feedback from influencers and course-correct, we couldn't help but feel a pang of regret wondering, "What if we had just interviewed five of our users who observe Ramadan beforehand?"

2. A cushier timeline for project quality

Looking back, every regret ultimately stemmed from the overly rushed schedule. If we had planned things out with product integration in mind during the early-quarter planning stage, we could have executed a much more polished attempt.

We felt we didn't sufficiently refine the "user-perspective journey," such as guiding new users to naturally reach the feature after installing the app, or designing the right nudges tailored to their product journey during Ramadan. In reality, while the retention rate of users who used the "Ramadan Alarm" feature was high, the adoption rate of the feature itself was low. Quite a few users simply ended up repurposing our existing "Habit Alarm" for their Ramadan prayers instead.

Similar regrets lingered on the marketing side. If we had expanded beyond paid channels and influencer marketing to organic virality via local communities, or Ramadan-related owned content infused with the Alarmy brand (like memes, swipeable posts, etc.), we feel the impact would have been vastly bigger.

Even so, we did our absolute best in the given environment and learned a ton.

This project was more than just a single feature or campaign; it was our first real-world battle where product and marketing intertwined to genuinely push into the global market. And through it, we gained both tangible results and meaningful lessons. It was a time of learning by doing—internalizing what genuine product spec looks like for a specific country, and the kind of effort it takes to understand and communicate with global users in their context.

We're confident that next Ramadan, we'll return even stronger with more ample preparation and a tighter strategy.

The Ramadan project, which we successfully saw through to the end while juggling existing projects! That's a wrap!

⏰ DelightRoom is hiring! Join us and Alarmy in changing the mornings of global users 🙌