Yousef Al-Rasheedi: From Haraj to Aqar, Building Saudi Arabia’s Everyday Marketplaces

In the mid-2000s, Saudi internet culture was defined by forums. People debated stocks, exchanged advice, and built communities on simple message boards. After the 2006 stock market crash, something unusual started happening inside those forums: the charts and ticker symbols slowly gave way to posts about used cars, rental apartments, old electronics, even livestock. Most forum owners saw this as clutter. Yousef Al-Rasheedi saw it as a market.

From that behavioral shift came Haraj, today one of Saudi Arabia’s most visited classifieds platforms, and later Aqar, a focused real estate marketplace. Together they form a dual infrastructure: one for everyday trade, one for property, both built by a Saudi engineer who preferred code and users over pitch decks and headlines.

An Engineer Who Watched Closely

Yousef’s story starts in Dhahran. He studied Computer Engineering at King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals (KFUPM) from 2001 to 2007, building a strong foundation in systems, networks, and software. After graduation, he followed a conventional technical path:

• Trainee network engineer at Arab National Bank
• Network engineer and server administrator at Computer Sciences Corporation
• Network engineer at Riyad Bank

But outside office hours, he was deeply involved in running online forums. Around 2005–2006, he helped manage a popular stock discussion forum. When the stock market crashed, a new pattern emerged: people started posting ads for cars, apartments, and other goods in the middle of investment threads. The same thing was happening across other forums he followed. Users were bending general-purpose communities into informal marketplaces.

Instead of resisting, he experimented. He opened a small section of the forum dedicated to these ads and watched it grow. That experiment revealed a simple truth: people wanted a digital haraj, a place that felt as familiar as the traditional flea market, but lived on the internet, in Arabic, and matched to local behavior.

In 2008, he acted on that insight. With roughly $220 (about 825 SAR) in server costs, no employees, and no external investment, he launched Haraj.com.sa as a standalone classifieds site, initially focused on cars. No glossy branding campaign. No PR. Just a product that understood what people were already trying to do.

Execution & Growth: Familiar UX, Strong Timing

At that time, most active internet users in Saudi Arabia were fluent in forums:

• They knew what a username and membership meant
• They knew how threads, replies, and private messages worked

So when he designed Haraj, he leaned into that mental model. The site behaved and felt like a forum, just repurposed for buying and selling:

• Listings looked like “topics”
• Replies looked like “comments”
• Communication flowed in patterns people already trusted

Competing platforms often introduced more complex interfaces and navigation logic. Technically impressive, but they required users to learn something new. Haraj felt like an extension of habits people had already built online.

Engineered for Search and Scale

Behind the simple interface was a thoughtful technical architecture:

• Clean URL structures combining IDs and titles
• Logical, deep category trees
• A structure that made it easy for search engines to understand and index listings

This helped Haraj appear more often in search engines. The system grew from one server to a group of servers with a load balancer, web servers, a database server, and cloud services like AWS. Tools like Sphinx search and Node.js were added to make the site faster and the search better.

Riding the Smartphone and Messaging Wave

The real inflection came when smartphones and messaging apps went mainstream in Saudi Arabia. Between roughly 2011 and 2013, as iPhone, Android, and WhatsApp adoption soared, Haraj’s traffic surged. Word-of-mouth combined with link-sharing and viral screenshots to create a loop:

1. Someone listed a car or apartment on Haraj
2. The link spread through WhatsApp groups and social circles
3. New users arrived already “primed” to trust the platform

During these years, Haraj’s annual growth in visitors reportedly reached 200–300%, on top of an already sizable base. By the mid-2010s, Haraj had:

• Millions of monthly visitors
• Thousands of new ads daily
• An estimated SAR 400 million in monthly sales passing through the platform

Today it consistently ranks among the most visited local websites in Saudi Arabia, with tens of millions of monthly visits and tens of thousands of new listings across vehicles, real estate, electronics, livestock, and more. And for years, much of this was run by a founder who still had a day job. Yousef Al-Rasheedi operated Haraj alone from its early days until around 2013, when he finally built a small, focused team.

From Haraj to Aqar: Specializing in Real Estate

As Haraj grew, one category consistently stood out in volume and strategic importance: real estate. Families, agents, and investors returned repeatedly to search for:

• Apartments for rent
• Villas for sale
• Land plots
• Commercial properties

The behavior was clear: real estate needed a dedicated home with more specialized tools such as search filters, map-based browsing, structured data, and a brand focused solely on property. That’s the context in which Aqar App (Aqar.fm) emerged, with Yousef as co-founder alongside other partners. Aqar applies the same principles that made Haraj work:

• Arabic-first, locally grounded experience
• Intuitive design, tuned to how people actually search for homes in Saudi Arabia
• Strong search capabilities to slice by city, neighborhood, price, size, and property type

By the early-to-mid 2020s, Aqar had become one of the top real estate apps in Saudi Arabia by downloads and traffic, and the go-to destination for buyers, renters, and brokers to discover and list properties If Haraj digitized the informal market, Aqar is helping structure one of the Kingdom’s most critical sectors: housing and real estate.

Leadership Style & Culture: Service, Focus, and Capital Discipline

Yousef Al-Rasheedi’s leadership across Haraj and Aqar follows one clear pattern: put service first, stay in control, and ignore the noise. Haraj uses a light monetization model (a low commission and paid added services instead of heavy ads) based on the belief that if people can easily sell a car, rent an apartment, or move stock, the business will take care of itself. Aqar applies the same logic to real estate, where good search, accurate information, and trust matter more than quick revenue.

When a reported $20 million offer for a minority stake came in, he turned it down because the business no longer needed the money and he didn’t want investor pressure to push the product toward aggressive monetization. Instead of chasing competitors, he keeps asking simple questions: does this change make buying and selling easier, reduce friction, and build trust? That quiet discipline keeps both platforms grounded while others chase trends.

Recognition & Ecosystem Impact

Together, Haraj and Aqar are more than “successful apps.” They are part of Saudi Arabia’s evolving economic infrastructure:

• Haraj enables everyday commerce: cars, electronics, livestock, furniture, and more at national scale
• Aqar supports property decisions: homes, offices, and land tied directly to Vision 2030’s urban and housing goals

Haraj has been recognized as one of the most visited local websites in the Kingdom and is cited in multiple rankings and analyses of Saudi digital platforms. Aqar outputs regularly appear in traffic and app-store charts for real estate. For the ecosystem, Yousef’s journey offers a distinctly Saudi blueprint:

• Arabic-first
• Rooted in local behavior
• Built by an engineer founder who believes in patient, product-driven growth

Platforms for a Transforming Kingdom

As Saudi Arabia accelerates its Vision 2030 agenda of diversifying its economy, reshaping cities, and digitizing citizen services, platforms like Haraj and Aqar sit at important junctions:

• Helping individuals and small traders participate in the digital economy
• Enabling families to navigate complex housing decisions
• Providing an ongoing, real-time picture of demand, pricing, and behavior across the country

Behind them is a founder who built them with consistency: watching what people do, serving those needs with precision, and protecting the long-term health of the platforms from short-term pressures. In a decade defined by Vision 2030, Yousef Al-Rasheedi’s story is a reminder that some of the most important economic change starts with a single founder quietly solving everyday problems at scale.

Follow Founder’s Tale for more stories of the visionaries shaping Saudi Arabia’s future.