Key Takeaways
- Alt MENA is a story-first publication, not a news outlet. It profiles individuals rather than tracking events, which puts it in a different category from most regional media covering the startup and creative space.
- The publication is built on a direct observation from inside the VC world: the most interesting people in the region are largely invisible to the press covering it.
- Maria Najjar is building toward a hybrid model where digital-first storytelling eventually becomes physical, with printed collections serving as a permanent record of the region’s creative generation.
Overview
Alt MENA is an independent media publication founded in Dubai in 2026 by Maria Najjar, who serves as its lead storyteller. The publication covers creators, entrepreneurs, and builders across the Middle East and North Africa through long-form written profiles, with supporting video and audio content. It operates as a digital-first publication on Substack, with a freemium model that keeps the majority of its content publicly accessible. Najjar runs the operation solo for now, with plans to build a writers collective of freelance contributors over time.
Background
Maria Najjar spent 30 years in the UAE before founding Alt MENA, the last several of which were inside the content operation of Global Ventures, a Dubai-based venture capital firm with a mandate covering the Middle East and Africa. She managed research, social media, public relations, and events, and ghost-wrote for the firm’s managing partner. The role put her in direct contact with founders across the region on a regular basis.
What she kept noticing was a gap between the people she was meeting and the way the region was being represented in media. The founders she encountered were solving serious problems, often more consequential than what was being built in better-covered startup markets. Almost none of them were being written about. The story that stayed with her was a spearfisher from Sharjah who, after pulling a turtle out of plastic debris during a dive, built a seafood traceability platform to document the journey fish take from water to market. It was the kind of story that would earn significant coverage elsewhere. Here, it went unnoticed.
When she left Global Ventures, the idea that had been forming for five years became a publication.
Mission and Approach
The framing behind Alt MENA is explicitly counter-narrative. Najjar argues that Arabs and people from the Middle East have a deep history of creativity and enterprise that predates the modern era but has been largely obscured by how the region is covered internationally, where the dominant images are conflict, displacement, and crisis rather than invention and culture. Alt MENA is not positioned as a rebuttal to that coverage. It simply goes looking for the other story.
The publication’s scope is broad by design. Subjects come from architecture, music, food, technology, and social enterprise. What they share is that they are building something, and that nobody is writing about it. Najjar finds them primarily through Instagram, reaches out directly, and reports that the response rate is close to universal. People from the region, she has found, want to tell their stories. They just need someone to ask.
Product and Offering
Alt MENA publishes long-form written profiles on Substack, supplemented by video and audio recordings from interviews. The publication is free to access by default. A paid tier for exclusive or extended content is planned, though Najjar is clear that the majority of what she publishes must remain public. Keeping the stories accessible is the point.
She is also working toward printed collections, compiling the digital archive into hardcover books. The intention is partly archival and partly practical: a physical object that can sit in someone’s home or office reaches a different kind of reader than a link does.
On the production side, Najjar is currently handling everything herself. She has identified the need for a graphic designer to improve how the content is packaged for distribution, and she intends to build a writers collective of freelancers who bring different backgrounds and perspectives to the subjects she is covering. She also wants to bring in contributors with deep access to specific areas of the region.
Business Model
Alt MENA operates on a freemium model. The public Substack draws readers and builds the subscriber base. A paid tier will eventually offer exclusive content for subscribers willing to pay for access. Revenue from printed book sales adds a transactional layer. The longer-term B2B angle involves licensing or distributing content to other publications, though that remains a secondary priority behind building the audience first.
Funding and Support
Alt MENA is entirely bootstrapped. No external funding has been raised.
Traction and Growth
The publication is at early traction stage. Najjar tracks subscriber count and conversion rate as the primary indicators of progress, and she is focused on turning readers into loyal subscribers rather than maximizing raw traffic. The metric she points to most, though, is qualitative: every time a subject reads their profile, their reaction confirms that the work is doing what it is supposed to do.
Misconception
The comparison Najjar hears most often is to publications like Khamsa or Womena. She pushes back on that framing. Alt MENA is not covering what is happening. It is covering who is doing things. The distinction matters because it shapes everything about how the publication is structured, what it publishes, and how long each piece takes to produce.
Outlook
The next six to twelve months are focused on volume. Najjar wants to publish consistently and build the archive. The writers collective is the structural priority that would allow her to scale output without compromising the depth that defines the publication. The longer play is the printed book, which she sees as a way to give the work permanence and reach readers who may never encounter it digitally.
