Yassir Ennazk and the trouble with easy buttons

Before the advertising dashboard, there was an Xbox sensor. Yassir Ennazk’s graduation project, Fastmocap, took the Kinect hardware associated with console gaming and used it to record movement for animated characters. An object designed for play became a working instrument. It is a useful place to start a career that would later involve audiences, checkouts, and the awkward business of deciding whether an advertisement earned its keep.

The attraction of the project was practical. Motion capture could be expensive for small animation and game studios. Ennazk saw room for a cheaper approach. Years before Scalify, the advertising company he founded, he was already considering what happened when a specialized task met a customer with limited resources.

The Xbox sensor before the ad account

Fastmocap used Microsoft’s Kinect sensor to help 3D artists animate characters. Its pitch removed much of the ceremony: no special suit, no markers, no elaborate setup. The person moved; the software turned that movement into material an animator could use. The hardware was familiar, while the purpose had changed.

The product’s tutorials show the sequence from installation to capturing an animation and exporting it to a 3D application. That last step matters. A demonstration can look delightful and still be useless if the result cannot travel into the artist’s working software. Fastmocap was presented as a way to fit motion capture into an existing process.

There is a pleasing economy to the idea. A studio wants a moving character, rather than an additional profession to master before the character can move. The challenge is to keep the useful capability while reducing the apparatus around it. Ennazk’s later businesses would encounter their own versions of that trade.

A fan is not automatically a customer

By January 2014, Ennazk had launched Facesniper, a web application for Facebook audience targeting. He had begun shaping the idea the previous September. In February, he described having several hundred international customers, concentrated in English-speaking markets. His explanation of the problem involved a Michael Jackson album.

An advertiser selling the album might select people interested in Michael Jackson. But that audience could include everyone who had liked a related page over its lifetime, including people whose interest had faded. Facesniper focused on people currently active around a subject. The difference was temporal: a past gesture of approval versus attention happening now.

Facebook’s filters, he said, were limited: “les filtres proposés par Facebook aux annonceurs sont très limités.” The product addressed that constraint for agencies, marketing specialists, and independent operators. The album example made the commercial problem legible. A fan list is a starting point; a seller still has to consider whether the people on it might want what is being offered.

A past gesture of approval versus attention happening now.

The distinction behind the Facesniper example

An engineer’s paper trail

Ennazk’s Stack Overflow profile describes a web and game development enthusiast and identifies him as founder of Proud Studios. Its questions and answers cover PHP, JavaScript, HTML, Qt, and other everyday software concerns. Session variables, file downloads, and interface selection all appear in the record.

These are the modest irritations that occupy real development time. A file that will not save has little respect for a product launch. A variable that has not been defined does not become more cooperative because the person debugging it has acquired a title. The profile preserves that working texture alongside the later company biographies.

His GitHub profile carries the same name, identifies Scalify, and links to its website. Pinned projects include Lightfunnels developer materials and Discord notifications. The public record places company work beside personal software configuration, without requiring a theory about how he spends every hour of his day.

One pinned repository configures Sketchybar, a replacement macOS menu bar, with Aerospace window-manager integration. Its features include workspace indicators, the current application, system information, and media controls. The README provides installation instructions and a file structure for making changes.

It is a small but concrete addition to the portrait: software for arranging the software environment. A menu bar is hardly a ceremonial achievement. Yet anyone who works at a computer knows how quickly a supposedly minor interface can become a daily companion or a daily nuisance. Here, the configuration is available for others to inspect.

The shop on the other side of the click

Scalify’s company history places its founding in 2018. Its advertising tools address tasks such as retargeting, audience testing, and campaign management. For an online seller, those tasks sit upstream of another piece of work: building the place where a visitor becomes a customer.

Lightfunnels, which lists Ennazk as co-founder and CEO, occupies that part of the journey. Its history dates the initial idea to 2018, the launch to a Black Friday offer in late November 2021, and the introduction of e-commerce stores to 2023. The origin it gives is frustration with existing e-commerce solutions.

Before that November launch, Ennazk’s name was already on explanatory pages. A July 3, 2021 introduction describes building sales funnels without writing code. Users could arrange and connect pages, while a separate page builder handled the elements within each page. Product information could populate those pages automatically.

The same introduction covers order management, analytics, themes, and abandoned-checkout recovery. Together, those features follow the seller beyond the first page design. A customer can arrive, consider a purchase, leave, return, and finally order. The merchant has to make sense of those stages while continuing to run the business.

Ennazk later shared an introduction to the funnel builder on LinkedIn. The shared post invited tutorial requests. That is a useful extension of the product itself: the builder supplies controls; instruction helps someone decide how to use them. An interface can be simple and still benefit from a demonstration.

Another July 2021 page bearing his name explains general settings: account identity, sender addresses, time zones, and currencies. The account currency could not be changed after the first order. Time zones affected tracking and analytics. These instructions concern the ordinary choices that become consequential once a store is operating.

They also give the story a welcome change of scale. Company timelines deal in years. A settings page deals in the next decision someone must make. Both belong in the record of a product, and the second often determines whether the first becomes useful to its customer.

The cap, the collaborators, the customers

The Lightfunnels team includes fellow co-founders Yousef Khalidi, Naoufal Bardouni, and Uygar Turantekin. Ennazk’s own short biography calls him an e-commerce enthusiast and web technology nerd, with a baseball cap apparently included in the description of the job. His title is formal; the accompanying portrait is more relaxed.

In the LF Connect 2024 speaker lineup, he appeared alongside Khalidi and other people working in e-commerce and its supporting services. The event was organized around Moroccan sellers and entrepreneurs, with Marrakech’s Sofitel as the venue. In May 2024, his LinkedIn invitation was brief: “Meet us @ GITEX AFRICA!”

Products that work through screens also have these public meeting points. A speaker lineup puts founders next to other operators. An invitation gives customers somewhere to find a team. Neither needs to become a heroic episode to belong in a career story. Showing up is part of the work.

Ennazk’s recommendation of print-on-demand provider AOP+ adds another practical connection. Speaking as an EasyAds founder, he warned about an “unreliable partner with quality issues and a lot of returns.” The point extends past the advertising campaign. Winning an order creates a promise that somebody has to fulfill.

A good campaign cannot personally manufacture a shirt, pack a parcel, or make a disappointed buyer happy. His endorsement connects advertising to the quality of the operation behind it. For the merchant, the ad account and the fulfillment partner eventually appear on the same balance sheet.

When the button needs better numbers

Scalify’s current homepage presents Sato AI, an assistant for creating and managing Meta and TikTok campaigns. It describes generating creatives, launching ads, examining performance, setting automation rules, and scaling campaigns. The sequence puts several specialist tasks into a conversational interface while also offering manual control.

Watchify takes up the measurement question. In his founder letter, Ennazk identifies himself as founder of Scalify and Watchify and says that helping more than 12,000 businesses exposed a recurring complaint about wrong data and wasted advertising money. That customer count is his account of the experience.

“Most tracking tools just show you the problem. We decided to fix it completely.”

Yassir Ennazk, Watchify founder letter

The letter describes sending corrected data back to ad managers through Watchify’s Ad Boost Engine. Watchify’s product pages focus on connecting Shopify orders with advertising and traffic sources. The intended result is information a merchant can use when deciding what to cut and what to scale.

That adds an instructive complication to the promise of an easier button. Automating a decision makes the information behind it more consequential. A simpler interface may reduce the number of steps a seller takes, but the relationship between an advertisement and an order still needs to be understood.

The Kinect sensor and the checkout are far apart in purpose. Across Ennazk’s public work, however, the recurring task is recognizable: take something that asks for specialist effort and make it more manageable. The details change, from character movement to campaign controls. The customer still has work to do. Software earns its place by taking a useful piece of that work off their hands.