Mustafa's vision was Canva for websites — a mobile-first, no-code builder letting freelancers and small businesses in Arabic-speaking markets design and publish a site from their phone, with AI writing the copy. We designed and engineered the full product: a tap-to-build mobile canvas, nine styleable block types, an AI text assistant generating bilingual Arabic/English content, and three export paths — hosted preview link, HTML zip, and JSON. Built and shipped in 10 weeks. Mustafa closed a $500K seed round shortly after.
Mrsam AI: We Built the RTL-First, No-Code Website Builder That Closed a $500K Seed Round
The challenge
Every existing website builder treated Arabic and RTL as an afterthought — a toggle bolted onto a layout system designed for English first. Mrsam needed the opposite: RTL and LTR as equal citizens from the block level up, on a canvas built for a phone screen, not a desktop mouse. On top of that, the AI content generation needed to produce genuinely usable Arabic copy, not translated English, and the whole flow — describe, design, generate, export — had to complete in one sitting on a small screen without feeling like a compromise.
Our approach
We built the canvas mobile-first from the ground up: single-column vertical layout, tap-to-add blocks from a component tray, long-press to reorder, snap-to-alignment — no drag-and-drop patterns borrowed from desktop that don't survive a touchscreen. Nine block types (text, image, video, button, container, divider, header, footer, menu) each got a dedicated property editor surfaced as a bottom sheet, with per-block RTL/LTR direction toggles and Arabic-first font defaults — Cairo, Tajawal, Noto Kufi Arabic — so a business could go fully Arabic without English leaking through. The AI text assistant ran on GPT-3.5-turbo with prompts tailored per block type and business category, defaulting to Arabic with English as fallback, so 'Generate with AI' produced copy that actually fit a WhatsApp CTA or a services headline. On export, we shipped three paths from one internal JSON structure — a hosted preview link, a downloadable HTML/CSS/JS zip, and the raw JSON — so a freelancer could go live in minutes or hand off a static build to a developer later.