Check out this great story from Business Today Egypt, my former employer, about Egyptian entrepreneurs minting ridiculous amounts of cash by using Facebook as a low-cost online business platform.

Mr friend Ethar el-Katatney, one of Egypt's best young writers, found a whole bunch of people who are making good money as importer-middlemen, using Facebook groups as their marketing and communications system. I love the example of Fadwa Attia, an aspiring fashion designer:

For a whole year, she would paint designs on T-shirts -- which typically takes her a couple of hours per T-shirt -- and sell them in booths at events. She was moderately successful, but outside of events she would only get two or three orders a month.

In September 2007, Attia set up a Facebook group for her friends. It instantly took off. Within a month she had over 1,000 members and more orders than she could possibly fulfill. Within six months, she had quit her job to focus solely on her new business, which she branded Fofo, complete with a caricature of herself. Today, her group has over 5,000 members, and she paints not only on T-shirts but on bags, sweatshirts, tank tops and sweaters.

"I could never have done what I've done without Facebook," she says. "It's truly incredible. The minute I upload new designs people find out about them. I get 15-20 orders a week now and I can't keep up. People like my designs, and I make enough money to live on quite comfortably."

A few things come to mind after reading this story:

1) I say this all the time, but here it is again: Arabs are a weird combination of naturally entrepreneurial and heavily risk averse. These two things sound contradictory, but they are not. Across the Middle East you see a culture that respects entrepreneurs and business, where successful businessmen are respected more than politicians or academics, where every street scene is filled with hundreds and hundreds of small, owner-operated businesses. But pretty much all the businesses are safe, old-school enterprises - dry cleaners, grocers, sandwich stands - and most of them do very, very little innovation (I repeat my call for an Egyptian fuul stand to offer my patented concept of Fuul Mexici, fuul served atop doritos with chopped tomato and onion...). The entrepreneur culture rarely extends to genuinely interesting or different businesses or business models, and is especially lagging when it comes to the internet and new media.

2) For the reasons presented in (1), its cool to see what is basically an experimental kind of business like Fadwa's getting given a chance online that it would be unlikely to get in the world of bricks and mortar. Sure, rich Egyptian socialites are often inclined to start boutiquey little hobby businesses doing interior decoration or jewelry design etc. But my suspicion here is that while Facebook will serve them well, connecting them to other members of the fabulous, idle rich, it will also give those from other classes and backgrounds an opportunity to mingle and let their talent reach an affluent market in a way they never could have before...

3) If you read the story, you'll see that a lot of the success for these entrepreneurs comes from them breaking/bending the law - some are essentially smuggling the things they sell into Egypt, few have actual registered businesses, most are taking advantage of the higher prices charged by legit retailers, who incur higher costs by doing this the [marginally more] legal way. But in Egypt, where it is essentially impossible to do business without breaking one law or another, and where everybody is bending some rule, avoiding some paperwork or paying off somebody, I don't feel this is such an issue - and it doesn't detract from the fundamental way that Facebook and other sites are massively lowering the fixed costs of doing business, and enabling a whole new class of entrepreneurs in the process.