In the race to build the ultimate “super-app,” it is easy to forget that the final destination isn’t a user’s screen—it is their living room. For Baris Kocdur, Vice President of Marketing at Justlife, the evolution from a cleaning platform to a comprehensive home operating system wasn’t just a technical upgrade; it was a renegotiation of trust.
With over 15 years of experience spanning high-growth performance marketing at Rocket Internet and product development at Insider, Kocdur is a veteran of the MENA tech ecosystem. Yet, despite a background rooted in predictive algorithms and data science, he argues that the true “autonomous home” relies on a decidedly human metric: the quiet, reliable coordination of everyday life. Here, he explains why, in a market as nuanced as Saudi Arabia, an algorithm never beats a handshake.
The transition from Justmop to Justlife marked a strategic shift toward a super-app model. From a brand storytelling perspective, what was the biggest challenge in expanding consumer trust from home cleaning to healthcare and beauty services?
“The shift from Justmop to Justlife was more than just a rebrand; it marked a bigger step in how the brand supports customers in their everyday lives, beyond home cleaning alone.”
Justmop clearly owned cleaning, but Justlife gave us permission to mean more. From a storytelling perspective, the main challenge was ensuring the trust built in one service could comfortably carry over into new ones. The name itself signaled care, breadth, and everyday living rather than a single task, which made the expansion into healthcare, beauty, and wellness feel natural rather than forced.
As we moved into these new areas, the focus remained on consistency across the board—from professional vetting to the overall customer experience. Trust is built when the brand promise, service quality, and lived experience reinforce one another. We didn’t take that trust for granted; it was reinforced through every interaction. Over time, the brand evolved into an umbrella for everything that happens at home.
Saudi Arabia is seeing a growing demand for “quality of life” services. How is Justlife tailoring its marketing and messaging to reflect the cultural nuances, lifestyle expectations, and evolving priorities of the modern Saudi household?
Saudi households are diverse, fast-moving, and increasingly time-constrained. That reality shapes how we think about marketing. We invest heavily in understanding households by city, life stage, and lifestyle because expectations vary significantly between Riyadh, Jeddah, and emerging cities.
As we expanded our service offerings beyond cleaning into multiple everyday home services, our focus shifted toward clarity rather than aspiration. Sometimes the strongest value proposition is speed. Sometimes it is professionalism. Other times, it is trust and privacy. We design our communication to remove hesitation by helping customers know exactly what to expect, making the experience feel simple rather than uncertain.
“Marketing works best when it feels familiar and relevant to daily life, not when it tries to sound universal.”
This approach has helped us build familiarity and confidence across repeat use cases. For us, relevance isn’t about saying more, it’s about showing up clearly at the right moment in a customer’s routine.
Operating a super app gives you access to diverse data points—from home services usage to wellness preferences. How does Justlife use this data in a privacy-first manner to personalize experiences and anticipate customer needs without overstepping consumer trust?
As a platform that brings together multiple home service categories—from cleaning to salon and healthcare services—we collect information to help facilitate bookings and connect users with professionals efficiently. Homes are personal spaces, and that shapes how we think about data.
We’re very conscious of the responsibility that comes with that access. Our privacy policy clearly explains how personal information is handled and safeguarded, and we take that seriously across the business.
Personalization should feel helpful, not clever. Our teams constantly ask whether an experience makes a customer feel understood or observed. There is a big difference.
When it comes to payments, transactions are processed through secure third-party partners; card details aren’t stored on our platform. Any data we use is focused on enabling the services customers are actively requesting. We want the experience to feel useful and seamless rather than intrusive.
“Long-term trust always takes priority over short-term gains.”
As the home services category becomes more competitive heading into 2026, which marketing trend or technology—such as AI, hyper-local targeting, or automation, do you believe will most strongly shape the next wave of growth in the Middle East?
From our perspective, the technologies that add the most value are simply the ones that make the experience feel easier and more reliable. AI is already central to how we approach marketing, from content generation and campaign optimization to bidding and experimentation.
We see the greatest impact when technology is used to remove friction—whether that’s helping customers navigate services, complete bookings smoothly, or improve how services are delivered overall.
However, human teams remain deeply involved. Every output goes through quality control, brand alignment, and cultural review. AI accelerates, but humans decide. As the category becomes more competitive, we believe growth will come from using technology to deliver a consistently dependable experience rather than from novelty alone.
“The real advantage lies in building systems where creativity, data, and decision-making work together at scale.”
Looking beyond 2026, the idea of the “autonomous home” is gaining momentum, where technology anticipates needs before they arise. How do you envision Justlife evolving from an on-demand marketplace into a more proactive, intelligent operating system for the home?
Looking ahead, we see the role of home services platforms gradually shifting from purely reactive to supportive and proactive. The future of home services is not just on-demand; it is anticipatory.
The idea of an “autonomous home” isn’t about removing human decision-making—it’s about reducing the everyday friction that comes with managing a household. With richer data and more advanced AI, services can increasingly align with routines, life moments, and preventive care rather than just last-minute requests.
From our perspective, that evolution means helping customers anticipate needs earlier. The goal is quiet coordination in the background, not complexity in the foreground.
For Justlife, this is about moving carefully. We want to use technology to make life at home feel easier and more organized, while staying grounded in trust and respect for how personal the home environment is. Ultimately, success is measured by how much uncertainty we remove from everyday life. As we see it,
“The real innovation is not visible AI. It’s when life at home simply works better.”
