What Does Purpose Bring to the Table That Strategy Can’t?

I didn’t set out to build a startup. I just wanted to buy an apartment and not feel like I was getting hustled by agents with their own agendas.

It was the spring of 2022, and I was ready to purchase my second investment unit. Property prices had started to rebound after Covid-19, and I was ready to pounce — but I couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

Licensing rules had loosened post-Covid, and it felt like every other person in Dubai had become a property agent overnight. On top of that, a massive surge in fake listings on property portals made the search experience so disorienting that even I, born and raised in Dubai, felt like I’d just landed in the city. According to Khaleej Times, 54% of readers on a poll with over 2,800 responses experienced bait-and-switch tactics with real estate agents.

At the same time, my now co-founders Saleem and Nicole were facing similar issues. Saleem, a friend who I’d met in London, was moving to Dubai from Abu Dhabi for a legal gig, and he ran into the same pain points trying to rent an apartment. We sat down with my sibling Nicole, who was always passionate about real estate, and thought: How can we use our experience to simplify this journey? That question soon became Sakani, and the three of us became co-founders.

Those early frustrations with unlicensed agents and fake listings weren’t just personal — they revealed a systemic problem. And from that problem came our purpose. We didn’t want to build just another property portal. We wanted to reimagine the experience of interacting with listings and agents — one grounded in trust and transparency. Those two values still guide us today.

So what does purpose bring to the table that strategy can’t? Here’s what we learned.

Related: How Defining Your Purpose Can Help Attract the Right Clients, Build Culture and Drive Success

1. Fuel — For when your plan breaks down

There will be decisive moments in your startup journey — the kind where a major obstacle forces you to choose: climb, go around or give up entirely. The strength of your purpose plays a big part in which path you take.

I remember one of those moments clearly during Sakani’s beta launch. The property platform space had a reputation, littered with false starts and fizzled-out promises. Investors were wary. The industry was skeptical. We were the new kids on the block, daring to try again. The easy path would have been to walk away, and many expected us to. But our purpose — to transform the real estate experience — became our fuel.

According to Harvard Business Review, purpose plays two important strategic roles: redefine a company’s playing field and reshape their value proposition — and that’s exactly what we did. What started as a mission to clean up listings is evolving into a growth engine for brokerages — saving time, reducing costs and freeing teams to focus on quality over chaos.

2. Empathy — To understand your customers better

Empathy is one of the most powerful tools in your startup toolkit. In our early days, we ran design thinking workshops with a few of our personas, but we were missing a key one: the real estate agent. I remember our early attempts to map their pain points. We tried, but we’d barely scratched the surface. Thankfully, purpose kept us moving.

We were determined to understand this persona on a deeper level. So we built real relationships, asked better questions and ran more workshops. It was like the iceberg that sank the Titanic — what we could see was only a fraction of what lay beneath. Understanding our customers helped us understand how to serve them better. And when you start adding real value, success becomes a low-hanging fruit.

Related: Why Empathy is Crucial to Your Success in the Business World

3. Clarity — For when decisions get muddy

As a founder, you make 100 decisions a day — some small, some big and some you can’t walk back. We’ve already faced thousands: defining our strategy, choosing what to build, figuring out who belongs on the team or what to include in a pitch deck. To make those calls effectively, you need clarity, and clarity comes from purpose.

After I pitched at the first REES event — an initiative launched by the Dubai Land Department to develop a global roadmap for real estate technology — I met a lot of local and international peers over coffee. One of them offered an API, packed with listings scraped from another platform. I asked them just one question: Will my customers trust me if I take their listings without their consent? I stuck to our core values — trust and transparency — because that was the very problem we set out to solve.

Startups are messy. Strategy changes, markets shift and plans fall apart. But purpose, when it’s real, holds. It’s what gives you the resilience to keep building when things go sideways. It sharpens your decision-making when the options blur. And it’s what turns customers into believers and teammates into true co-builders.

So if you’re in the thick of building, don’t start with what you’re building. Start with why. Then keep coming back to it. Because in a world full of pivots, pressure and noise, purpose is what cuts through.