Creators Blueprint: How four Dubai students are helping MENA creators own their income
Four students — three from Middlesex University Dubai, one from RIT Dubai — have built Creators Blueprint, an AI platform helping Middle East creators turn their audiences into income they actually keep. With 150 creators onboarded and not a dirham spent on marketing, the founders talk ownership, accountability and why the region’s creators were being underserved
04 September, 2026
TT
16
Most link-in-bio tools, Soniya Rajpurohit realised, are built to send people away. “A creator’s audience clicks through, lands on a page of links, and leaves. There is nothing at the end of the journey to actually buy.” Even when creators tried to sell, she found the setup was scattered: one tool for links, another for payments, another for bookings, and payments in particular can be challenging for creators in the region.
She had spent months talking to creators across Dubai, and the same story kept surfacing: people with real, engaged audiences still living campaign to campaign, dependent entirely on brand deals. “One month you might make Dhs11,000, the next month nothing, and you are back to waiting on someone else to decide you are worth their budget.”
That gap — audiences and expertise on one side, nowhere to sell it on the other — is the problem Creators Blueprint was built to close. The startup is the work of four students in Dubai: Malak Dabjan, studying an LLM in International Law and Human Rights; Soniya Rajpurohit, reading for a BA in Advertising, PR and Branding; and Lebohang Khasipe, an MSc student in Network Management and Cloud Computing, all three at Middlesex University Dubai alongside co-founder Abubaker, a master’s student at RIT Dubai.
Bootstrapped entirely in the emirate, the platform lets creators build and sell digital products, ranging from guides and playlists to planners and eBooks, from a single storefront, using AI to turn what they already know into something their audience can buy.
The engine is an AI layer that reads a creator’s Instagram presence, bio, recent posts, comments, the topics they return to, and combines it with answers from onboarding to suggest products likely to land. “The AI looks for areas where the creator already has knowledge, experience or trust with their audience,” explains Khasipe, who leads the technical build. A fitness creator fielding beginner questions might be prompted towards a starter workout guide, meal planner or eBook; the aim, he says, “is not to generate random ideas and hope one works,” but to connect what a creator knows with what their audience will actually pay for.
Crucially, the platform uses third-party AI models rather than proprietary ones. The value, Khasipe argues, is in the system built around them, and in keeping the creator in charge. He is candid that the feature is still in beta: AI output is never treated as ready to sell, and creators can review, edit or regenerate before publishing. He describes an ‘80/20 split’: AI does the heavy starting work, but “the creator still needs to add their own knowledge, experience, personality and final judgement.”
That insistence on creator control is not incidental; it runs to the heart of how the team thinks, and it is where Dabjan’s legal background reshapes the conversation. “If a creator spends years building their knowledge, audience and personal brand, we believe the technology supporting them should strengthen that ownership rather than dilute it,” she says. Her guiding test for accountability is disarmingly simple: “If we wouldn’t be comfortable explaining something clearly to a creator, should we be doing it in the first place?” On data and copyright, the principle is the same: “access should not mean ownership.” A creator connecting their profile, she stresses, does not hand their content over.
The early traction has come without a marketing budget. More than 150 creators have signed up, and the number Rajpurohit cares about most: more than 130 are actively selling, not just registering. “A signup means nothing on its own,” she says. “What tells us the product works is someone putting their own knowledge behind a price and having people pay for it.” The growth, she adds, came from conversations rather than campaigns: personal outreach, listening more than pitching, and a referral loop that “did more than any campaign could have.” Building with creators rather than for them mattered too — “people stay when they feel some ownership over what we are building.”
One result has become the team’s shorthand for what is possible: an early user who generated Dhs3,850 within 48 hours. The founders are careful not to oversell it. The figure is verified through Stripe, not self-reported: “every sale flows through it, and the creator sees their income on their own dashboard.” She sold a curated Spotify playlist, something her followers had long engaged with. “That is the honest lesson in it, more than the number,” says Rajpurohit. “It was not a huge production or a course that took months to build. It was an offering her audience already wanted from her.” The opportunity, she adds, will look different for every creator.
As Creators Blueprint eyes expansion across MENA, Dabjan is wary of the region being treated as monolithic. The team’s approach is deliberately jurisdiction-specific, treating regulation “as part of product design rather than something sitting separately in a legal document.” For creators to build businesses on the platform, she says, “trust has to grow at the same pace as the platform.”
For now, the focus is on strengthening the foundation before scaling it. Much of what is hard to replicate, Khasipe argues, is not the AI, which most people can access — but the system built around it: CBStudio connects audience analysis, product ideas, eBook creation, design, storefront management, payments and email delivery in one platform.
The team has deliberately separated the key parts, so that if one external service fails, the rest is not heavily affected, and individual services can be improved or replaced without rebuilding everything. For scaling, the platform runs on cloud infrastructure with load balancing, rate limiting and separate processing for heavier AI tasks; on security, access to sensitive information is controlled, connections encrypted and payments handled through Stripe and Stripe Connect, so full card details are never stored by Creators Blueprint itself.
“The first 150 creators have allowed testing the platform properly, identify the weak points and improve the system,” says Khasipe. “We do not expect everything to be perfect immediately, but we are building the platform in a way that allows us to learn, adjust and scale responsibly.”
Built in Dubai, by students, for a creator economy the city is racing to lead — it is a blueprint, fittingly, still being drawn.
