Awarded the
“Rodinstar” Post
of the week!!
This is my story of building my startup in Pakistan.
I grew up in a small town of Punjab. Life got me to a good university in Lahore for education (BS Physics). While studying I started learning internet especially social media, and was helping few small businesses use it.
During vacation in May 2010, I went to my town to spend time with family. Every evening I used to visit a Panchayat (local meeting in town). It was time when Facebook was blocked in Pakistan. So there were three guys in their 50s discussing the news story. Though none of them ever used Facebook or even Internet, they were blaming Facebook. This is when I interrupted the discussion, and the idea of a startup was born.
“Facebook is not responsible for blasphemous content, it is just a social platform.” I said to them
“Young man, who you are.” Asked one of them.
Me: “I use internet, I know Facebook, and you?”
“I make shoes, hand made shoes.” He replied.
So over the next few days I visited their unit, where a group of 5 craftsmen was making handmade shoes. I felt proud to see what they were doing in my hometown. They would use almost no machinery to make different kind of footwear for men.
But everything wasn’t going well. Their business was/is getting down because of limited resources, decline of demand in local market. I offered some help, but we couldn’t do it. I went back to college.
But this time, instead of attending classes, I started reading Forbes, HBR and interesting business books from library. Finally I had to drop out of college, as I wasn’t attending any class at all. But, a new person had born inside me. I started learning about how people are building companies around the world. I would spend hours on computer, making notes of how organizations like Zappos, Google and TED are impacting world in different ways.
All this lead me to either join a creative gang, or start something new. I followed the second and riskier thought. Though I didn’t have much practical experience of startup, but I said to myself “it would go fine.”
I started working of the idea of helping craftsmen in my hometown, and making that a sustainable business. My plan was to build an online shoe store. We named it HOMETOWN, as the company was started from my hometown.
I went back to my town, met with shoe master M Hussain, and started research on how we can get start. It was clear to me that we needed some initial capital to get start. So I started a job to manage some cash and was also applying at various social businesses fund. Meanwhile, I called my friend Sidra Qasim to join me as co-founder. Thankfully, in Nov 2012, we managed to win a seed fund of $10k from P@SHA Social Innovation Fund.
We moved to Lahore to get in touch with designers, find good quality raw material, and building website etc. Both of us were living in hostel, and using KFC as our office. KFC people would let us work there and had power in Load Shedding.
On the other side, back in town, Hussain was working on shoes. Our major goal was to make best possible footwear within resources. Something which we would want for ourselves and can proudly tell other people buy and use it.
The hard work of four months, collaboration with craftsmen resulted in making shoes, which were highly comfortable, light weight. We thought, now is the simplest part: SELLING. Which of course turned out to be the most difficult.
Spending 60% money on inventory, left very little money for marketing and operations. So I used all of the best free services to build website and communication tools (mostly Google).
On June 06, we launched our online store.
Suddenly (but not so surprisingly) we were out of cash. Everyone was recommending us to use Google and Facebook Ads. But how could we do that. Instead of taking loan for marketing budget, we planned to interact with people, both online and offline. We sold our first shoe on 5th day of launching our website. I wrote a hand-written letter to our customer, I still write one for each new customer.
Honest communication, delivering on promises, and most importantly showing human side of our business helped us increase both our traffic and sales. One of our customers (or friend as we call them) from Paris paid us more than the price, because he wanted to support us.
This was the all E-Commerce we were doing.
Like a local farmer’s market, instead of just transactional experience, we took it as an opportunity to interact with people who were coming to our website or meeting in person. It helped HOMETOWN grow organically.
Then we received an order from someone who’s email address was @google.com. OMG, we weren’t expecting such high-profile customers. I though we were over promising in our marketing communication.
We were afraid, what if we ship him our shoe and he wouldn’t like. So I and my co-founder discussed, let’s not ship shoes to him and apologize for being out of stock. But it was against our vision of ‘Being Human.’ So we finally shipped him our shoe, and he loved it. (Recently he bought another one for his brother on Christmas). People started giving examples of our communication.
In August 2012, Google and Punjab Government launched ‘Innovation Campaign’ where they featured HOMETOWN as an ‘Innovation Hero.’ We felt great. We started working hard, really hard.
Same time, we were applying at different startup accelerator like Y Combinator and AnglePad to name few. Of course, we didn’t make there.
Then fortunately, Govt of Punjab started its own Tech Incubator – Plan9. Like many other tech entrepreneurs from all over Pakistan, we applied and participated enthusiastically. HOMETOWN made it, along 10 others startup (out of ~500 applications). It is now over two months since we are here, we have got two new people in our team, a designer and programmer. Now working on to add more products, shifting on a better platform. The plan is to grow both our impact on our craftsmen and sales.
Most recently I got selected as Acumen Fund Pakistan Fellow, a prestigious leadership program to empower new leaders of Pakistan. 2013 is big year for me and HOMETOWN.
Building a startup is never an easy thing to do, no matter in which part of the world you live. It gets worse when there is no ecosystem at all, and services like YouTube, Facebook can be banned any time. When PayPal is not supported in your country and it takes you 2+ months to figure out payment solution and affordable global shipping.
But we have learned invaluable lessons from our mistakes and achievements. Hussain, who once was anti-Facebook, now use an Android Phone, laptop, email and has a Facebook account.
It is all about humans. Like you, like me.