Let's Furnish Founder and CEO Efaz Ahmed on bringing an idea to life, finding product-market fit, building a furniture rental platform in Bangladesh, and the importance of resilience in entrepreneurship
Ownership is dead. Today, we live in the ultimate world of uberization. We don’t own cars, we uber or Zoom for that matter if you are in India. We don’t own our designer clothes, we Rent The Runway. Sharing is in vogue. Consumers today increasingly prefer access over ownership helping redefine the world of consumption and commerce. This trend has slowly been gaining momentum in Bangladesh as well.
Efaz Ahmed, the founder and CEO of the Dhaka-based furniture rental platform Let’s Furnish, and his team at the forefront of this new trend in Bangladesh. Founded in 2017, Let’s Furnish is the first furniture rental platform in Bangladesh. Started as a scrappy startup, the company has evolved over the last two years. It graduated from the Grameenphone Accelerator Program of late and is in the process of closing its seed investment in the next few months.
In this interview, Mr. Efaz walks us through his path to entrepreneurship, talks about how Let’s Furnish came into being, its business today and its ambition going forward.
Interview Notes:
Efaz Ahmed studied biochemistry and his path to entrepreneurship is largely driven by his passion for doing new things and making a difference in the society.
He came from a family of businessmen, which obviously helped in terms of support and making the decision but what Efaz is trying to accomplish with Let’s Furnish is an entirely new thing for his family.
Let’s Furnish is a furniture rental platform based in Dhaka. The first of its kind platform was organically founded in 2017 by three founders. It took Efaz and his co-founders two more years to put everything together and finally launch the company. During these two years, they went through hundreds of rejections before finding their first furniture manufacturer who would agree to work with them.
Today, the platform does hundreds of renting every month and has 50+ furniture brands on its platform.
We discuss:
How Efaz and his co-founders came up with an idea of furniture rental business in Bangladesh
What went into building the initial operation of Let's Furnish ? How did you put together initial investment and other things to get started? Please walk us through what the first few months of your journey were like and challenges you faced.
How to build your prototype, test it in the market and validate.
How to manage your initial capital and put together resources to get started.
How to identify potential partners, reach out to them, and convert them.
How to validate your business model and then evolve with the demand of the market.
How Efaz and his team persisted through consistent rejections and eventually managed to on-board a large number of partners.
How Let’s Furnish approaches growth and how the company has managed to achieve almost 30% MoM growth in the past six months.
The challenges of being a founder and the importance of maintaining an open and consistent communication with your team.
Mohammad Ruhul Kader is a Dhaka-based entrepreneur and writer. He founded Future Startup, a digital publication covering the startup and technology scene in Dhaka with an ambition to transform Bangladesh through entrepreneurship and innovation. He writes about internet business, strategy, technology, and society. He is the author of Rethinking Failure. His writings have been published in almost all major national dailies in Bangladesh including DT, FE, etc. Prior to FS, he worked for a local conglomerate where he helped start a social enterprise. Ruhul is a 2022 winner of Emergent Ventures, a fellowship and grant program from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He can be reached at ruhul@futurestartup.com
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