This past week, we published some very very fascinating stories.
In The Generalist, we spoke with GoZayaan CBO Wafiul Haque, building a migrant-tech product for a challenging market while solving an immensely gratifying problem. Building products for users is tough. Building products for users who are consistently underserved, often exploited, and face unique challenges living far from home, that's a whole different ball game. We discussed everything from the origin and growth of Hometown to the philosophy of building great products and designing excellent operations.
In Business Deep Dive and Brand Story, we published a fascinating story exploring the fascinating and highly effective Hubxpert, a deep dive into BeshiDeshi’s inventory investment program, and a research length deep dive into the rise and future of the MFS industry in Bangladesh.
Link to everything below.
Building products for users is tough. Building products for users who are consistently underserved, often exploited, and face unique challenges living far from home, that's a whole different ball game. Not only do you face the usual challenges of product-market fit, scaling, and regulation, but you're often dealing with users who are vulnerable, lack trust, and have needs that existing solutions don't address.
Today, we're diving into a conversation that gets right to the heart of building for an incredibly important, yet frequently overlooked, user segment: migrant workers. These individuals send billions of dollars home annually, a crucial economic pillar for Bangladesh, yet their access to easy, reliable, affordable travel and financial services is often dismal. They face unnecessary hassles, opaque systems, high costs, and exploitation when managing their travel and finances.
In this fascinating conversation, Wafiul Haque, Chief Business Officer at GoZayaan and the force behind Hometown, shares his journey and the insights gained from building a product for this segment. Hometown, an initiative of GoZayaan, is a platform specifically built for migrant workers, starting with essential services like flight bookings and remittances. Mr. Haque recounts his path from early career experiences to finding his calling in the startup world. He details the origin of the Hometown, which came from recognizing a gap in services for migrant workers. The conversation provides a deep dive into the meticulous research and empathetic approach Hometown team used to understand the daily struggles and specific needs of migrant workers in markets like Singapore. Mr. Haque explains how these insights informed Hometown's product design philosophy, prioritizing extreme simplicity, using local languages, and introducing features like partial payments for flights to directly address user constraints.
Mr. Haque shares the raw details of:
If you're a product builder, a founder, or anyone interested in building for underserved markets and achieving impact alongside profitability, this interview is packed with a ton of actionable lessons. Mr. Haque’s experience with Hometown offers a rare look into the challenges and rewards of creating a product that works and also provides valuable lessons for operators in any sector.
Enjoy!
In the competitive landscape of technology and services, where talent mobility is high and the demand for skilled professionals constant, a company's culture often becomes its most valuable asset. Thus comes the adage “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Culture is constant. It is the context in which the rest of the things happen. Strategy needs to change and adjust every now and then. It is usually the content within a context.
Hubxpert, a firm specializing in CRM and digital transformation and a HubSpot Platinum Partner serving both international and local Bangladeshi companies, appears to have internalized this principle, crafting an organizational culture aimed not just at attracting expertise but, crucially, at retaining it and ensuring consistent, high-quality output.
In this article, we take a close look at Hubxpert’s culture and how it drives the company, helping it attract and retain talents and deliver high quality work to its customers. We explore how the company thinks about culture and translates that thinking into practice, its core values, how culture empowers its people to produce high quality work, and finally, we distill critical culture building lessons that founders and operators can learn from Hubxpert’s experience.
The most elegant solutions often emerge from the most pressing constraints. And nothing reveals constraints quite like a global pandemic.
In late 2020, as COVID-19 ravaged economies worldwide, Bangladesh's artisan sector faced a devastating double bind: unsold inventory piling up and no capital to buy raw materials for new production.
For most of these artisans, particularly women in rural areas, traditional financing remained inaccessible due to lack of collateral, formal documentation, or credit history.
This is where BeshiDeshi, an artisan products focused e-commerce platform founded by Zeeshan Khurshed Mazumder, saw an opportunity to redesign how capital flows to artisans in Bangladesh.
By this time, BeshiDeshi had been working with artisans in Bangladesh for more than two years. The company was intimately aware of the myriad challenges artisans face. It had evolved from a simple e-commerce platform into a comprehensive ecosystem to address many of these challenges—from mobile photography training that empowered artisans to capture professional product images using their phones, to design consultations that aligned craft with market trends.
When the company came to learn that artisans struggled to fulfill orders due to capital limitations, it decided to jump in to provide financial support to these artisans, which would eventually become its Inventory Investment Program.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has transformed our world with a speed that has surprised even seasoned pro-technologists. It has transformed industries and changed how we work and live. Industries that once seemed immune to digital disruption now find themselves utterly remade; established business models fall apart while entirely new economic sectors materialize almost overnight. AI has established a pervasive presence everywhere.
In boardrooms worldwide, machine learning capabilities take center stage in corporate strategies regardless of relevance or readiness. Nobody wants to be deemed technological laggards. Every company wants to be an AI company.
The rise of AI has transformed the venture-building landscape and monopolized the overall funding landscape, with AI companies commanding a staggering proportion of global investment across all sectors.
The pace of advancement in AI is relentless, which makes maintaining a meaningful understanding of the field a challenge. New breakthroughs are daily events.
One shortcut we have found to understand any field is through understanding the key players in that field. We believe the same strategy can be applied to AI, understanding this new landscape through knowing its cartographers.
The field of AI has been shaped by a diverse group of brilliant minds, from the early pioneers who laid the theoretical groundwork to contemporary researchers and industry leaders driving its rapid advancement and application. From Alan Turing's foundational work on machine intelligence to Sam Altman's controversial leadership of OpenAI, from the "Godfathers of Deep Learning" to the emerging voices advocating for ethical guardrails, these are the figures shaping a technology that increasingly shapes our world.
Understanding these key individuals and their contributions can help us grasp the evolution and future direction of AI. In this article, we take a stab at that as a way to understand the AI revolution and its future.
bKash, valued at over $2 billion dollar in its last funding round, is Bangladesh’s first and only tech unicorn. The MFS company posted a profit of Tk 315.77 crore in 2024, a staggering 67% year-on-year increase. By all means, the company is just getting started as the MFS, the industry it operates in, is also just getting started.
The Mobile Financial Services (MFS) industry in Bangladesh has experienced remarkable growth, becoming an indispensable component of the country's financial ecosystem, expanding the formal financial industry and driving the digital economy.
Since its inception in 2011, MFS has evolved from facilitating basic money transfers to a wide range of financial transactions. It has also seen the ballooning of its user base, exceeding 200 million registered customers. A vast network of agents that partly enable the entire ecosystem has created a unique phenomenon.
Key players like bKash, Nagad, and Rocket dominate the market.
The regulatory framework established by Bangladesh Bank has been instrumental in guiding this growth. While the existing regulatory regime has played an important role in ensuring consumer protection and compliance, it has also stifled innovation and competition in some instances.
Technological advancements, particularly the increasing use of smartphones and mobile applications, alongside the continued relevance of USSD-based services, have played a significant role in shaping the industry's trajectory.
Despite its successes, the MFS industry in Bangladesh faces challenges such as agent network management, security concerns, customer education, and the need for greater interoperability.
While several major providers compete for market share, many industry insiders want to suggest that there is a lack of meaningful competition in the industry.
Looking ahead, the future of MFS in Bangladesh is promising. The market has room for further growth, MFS players are continuously expanding their service offerings, and new trends like digital banking will likely create new opportunities.
In this report, we take a stab at offering a comprehensive overview of the current state of the MFS industry in Bangladesh, its historical development, key players, regulatory framework, market dynamics, technological infrastructure, challenges, competitive landscape, and future outlook.
