Find the collection of last week’s excellent reading from Future Startup.
Dipty Mandal is not your typical founder or CMO. She left a cushy job at Bangladesh’s largest telecom company, Grameenphone, to co-found PriyoShop, a B2B e-commerce platform transforming the MSME retail supply chain and finance landscape in Bangladesh. With a BBA and MBA in Marketing from the University of Dhaka, she brings a sharp understanding of customer psychology and a knack for building systems that scale.
PriyoShop originally started as a B2C platform but pivoted during COVID-19 to tackle a bigger problem: the fragmented supply chain for Bangladesh’s 5 million mom-and-pop shops. Today, with 29 hubs, 276 partnered brands, and a recent $1.5 million raise, the company is on a roll.
In this interview, we dive into Ms. Dipty’s path to entrepreneurship, how she built a lean marketing operation from scratch, and the lessons she’s learned about balancing structure with creativity. We explore how PriyoShop’s marketing speaks to both price-sensitive shopkeepers and global brands like Unilever, using trade marketing and word-of-mouth to onboard 150,000 retailers.
Ms. Dipty shares practical insights on how PriyoShop's marketing operation works, how the company launches new hubs, designs strategies, crafts positioning and communication messaging, explains her approach to building a marketing operation from scratch, and staying agile in a fast-changing market. She also opens up about launching PriyoShop’s own brand, her productivity methods, and lessons from her journey so far.
The numbers tell a compelling story. According to UNESCO data, 52,799 Bangladeshi students studied abroad in 2023, with the United States being the top destination (8,524 students), followed by the UK (6,586) and Canada (5,835).
This represents significant growth from earlier years, with the number of students going abroad having tripled over the past 16 years.
Behind these statistics lies an industry that barely existed two decades ago: education consulting.
Companies like Adroit Education, which sends students from Bangladesh to Grade A universities in the US and Canada, Mentor, and many other consulting agencies, represent a new category of business built on a simple premise: helping middle and upper-middle-class families navigate the complex world of international admissions.
These firms run nine-month to year-long programs, essentially functioning as bridge-builders between Bangladeshi students and foreign universities.
The business model is straightforward and profitable. Agencies charge substantial fees—often $2,000 to $5,000 per student—for services ranging from university selection to visa processing.
The market has responded accordingly. Some firms now operate 10 branches across Bangladesh, with additional offices in Pakistan, Indonesia, and Arab countries. It's a gold rush of sorts, except the gold is information and guidance.
But there's a problem lurking beneath this success story, one that Fazle Rabbi, COO of Hubxpert, sees repeatedly when consulting agencies approach his firm.
Despite healthy revenues, these businesses are hemorrhaging money through operational inefficiencies that would be unthinkable in other industries.
We've been following Geeky Social since its early days. The Dhaka-based digital marketing agency that started small and weathered every storm the market threw at them. The company has just reached its 10th anniversary, a milestone that deserves recognition in Bangladesh's unique business ecosystem.
To that end, we recently hosted Md Saimum Hossain and Mahadi Hasan Sagor, the duo behind Geeky Social, to share their unfiltered story and lessons they learned from the journey. We invited one of our favorite founders, Talukder Mohammad Shabbir, Founder and CEO of Green Grocery, to host the conversation.
What emerged is a fascinating and equally practical conversation on the art and science of building enduring businesses, including struggles to expect, mistakes to avoid, and strategies that usually work. I have a fascination with things and organizations that endure.
Endurance is not easy. Most businesses don't make it past year two. Fewer still reach a decade. So when a company survives for ten years, there are lessons worth learning.
More importantly, if we take the idea of “lindy effect” into consideration, how long an idea or an organization has been around also indicates the future longevity of the same.
In this article, we pull together the key lessons derived from the conversation with Mahadi Hasan Sagor and Md. Saimum Hossain. An edited transcript of the conversation will follow soon.
We have been interviewing founders and operators on building enduring enterprises for years now. Each of these interviews come with practical insights and deep wisdom. We have recently started going through some of these interviews in groups in the hope of finding common patterns.
As we explore these detailed interviews with some of Bangladesh's successful entrepreneurs, our assumption comes true, a distinct blueprint for building sustainable businesses emerges. A deeply ingrained combination of personal philosophies, strategic operational principles, and a commitment to people.
Business is hard anywhere in the world. It is more so in the challenging landscape of Bangladesh. It means founders need much more than capital. Looking closely at the stories of these founders show that enduring companies are built on a foundation of character as much as capital.
Community-based tourism has been the development world's favorite solution for decades. The pitch is always the same: instead of building resorts that benefit investors, create tourism that directly empowers local communities. Let villagers be the guides. Have artisans sell their crafts to visitors. Keep the money in rural areas where it's needed most.
The concept sounds perfect. The execution rarely works.
Visit any community tourism project and you'll find the same pattern. A well-meaning NGO, government agency, or young startup sets up village homestays and cultural experiences. Initial enthusiasm from both communities and visitors. Media coverage about authentic travel and rural empowerment. Then, slowly, the problems emerge.
The village guides lack professional training and struggle with language barriers. The homestays can't maintain consistent service standards. Tourists complain about poor organization and unreliable logistics. Bookings decline. The project survives on donor funding for a few years before quietly shutting down or becoming a token program that processes a handful of visitors annually.
The fundamental issue isn't a lack of goodwill. It's operational complexity. Community tourism requires connecting rural producers to urban markets, maintaining quality standards across dispersed locations, managing logistics in areas with poor infrastructure, and balancing authentic experiences with commercial viability. Most organizations attempting this have either community relationships or business capabilities, but not both.
The few projects that achieve modest success remain small and local. None has scaled beyond regional impact. After decades of attempts, community tourism exists mostly as pilot programs and donor-funded experiments.
In November 2024, BRAC entered this graveyard of good intentions with Otithi. The name means "guest" in Bengali, carrying cultural weight—in Bengali households, a guest brings blessings to the home. The symbolism is intentional: tourism should benefit everyone involved.
Three months in, something unusual is happening.
At 3 AM, the development team discovered that an AWS access key — inadvertently exposed by being committed to a public repository — had been compromised by cryptocurrency miners, resulting in an unexpected $30,000 charge within just a few days.
"This is a real case," explains Mohammad Mizanur Rahman, CTO of Brain Station 23, sharing an incident that illustrates why cloud transformations often fail despite sophisticated technical planning.
And this type of incident is unfortunately common in organizations that overlook the human and organizational side of cloud security.
The problem wasn't inadequate security tools or lack of technical knowledge, it was the gap between security best practices and organizational behavior under pressure. The breach could have been prevented with proper access controls, but like many organizations, they had granted full privileges, which while seemingly a minor innocuous decision, came with huge security risk.
For Brain Station 23, cases like these have become proof points driving its philosophy: cloud transformation success depends not only on technical tools but also on aligning processes, behaviors, and governance. This blend of security-first thinking, technical depth, and organizational awareness ensures clients avoid such costly pitfalls.
After nearly two decades of software development and over seven years as an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, Brain Station has developed deep understanding about why transformations fail and built capabilities specifically designed to prevent these common pitfalls.
