Salman Ali, Founder and CEO, Pricekoto.com
Be ready to do everything, from the role of a peon to CEO. Building a company from scratch is nothing sort of a grand job. It will take everything you have got to build one. The second thing is: focus more on the product and not on marketing.
[su_divider top="no" divider_color="#adacab" link_color="#edde29" size="1"][/su_divider]
A.M.M Habibul Mustafa, Co-founder, Khaas Food
Building a company takes an endless supply of passion and hard work. You will face a lot of hurdles and then there will be social and peer pressures. Our parents and relatives often ask ‘what are we doing after getting a BBA degree from Dhaka University. But if you are passionate, then hard work will not be painful for you in shaa Allah. And then make sure that you are working as a team. Create an environment where your people will feel at home and love to work.
We are not in this business for money alone. We are solving this problem because we are passionate about this problem and we understand the magnitude of the importance of pure foods in our lives. We believe this to be a noble act and important work for our next generation.
Being said that, there will be challenges and hardships but if you continue working hard and stay true to your customers and yourself things should get better.
For now, we want to make Khaas Food the ultimate destination for adulteration free, pure food products. We plan to add more items in the coming days so that our customers can get all their food products from us.
[su_divider top="no" divider_color="#adacab" link_color="#edde29" size="1"][/su_divider]
Sidrat Talukdar, Maverick Studios
People around you are very important: your partners, support group, and mentors. Having the right partners can take you far. If you get the opportunity to work with people who you respect, you should be grateful for it and should not waste it.
Having a solid set of partners is almost the cheat code to building a successful company.
Give your 100% but don’t lose track of the rest of your life. If you start a business and it fails, it is not the end of the world.
In short, believe in yourself, find the right partners, focus on fundamentals, do good work, and never stop learning.
[su_divider top="no" divider_color="#adacab" link_color="#edde29" size="1"][/su_divider]
Have confidence in yourself but never let it dictate how you make decisions and how hard you work. Try not to prioritize short-term goals in exchange for long-term ones.
[su_divider top="no" divider_color="#adacab" link_color="#edde29" size="1"][/su_divider]
Learning is key to success and you can’t overstate the importance of learning in business and life. There is a widespread misconception that making money is easy in hosting business, which is wrong. The provider must know the technicalities first before offering service. This is a service business. Like every service business, it is extremely tough to satisfy your customers.
Be patience and make sure that you are offering best possible service to your customers.
[su_divider top="no" divider_color="#adacab" link_color="#edde29" size="1"][/su_divider]
Hard work is the key to everything and there is no other route to success. I used to work and work and then felt that I am not working enough. The level of work you put on your venture is equal to the passion you have.
[su_divider top="no" divider_color="#adacab" link_color="#edde29" size="1"][/su_divider]
Probably the biggest lesson for us was that we really followed the “lean startup” approach, and it worked really well. We made a big effort to try to understand our customers and their problems, including spending a lot of time “in the field” in rural areas, and we changed our product and business model radically during those first few months in response to what we were hearing from our customers and experiencing in the field.
I would advise fresh entrepreneurs not to spend too much time writing a business plan or running after angel investors or doing marketing and self-promotion, but to just go out there into the real world and test a prototype with some real customers.
Build a “minimum viable product”, test it, measure, learn and iterate until you find the winning formula. Then the business plan will write itself, the investors will come to you and the media will promote you.
[su_divider top="no" divider_color="#adacab" link_color="#edde29" size="1"][/su_divider]
A startup needs to concentrate on revenue generation and not on investments.
Secondly, doing an online business in Bangladesh requires a lot of patience. You’ll stumble a thousand times, but you have to stand up every time. You will also need someone to support in the hard times. It’s hard to have someone like that but never give up. And if you do find someone like that, keep that person.
[su_divider top="no" divider_color="#adacab" link_color="#edde29" size="1"][/su_divider]
Muhammad Abdul Matin Emon, Doctorola
From my first business, I learned that it is important to have product-market fit. I did not understand it well back then but I do understand it now. That was what went wrong with my business. The market was not ready for what I was making. That was one of my most important lessons.
Partners. I had the opportunity to work with partners who were great people. But in the partnership business, you have to balance between partnership and personal relationship. I was not capable of doing that in my previous business which eventually hurt all of us.
Before Doctorola when we were working on Freelancing platform, we did not foresee the huge investment requirement of the project. We underestimated the challenges and overestimated the potentials. That was a big lesson.
