This week’s FS newsletter is packed with fascinating reads. After a long time, FS interviews are making a comeback. This newsletter features 03 brilliant new interviews with 03 world class operators.
To top it off, we have excellent articles on Time Traveler, a small but growing retailer selling travel goods and gears in Dhaka, and on how artisans products ecommerce company BeshiDeshi has built a growing mobile-first e-learning platform for artisans.
All links are below. Enjoy!
Bangladesh's travel goods and gear market is mostly broken. There is a small formal market but the vast majority of the market operates informally where customers hunting for trekking boots or camping equipment face days of wandering between informal shops. No inventory systems. No quality standards. Handwritten bills. Products appear randomly in WhatsApp groups, and disappear without warning.
Yet underneath this dysfunction lay a massive emerging opportunity. While the current market for travel gears may not be that big, it is changing. The travel market has been growing steadily, but the gear ecosystem remains stuck in the past.
Three travel aficionados saw the problem clearly during a frustrating gear-hunting experience in late 2023. Their solution became Time Traveler, now Bangladesh's one of the few professionally operated outdoor and travel goods and gears retailers.
Started with a tiny outlet and a part-time operator, the company became profitable within three months. Over the last one year, it has seen consistent growth, expanding its offering and building a community of loyal customers.
BeshiDeshi started in 2018 with a simple mission: connect Bangladesh's skilled artisans with customers through a digital marketplace. From a small operation, the company has come a long way. Today, the platform hosts over 30,000 products across 200+ categories from 5,000+ artisans/product partners. But the team quickly realized that building a platform wasn't enough. Many artisans were not fully ready for e-commerce. They were talented but lacked basic skills in pricing, product presentation, photography, packaging, or even understanding online orders.
The BeshiDeshi team found themselves constantly teaching artisans basic digital commerce skills over the phone, in small in-person sessions, whenever problems arose. That need eventually pushed the company to launch an e-learning initiative so artisans could learn anytime, anywhere, in a format that works for them. That initiative has now grown into a full-fledged online learning platform for artisans in Bangladesh.
Wahid Choudhury is the founder and CEO of Kaz Software, a Dhaka-based software outsourcing company serving clients across the world. Founded in 2004, Kaz has become one of the most fascinating companies in its vertical.
In this second part of our conversation (read part one here), we go deeper into the history, operational dynamics and the making of Kaz. Most of all, we try to understand how Kaz has become the company it is today, what makes it tick, and what we can learn from its journey.
Md Sajedur Rahman is a Director of Star Tech Ltd, where he has helped the company build its e-commerce business from scratch into the dominant player in the IT products e-commerce vertical in Bangladesh.
In this fascinating conversation, we discuss how Star Tech has built a dominant e-commerce business and how it navigated the challenges of the innovator’s dilemma. We talk about the early days of Star Tech’s e-commerce operation, the evolution of the business, strategies that worked, the state of its operation today, operational dynamics, and future plans. We also discuss how Sajed operates, stays productive, and leads.
Marc Thiry is the Director of Operations at GoZayaan, one of the most fascinating travel tech companies in Bangladesh. Before joining GoZayaan, Marc built a diverse career spanning multiple countries and sectors. He began at Jumia, a Rocket Internet company in Africa, where he mastered the fundamentals of operational management. He then moved to France to join Mano, an e-commerce startup, where he saw the company scale from a small team to an organization of hundreds. His journey eventually brought him to Bangladesh, where he honed his expertise at Sundora, a beauty and cosmetics company, and Maya, a healthcare startup, before landing at GoZayaan.
In this conversation, we explore Marc's journey to where he is today, his work as Director of Operations at GoZayaan, how operations work at an online travel agency, the science and art of running excellent operations, and the lessons he's gathered from working and living across continents.
