This week’s newsletter features five excellent reads.
In The Art of Enterprise, we release a fascinating long-form interview with JoulesLabs founder Arifur Rahman Naim. Naim bhai opens up about his path to entrepreneurship and building JoulesLabs, his thoughts about building enduring institutions, the reality of building a services business in Bangladesh, the hard-earned wisdom of finding the right co-founder, and much more.
In the business deep dive, we have profiles of Waffle Up, a Singapore-anchored fast-growing food-tech QSR brand, with operations and R&D executed primarily from Bangladesh, and a deep dive into Pran RFL’s growing retail dominance.
Waffle Up is a fascinating company for several reasons. The company operates 16 waffle outlets across Bangladesh and Singapore and claims to have sold over a million waffles since launching in 2021.
For Pran RFL’s growing retail empire, the group now operates over 3,000 retail outlets across the country under seven different brands. This story offers revealing insights into this new phenomenon.
In insight, we have two stories.
On Building Enduring Businesses: Practical Lessons and Wisdom from 13 Founders, we explore a bunch of our past founders' interviews in the hope of finding common patterns of what it takes to build enduring businesses in Bangladesh. As we explore these interviews, a distinct blueprint for building sustainable businesses emerges. Read the article to learn more.
In another insight story, we look into the growing demand for air fryers in Bangladesh as households face ongoing cooking gas shortages and rising liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) prices. Many consumers now see air fryers as a necessary household item rather than an optional gadget.
Links to everything below.
Arifur Rahman Naim didn’t follow a traditional path to entrepreneurship. Growing up in a village near Kuakata in Bangladesh's Barishal division, he experienced a childhood immersed in nature, rivers, canals, and wetlands, far removed from the digital world that would later become his profession. From studying at a madrasa that produced exceptional results to dropping out of university, from working freelance jobs to founding JoulesLabs in 2017, Naim’s journey has been marked by intentional learning, strategic networking, and a commitment to building something meaningful.
Demand for air fryers in Bangladesh is increasing as households face ongoing cooking gas shortages and rising liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) prices. The electric kitchen appliance is becoming a practical option for families looking for reliable ways to cook daily meals. Many consumers now see air fryers as a necessary household item rather than an optional gadget. The trend reflects a wider shift toward electric cooking as gas supply remains uncertain in many parts of the country. Households are gradually adjusting their kitchens to rely less on gas and more on electricity for regular cooking needs.
Generally speaking, global food brands follow a somewhat predictable pattern. American burgers scale from the United States. Italian pizza chains trace their lineage to Naples or Rome. Japanese ramen concepts expand from Tokyo. The brand story and the business headquarters align with the product's cultural origin, and both typically sit in developed markets with established consumer credibility.
There are examples where this pattern breaks, where the cultural origin of the food is maintained, but the scale is done by a third brand.
Nando's built a global chicken brand from South Africa by leveraging Portuguese-Mozambican peri-peri heritage; the product had cultural credibility even if the company didn't originate in a traditional power center. Jollibee grew from the Philippines by targeting diaspora communities first, then expanding to mainstream markets once it had proven unit economics and operational systems.
These exceptions tend to share common traits: they either carry authentic cultural credentials for their product category or they prove the model in underserved markets before attempting direct competition with established players.
Waffle Up is designed differently and tries to borrow from both the standard pattern and these exceptions. It's a Singapore-anchored food-tech QSR brand, with operations and R&D executed primarily from Bangladesh. It's a deliberately structured global brand that decouples legal domicile and brand positioning from operational execution. IP and customer perception anchor in Singapore. Product development, technology infrastructure, and talent concentration happen in Dhaka. The model inverts the traditional assumption that global consumer brands must be built where they're headquartered.
We have been interviewing founders and operators on building enduring enterprises for years now. Each of these interviews comes 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 shows that enduring companies are built on a foundation of character as much as capital.
PRAN-RFL Group, one of the largest conglomerates in Bangladesh, is not only huge in scale, it is a relentless company. The company manufactures 8,000+ products across more than 100 brands.
More fascinating is the breakneck speed with which the company introduces new products and initiatives. Every week it experiments with something new.
However, a still more fascinating fact is how the company has quietly built an extensive retail footprint across Bangladesh over the last several years, amassing a growing distribution power.
Today, PRAN operates 3,000+ retail outlets across more than seven distinct retail brands. It has essentially created a parallel retail universe where it controls every touchpoint, every display, every customer interaction. Complete control over how its products reach customers.
PRAN has been working on this effort for a while with mixed success. Over the years, it has refined its strategy. This time around, it is doing it at a much larger scale, and it seems to be succeeding.
This expansion carries strong strategic implications for the company. It strengthens its vertical integration, provides greater control over distribution, helps gather unique and rare market insights, allows it to run new product experiments with greater control, and improves margins.
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That’s all for today. Thank you for reading.
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