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Over the last two weeks, we released two high-quality and high-texture founder story interviews that go deep into what it takes to build a sustainable business in Bangladesh. Caretutors, started as an academic tutoring platform, has expanded into becoming an everything tutoring platform, covering both academic and non-academic skills-based tutoring. Adroit Education runs a highly distinct education consulting service and mentorship program that has fundamentally changed how Bangladeshi students access top American universities.
Both businesses are largely bootstrapped. Both businesses are in the education space. Both businesses started out of personal problems and passion. Both businesses demonstrate what relentlessly resourceful means in business building.
Links are below. Happy Building. Enjoy!
Masud Parvez Raju started Caretutors in 2012 with 18,000 Taka, a 3,000-Taka website, and a handful of leaflets slipped inside morning newspapers delivered to Gulshan. He was 22 years old, a BBA student at IUB, and working part-time at an IT firm to supplement his living expenses in Dhaka, a city he had moved to only recently from Chittagong.
The problem he was trying to solve was unglamorous but real: the private tutoring market in Bangladesh was entirely unstructured. Parents couldn't find reliable tutors. Students couldn't find tuition. The intermediaries, agents, and tuition media were opaque, often unreliable, and occasionally risky. Mr. Raju thought technology could fix this. He wasn't sure how exactly. He was just certain the problem deserved a solution.
Thirteen years later, Caretutors is one of Bangladesh's most quietly consequential startups. The platform has over 450,000 registered tutors, more than 125,000 registered students and guardians, and operations spanning Dhaka and several divisional cities, with a growing international footprint serving Bangladeshi communities across the Middle East, North America, Europe, and Asia.
The company is profitable. It has been profitable every year since recovering from COVID. It got there largely without raising much external capital. Mr. Raju raised a small investment in 2017, has taken no significant outside investment since, and built the entire operation by staying lean, training people from scratch, and refusing to spend money he didn't have.
The company has also evolved in ways that reveal a maturing thesis. What started as an academic tutoring marketplace has expanded into twelve categories, Arabic language learning, music, dance, painting, gym training, coding, and more, and now encompasses four distinct service formats: home tutoring, group tutoring, online tutoring, and the recently launched Shadow Tutoring, designed for working parents who need a trusted person to spend extended hours with their child.
For anyone building in consumer markets in Bangladesh, thinking about marketplace businesses, or simply interested in what patient, trust-driven company building looks like in practice, this conversation has a great deal to offer.
Read the full interview.
Shahreer Zahan is the founder and CEO of Adroit Education, an education consulting service and mentorship program that has fundamentally changed how Bangladeshi students access top American universities. Since 2017, Adroit has helped students secure over $100 million in scholarships from institutions like Princeton, Stanford, MIT, and Yale, while maintaining a near-perfect success rate across eight years of operation.
What sets Adroit apart in Bangladesh's crowded education counseling market is its refusal to operate like a traditional agency. Adroit works exclusively with highly selective institutions that don't pay commissions and accept fewer than 3% of international applicants. The company deliberately turns away hundreds of applicants each year to maintain small cohort sizes of 50-60 students, prioritizing depth of mentorship over volume of placements. This approach has helped the company grow entirely through word-of-mouth without external funding or paid marketing, with 95% of students coming through referrals.
The conversation explores critical strategic decisions that enabled Adroit's growth: hiring team members who genuinely cared about students rather than just possessing skills, demystifying SAT preparation with consistent methodology, encouraging meaningful extracurriculars, and building a cohort system where students support each other. The conversation goes deep into Shahreer's personal philosophy on entrepreneurship: why passion for solving problems matters more than chasing money, how physical health through Muay Thai and long-distance running directly impacts business decisions, why nothing is absolute and continuous learning is essential, and how founders must accept they're not the center of the world.
If you are an entrepreneur, operator, or someone interested in the inner workings of venture building, this is a must-read.
Read the full interview here.
