Living in the present solves for the present, project X yrs out and think does my idea today build out a company?Build whats missing is a good add-on to, "build what others have missed".Randomly thinking of ideas alone, typically tends to lend to your filter bubbles and biases.
Entrepreneurship is some thing you learn by doing. If you are in uni, stop obsessing about taking a course. Instead find some thing that lets you try out doing some thing.Learn about how to come up with viable organic ideas that are not self evident by working with those who have
Messy and tedious are your friends, un sexy and boring as your scale. Find things others stay away from because they are perceived to be dull. Every thing doesn't have to be software dependent or related either, there are great opportunities in other areas too. Dont be misguided.
Have crazy ambition & growth mind set, focus on the ideas as some thing with multiple innings & aim for 1% growth daily. Move the needle on some thing hard every day before you go to sleep.Dont give up.Ideas without ambition are like working for some one n supplying them free
Speed to decision is your moat if nothing else is, park your ego, fail fast,do wrong & re-calibrate vs doing nothing & suffering from analysis paralysis.Find collaborators & mentors,former 2 give you perspective & the latter to give you direction. Be ruthless with quality not ppl
Cash flow is king, vc money is not, focus on things within your control, break even is your friend, just eye balls arent. You wont know till you try, beg borrow steal things you cant afford from the people you know. Networks are key, build as many as you can & use others rails
The easiest thing to do is ask,the worst that can happen is being turned down.Not is asking is criminal. Dont hire ppl u cant afford unless they partner with u, have 6 months of kitchen money & risk only what you can recover from, to live an other day vs not being able 2.
Dollar cost averaging may work in markets, but it typically doesnt when your own ship is sinking. Dont make metrics to appease your self. If you are dying, go out quickly. Adapt to the changing market around you to find sticky things. In a time where most ppl are WFH globally..
Think subscription, think of what you want coming to you vs what people will go out to get. Dont only think local, start from there, then regional and global. There is no shame in borrowing things that work else where & localize them or take localized ideas and take them global.
Think of FBA, D2C, Subscriptions, Local Products, Niche areas when you think beyond local. When thinking locally get out there to see whats happening and what you can effectively build a large business on. My fav eg these days is unit cost economics of things we consume daily
naheed.pk/shan-taaza-dha…
naheed.pk/naheed-dhania-… to similar product. Stores brand is 46p/G, branded is 90p/G.This is where you need to focus on. Slowly all the big brands are entering the "open" OEM branded space. Is there room to build your own brand/subscription for consumables?
Its never a bad idea to look at commodity products where; the differentiation is what you add to it, quality, speed to delivery, price, customer service. U likely cant over take Shans distribution over night, but you can pick regions, you can use the margin info to build ur brand
The dull the boring, the mundane the every day masalas are also ready for disruption if you look hard enough. Solve for some vectors not all. Target some ppl not all. Grocery shopping is one area to target. Given most large retailers have pricing data available,why not target it?
I have a long term belief, that most stores; price some loss leaders to build loyalty. People get driven into those store and they build volume based on margin sacrifice. Practice eternal. You have the power to help people make a grocery list per say in the app that U build, then
Show pricing for the same product across the top on & offline stores. If every one makes a list to start off with, you start capturing data on what people are looking to buy. That data is not only useful to you but many others,build scale in building the data vs selling just yet
Over time people can upload the list to you, see the best pricing every where, so if they have to make 4 trips to 4 locations to get the price, would they be incentivized to get a subscription or delivery box from you if u beat all other prices for the same products?
Price transparency is larger than you think. Capitalize on that vs trying to build yet an other disrupter in the distribution value chain. Be the small data person in a large data world, license ur data, let others burn VC money to fulfill the needs of others.Use other ppls rails
In this use-case product info is king but not god. Most of the info you need on pricing is a coefficient of publicly available data, your technical skills and the determination you have to break it down to small sets of data to solve for. Find a market and conquer it.
Identify the bread basket, pick the top 10 items in it and build for price transparency in those, slowly add others and solve this issue iteratively. You dont have to be in the product content business to find pricing. If there are 10 major stores nation wide, and u do 10 items
U can find 10 free lancers to visit the stores 2xweek & capture the pricing of the top ten items by store, same thing for online u can write a script to find the data. But do u care enough to solve this problem?Add one more vector to it, published govt rates and list them 2
Price comparison sites are great & in over supply for the mobile & other verticals in PK. A low key low budget system solves for mass market items if you compartmentalize the problem and apply small data vs trying to solve for every thing for every one.pbs.gov.pk/press-releases
finance.gov.pk/survey/chapter… both the urls are a good starting point. In Pakistan, the CPI(consumer price index) covers the retail prices of 374 items in 35 major cities and reflects roughly the changes in the cost of living of urban areas. Static info is easily available for any one
If you google CPI Items and their prices nothing dynamic of real value shows up. So isn't that a problem worth solving?Just being #1 on search has its benefits add other items of interest and you are solving for an unsexy boring business with small data if u just started with 10.
This is 1 of many things that need solving for in the absence of dynamic govt pricing or data. In high inflationary times U have the ability to be the partner of choice for millions of ppl.Will you build for it? @rebootdude @jehan_ara @Ash_Kalim @shahjahan_ch @ShahidM99 @SaadGH
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