CEO and Founder of bdjobs.com Fahim Mashoor talks about the story behind bdjobs and present scenario of the entrepreneurial platform in Bangladesh.
Q: At first we would like to know where you were born and brought up, and about your educational background.
Fahim Mashroor: I was born and raised in Dhaka. My father was a government service holder. I belonged to a middle-class family where I was brought up with middle-class values and economic conditions. There was no businessman in the family – our family was service-oriented. I passed my SSC from Ideal School & College and my HSC from Notre Dame College. I completed my honors and masters in economics from Dhaka College. After that, I did my MBA from IBA.
Q: When did the plan of BD Jobs come to your mind? When did you start thinking about it?
F Mashroor: It all started in 1999. At that time, the internet wasn’t available like it is today. So we didn’t have much idea about international affairs. But I had a feeling that the internet was going to become widespread and would bring about a lot of changes. But 15 years ago, at that time, Bangladesh was lagging far behind in this race – there was no broadband or mobile internet. I always had this urge to do something out of the box right from my student life. I was involved with many clubs and extra-curricular activities in my student life. I never wanted to do the traditional kind of thing. I wasn’t very much interested in doing a job – I always wanted to do something new, interesting and value-adding. I never wanted to do business only for money – I wanted to add value to society. That was kind of an inspiration for me.
In 1999, I worked for a local corporation for a year. I wanted to do something different at that time. Before that, while studying at IBA, I launched the first online economic journal in Bangladesh. My purpose behind it was to provide access to different economic data regarding Bangladesh. We had a big database and we updated it every month. There were also many business articles. But it was basically voluntary work. Our goal was to establish an authentic and credible source regarding the business and economics of Bangladesh. Unfortunately, we could not manage enough investment to create a sustainable business model. For this reason, we couldn’t continue it after 2 years. Around 1999, we thought of doing some sort of internet business. At that time, particularly the young generation was using the internet. At first, we thought of doing e-commerce. But the environment of Bangladesh at that time was not suitable for doing e-commerce.
We figured out that there was a demand for information in the market. At that time, looking for jobs was a tough thing to do and there was no job portal in our country. We saw that the main consumers of job portals – the job seekers had access to the internet. And it also had a good demand. I believed that we could add real value to society if we could sustain it. In our country, the main problem that job seekers face is that they don’t get the right information at the right time. At the same time, employers can’t always reach the right employee. So I thought that we could benefit the people if we could create a platform where the job seekers and the job providers could meet. So it was very exciting for us in terms of values as well as business.
But the main problem that we faced was, none of us came from a business family. So investment was a big issue. None of us could make it unless we made a group investment. We had a partner for technical issues. He did the programming. We also had a person for data entry. The other members also did their parts. We all were involved in full-time jobs.
In the first 3 years, we invested only 15 lakh taka, as we didn’t have much money at the time. These days a proper business investment starts with 1 or 2 crore taka, but we started with only 2 lakhs. We didn’t even have enough money to take an office. That’s why we started in my own living room. We also didn’t have money to recruit enough employees – we just had a few people for 5 or 10 thousand taka. We actually had to start with as minimum a cost as possible. That was the start of our journey. My background in economics and business management helped us to gradually develop our business plan. We made some pretty good assumptions. The main value of a business proposition is how realistic you make the assumptions. We knew that it was going to be a very long journey.
In any kind of internet business, you need to run a marathon for a good amount of time. You can grow up but it needs to have a slow start and long-term plans. Our assumption was, we would need at least 3 or 4 years to make any kind of revenue.
Our first target wasn’t revenue – it was creating a good service. That’s why we targeted the job seekers first. To do so, we collected all the job announcements from the newspapers and input those into our database. We represented all those data (mentioning their sources) on our website and tried to make it popular among the job seekers.
It was a tough job. It took some time to get popular among the job seekers. At first, we didn’t have enough budgets for marketing. We also couldn’t move to the employers as we didn’t have enough visitors.
But after 2 or 3 years, our user base increased. We used to have 4 or 5 thousand visitors each day – which was still very low. At that time, when we reached a certain level, we reached out to the employers. We proposed them to advertise their jobs on our site. This attracted more job seekers to the website.
After a few more years we started to charge the employees – but kept it to a minimum charge. Then, after 4 or 5 years we started profiting from the website. That means, we started to gain revenue from the 3rd year and started profiting from the 4th year. Then we didn’t have to look back anymore.
Q: An interesting thing is that, whoever plans to do any online business these days needs to be highly dependent on the social media platforms. But when you started, people were not that much active in social media platforms. How did you make it possible?
F Mashroor: Frankly speaking, we didn’t have enough budgets to do that level of marketing. We did some postering and handed out some leaflets. We mainly relied on word of mouth. We knew that, if we could provide a good level of service, people themselves would spread it with their word of mouth. We didn’t invest any sort of money in promotions like newspaper advertisements and those sorts of things.
Q: What were the basic barriers for starting this sort of business and attracting the clients?
F Mashroor: We didn’t have many barriers actually. We knew that this was going to be a long shot and we needed to be patient. Time was the only barrier – we spent months after months without any revenue. At one point, people started questioning our efforts. But we had the proper mindset to overcome it. And my family was also very supportive.
There was also sort of a cultural barrier – people didn’t want to take risk and do something out of the box. In foreign countries, if you have any idea, you can manage hundreds of investors to start a business on it. But we don’t have that sort of thing in our country. We had to do all of our investment ourselves. Nobody from outside invested for us.
Q: In recent times, several other job portals have emerged in the country. What makes BDJobs different?
F Mashroor: We have been in the market for 15 years; we cover 95% of the market. Within this time many other job portals have been initiated in Bangladesh. They have been around for the last 7 or 8 years. What occurred to me is that they are not very focused on this thing. They do it as a side business. As a result, their whole management and leadership are not fully devoted.
There were many startups. Most of them wanted to follow BDJobs. They wanted to provide the exact same service that we provided – there is no creativity in it. It’s true that we got the idea of a job portal from foreign countries. But the thing is that we localized it. We customized it according to our culture and job market.
But whoever came after us couldn’t provide the market with any new type of service dimension. That’s why the job seekers and the employers were not attracted.
Apart from all these, the most important thing that sets us apart is that we serve our customers with the highest level of professionalism. There are two types of users on our site – the job seekers and the employers. We don’t charge any fee to the job seekers. We only charge the job providers. Having said that, we provide the same level of support to both kinds of users. The job seekers and the employers both are a big asset to us.
Q: We heard that sometimes you organize trainings as well. Can you please shed some light on it?
F Mashroor: Yes. We have been providing this service for the last 7 or 8 years. At the moment we are the largest corporate training provider. Every month we provide training to about 500 or 600 professionals. We started around 2007 or 2008. We found out that the job seekers who seek jobs on our site have a demand for good professional training.
On this note, I would like to point out that, there are some significant differences between professional training and normal training. The graduates from different universities get academic training only. It’s mainly bookish knowledge. But there are some capabilities that they should acquire based on the context of Bangladesh. We saw that there were no training facilities for the people to provide them with these real-life capabilities. We came up with a unique model suited for our country.
We focused on two things: firstly, we started providing holiday training. You see, most of the people who seek training are professionals. They can’t have any training after office hours. So we started providing training on weekends. Secondly, we didn’t involve any trainer from an academic perspective. We appointed senior and successful professionals as trainers who had good practice in their own fields. They come here and share their practical knowledge rather than any bookish knowledge. Every month, we organize almost 30 to 40 pieces of training.
Q: As you are affiliated with trainings, you certainly have a good idea about the professionals and about the people who are training them and giving them directions. So, if you do a SWOT analysis on them, like what are their strengths and weaknesses, what do you find?
F Mashroor: In the last 5 to 10 years, our academic system has downgraded significantly for over- commercialization. Any degree is now nothing but a piece of paper. This problem is more acute in cases of private universities rather than public ones. Of course, there are some exceptions. But the quality of overall output from the universities is not good at all. They don’t have any basic foundational skills like communication skills, analytical skills, job ethics and other comprehensive skills. People develop these skills through academic practices. Most universities don’t bother about training their students with these skills.
Another thing is that they lack functional and applied skills. Say, if I hire an employee for accounting, he is expected to have the basic accounting skills. If I hire someone from computer science, he needs to know about basic programming. The graduates nowadays lack those applied skills too. They only acquire bookish knowledge. They memorize their books from cover to cover and that’s all. They don’t find the relationship between theory and practice. That’s why the general skills of the new generation compared to the old ones are not up to the mark. The few exceptions who have the skills do not join the mainstream economy. They are either moving to foreign countries or joining some MNC that can provide high salaries. But they are not joining the mainstream and emerging sectors like garments or IT. That’s why as a whole, the professional skills are very low. That’s why people come to us for their professional skills. But it’s really difficult for them for the time constrain.
Q: How is the training helping them in this regard? How much success are they getting after this training?
F Mashroor: They are obviously benefiting from the training, that’s why they are getting the training. But if you ask me whether if it is enough for them to be very professional in the field, the answer is of course not. It would have been much better if they had this training at their university level.
Q: According to you, what is the importance of entrepreneurs in the rise of the economy of Bangladesh? And what is the biggest obstacle they face?
F Mashroor: Well, Bangladesh is a nation of entrepreneurs. That’s why Bangladesh is the only country that revolutionized microcredit. Microcredit is based on entrepreneurship. Otherwise, Grameen Bank couldn’t have sustained. The whole world is working with the model invented by Grameen Bank. In that model, the lone is given to entrepreneurs. The challenge is, most of the entrepreneurs in our country are entrepreneurs because they don’t have any other choice. But in foreign countries, entrepreneurs are the best-qualified people.
In Bangladesh, either mediocre or low-mediocre people are getting into entrepreneurship. This is not bad totally. Of course, this has a good impact on the economy. Because the person is not sitting around because he didn’t get a job. He is earning his own income. But all of them are going into traditional sectors, as that is the thing they can do best. But in other societies, particularly in the last 10 to 20 years, technological entrepreneurship has emerged greatly. These non-traditional entrepreneurship brought about revolutionary changes in the economy of countries like India and China. But to do business in those sectors, you need the highest qualified people.
The problem in our country is, there are a lot of opportunities for the best people in our country in terms of job and in terms of moving outside the country, etc. So, they are taking those routes. They are either getting into a job or moving abroad for higher studies. Entrepreneurship is left to mediocre people. They are doing well. They are contributing to society by sustaining. But they don’t have the qualities required to elevate society to the next level. Unfortunate- ly, in the last 10 or 15 years, brilliant people having those qualities have not become entrepreneurs. Either they are doing jobs in MNCs or have migrated to developed countries.
Q: But as you mentioned before, there are no investors in our country to fund ideas. For example, if a student graduates from a very good institution and wants to do something for himself, he can’t get a proper backup. He also has constraints from the family and society. What is your opinion in this regard?
F Mashroor: Of course there are challenges. But it’s also true that there are people emerging in spite of these adversaries. China has a lot of entrepreneurs. There are a lot of rich guys over there. But in the beginning, the condition in China was just like ours. Although China is a bigger market and there are a lot more opportunities, there are also a lot more failures. The main thing about entrepreneurship is that you need to be prepared to face failures.
In our country, there are issues like lack of investors, social norms, and cultural values which frown upon entrepreneurship. The mindset of the students over here is set towards being a doctor or engineer right from the beginning. The majority of the people are very skeptical about business. Although this trend is changing nowadays, in my opinion, that’s not enough. There need to be more skilled people in this field.
Q: In the field of entrepreneur- ship, we can see a trend of “going with the flow” nowadays. That is, whenever someone becomes successful in something, there are a lot of other people following his footsteps blindly. For example, there were only a few online retail shops a couple of years back. But after one of them clicked, now there are thousands of retail shops. Don’t you think that this lack of innovation is a problem?
F Mashroor: Well, imitating is not a fault. There has to be an imitation. To speak the truth, the idea of BDJobs was inspired by some job portal in a foreign country. But you can’t blindly follow someone else’s footsteps. To be successful, you need to add some additional values. Add some new kind of dimensions. One might do e-commerce or an online store. But he can do something to differentiate his service from the others. There are a lot of ways. There are a lot of local issues that an entrepreneur can solve if he does the proper research. If he customizes his ideas and localizes them based on research, then there are possibilities to be much more successful. You can’t be successful just by following others.
Another problem in our society is that the students are concerned with academics only. For example, when a student of IT studies his subjects, he does not get any ideas on anything else. To him, IT is all about being good at programming. But he is totally aloof from the business values of IT. He does not study any business magazine or any economics magazine. He does not know anything besides his subject. He is not concerned about how IT is performing as a product. He can’t tell if he is solving a real problem of society, or if he is adding any real value in the lives of the people. He is only concerned with technical issues.
On the other hand, those who are students of the business discipline, think purely of the business values – they don’t care about the technical issues. So according to my opinion, if a person wants to do any IT business, he needs to have a clear idea of both the IT sector as well as the business sector. If not, there needs to be a group of people who can complement each other. For example, when we started, we had people from both sectors. This helped us take many good decisions.
Q: What is the mystery behind the success of BDJobs?
F Mashroor: There is no mystery actually. To me, there were 4 things. Firstly, we had patience. We knew that we were going to succeed in the long run. Secondly we believed in ourselves. We didn’t do it only for the money. We wanted to add some value. Even when Steve Jobs wanted to do something, he wanted to do something beautiful. It was a passion for me.
The third factor is our honesty. I think, the people over here want to achieve success in an easy way. People don’t treat honesty as a big asset of business. That’s why there are no businesses like Apple over here. But rather than that, there are MLM businesses. Dishonesty will bring you short term gain. But in the long run, you will fall. Trust is a big asset. To gain trust you need to be honest. You need to be honest not only to the clients but also to yourself. Finally, you need to have some sort of luck. There might be people who were more skilled than us, more devoted than us. But they didn’t get the right opportunity at the right time. For us, the time maybe was in our favor.
Q: The last question is that, where do you see BDJobs in the next 10 years? What are the surprising values that you plan to add?
F Mashroor: BDJobs has already come a long way. Already we are on a very good position in the market. So, in the perspective of BDJobs, we have covered only white-collar jobs till now. We only endorse jobs for the graduates. But in Bangladesh, the use of the internet has increased significantly. So, we are planning to move on to blue-collar jobs. We want to put up jobs for security guards, drivers, etc. This is because a huge portion of jobs in our country is blue-collar jobs.
Recently, we have launched a Bangla version of our site. We are also much more focused on the mobile phone platform. Because most of the people access the internet from their mobile phones – they can’t afford a PC sometimes.
So, in a nutshell, we want to keep adding value to society. There are a lot of people who can’t get a job because they are not skilled. Still, there are 5 lakh professionals from foreign countries in Bangladesh. Every year over 3 billion dollars are sent outside by these 5 lakh people. This money could have stayed in our country. The main reason is, people over here are not skilled enough. This situation is very acute in the garments sector. But the talented people from our country don’t want to join the garment industry – they want to sell cigarettes for a multi-national company. So we think, there is a lot more room to work for in regards to skill development. That’s why we have the training programs. We want to give more contribution to this.
As an entrepreneur, my future plan is something different. I have some other ventures. I am one of the founders of Ajker Deal. It’s one of the largest e-commerce marketplaces in the country. I want to take it to a higher place. It has a value-adding proposition also. There are a lot of small merchants in our country who can’t afford to have a shop. They are doing business from their own home. We want to kind of give them a platform so that they can sell their products. We want to give them an opportunity just like we gave the opportunity to the job seekers and the employers all alone in the country. Over here, our goal is to connect the small merchants and the millions of consumers – not only inside Dhaka but all over the country. This can probably be bigger than BDJobs.
I have another venture, it’s called Beshto.com. It has been around for the last two years. This is a social network in Bangla. But we are definitely not like Facebook. We are different from them. Facebook is more of a private network where you connect personally with other people. It’s much more like Twitter actually. Over there, anyone can post anything and it can be viewed by anyone.
We have two other services. One is Proshno another one is Adda. Proshno is for general information. Sometimes we have a lot of queries, such as who is the best heart specialist around town. People can get those answers over here. The information is crowd-sourced. Users can give answers to other users’ questions. Anyone can up-vote or down-vote answers. So the best answer can be featured based on up-votes. To some extent, you can compare it with Wikipedia. But Wiki is more of a keyword-based service; we are based on queries and information. And this is also very informal – just like any other social media platform. Already we have around 50 thousand regular users. We want to increase the number of users a lot more.
We actually want to minimize our dependency on foreign countries. We are trying our best that the internet doesn’t mean only Facebook to the people. The Internet can be more localized; it can be very close to our own needs. My next few years are planned for internet-based projects and skill development sectors mainly. I want to add more value to these two fields.
Personally, I don’t feel very excited following people around me. There is no additional benefit for me if I do that. Honestly, money will come eventually if I focus on adding value; I don’t want to run after money. Money is only needed for investment. I have invested the money that I got from BDJobs in other ventures that add value.
