I want ehtisaab to provide business management solutions for niche businesses in Pakistan. Instead of trying to build a single catch-all ERP that other pre-existing solutions in the market would undoubtedly shadow, why not build something that can solve all problems for a single niche of businesses.
But when you are building a product for a niche market, you do not have years to devote to perfecting it. Either you complete the MVP as fast as possible and put it in front of people, or you scrap it midway and stop working on it altogether.
the name
It was a long night and Imran Khan, who is the current prime minister of Pakistan at the time of writing this, was under discussion. I was tossing around business names for this exact idea of mine to two of my dear friends who were on comms with me over discord. It was in middle of the COVID lockdowns and that is when Imran Khan’s obsession with ehtisaab came up.
A few google searches later, turns out no one owned ehtisaab.com and the owner of “ehtisab” did not really get much done with it after he installed WordPress. Let me pause writing this post for a moment and send a purchase offer to the owner of that domain.
Hello,
– my request through PrivacyProtect to the owner of ehtisab.com
I am interested in purchasing the domain “ehtisab.com” from you. Kindly provide me with contact details so we can discuss prices.
That ought to be enough? Right?
the business plan
We need to make it as affordable as possible. Our aim is not to have a hundred clients and be happy that they are all paying us 20,000 rupees a year, especially when we could have a thousand clients paying us 10,000 rupees a year.
How will we solve all problems for a business? Simple.
- Find someone in your friends or family that has a niche business.
- See if they are already using a software.
- Find out what features that software is missing.
- Build a management system for their business and cater to every single request (well, most requests, duh)
the timeline
Like we said earlier, you cannot spend years building something that may fail. Rapid development, rapid deployment, and get the first version of your application out in front of users as fast as possible. Three months will be our roadmap for every branch of ehtisaab that we start.
The three months will start as soon as we first allocate a VPS to make our product accessible to the general public. Within these three months we need to break even on our investments. Meaning that the product should be self-sustainable financially where it generates more revenue than our expenses.
The incredibly low cost of doing business in Pakistan does make that easy, but the ceiling is high and for some reason, it does not seem as unreachable as it once did.