Biography
Tayef Sarker is the co-founder of Barikoi, a Bangladeshi startup building accurate maps for companies in emerging markets. The company has raised over $600K and cashed in over $300K in ARR last fiscal year.
Prior to Barikoi, Tayef co-founded a job platform and a bike-hailing startup.
What’s Barikoi’s genesis?
Bangladesh’s e-commerce wave began around 2013, when companies like Chaldal and Daraz (a Rocket Internet company since acquired by Alibaba) emerged. I was attending university at that time. A few years later, ride-hailing apps appeared, with Pathao launching in 2015 and Uber entering Bangladesh in 2016.
Inspired by these companies, I co-founded AmarBike, a sort of “Uber for motorcycle taxis”. Evidently, reliable maps were crucial to our business. We used Google Maps, but we weren’t satisfied. The level of preciseness simply wasn’t good enough. I wondered if other Bangladeshi startups with mapping needs faced a similar issue. They did. I shadowed a delivery company, and was astonished by the time they wasted looking for houses they were supposed to deliver parcels to.
I figured there was an opportunity for an infrastructure play, providing reliable maps for Bangladesh to companies with a dire need for it. My co-founder and I started building off of that intuition, without spending time on market sizing.
Why wasn’t Google Maps’ Bangladeshi product good?
Google adequately invests in markets they know will be lucrative. Bangladesh neighbors India ( (a larger, more affluent market), where Google obviously preferred to spend more resources.
Building reliable maps for Bangladesh required significant investments because a company like Google can’t apply a Western lens here. Addresses aren’t organized through names, they are situated in relation to a specific “landmark” (ex: the house is “just behind the big tree”). In the US, the government publishes useful data for map makers. Not so much in Bangladesh. The granular, data collection work has to be done from scratch, by hand.
RO insights: Western tech products being unadapted to emerging markets
Some tech products developed in the West can rapidly spread worldwide with a seemingly homogenous value proposition. Facebook and WhatsApp (Airbnb to some extent) fall into this category.
But for other, more technical products, Western tech companies face a localization wall. If the market is too small or too complex, the company might not deem it worthwhile to invest in overcoming that wall. In that case, they can either invest in local companies, partner with them, acquire them or not enter the market at all.
This is the case for maps as Tayef states, but also for digital payment infrastructure. Stripe, which brands itself as a quintessentially “global” company, actually shies away from many markets. In that case, local startups take its place, because the need for digital payments infrastructure remains.
Here’s how Gega Tsurstumia, co-founder of Georgia’s Payze, explains:
“Stripe still has a ton of value and upside to capture in its existing markets. It’s far from having conquered them entirely.
In 2020, Stripe acquired Nigeria’s Paystack (the “Stripe for Africa”) for $200M. This might show that Stripe has a desire to enter new, difficult markets through acquisition rather than flat-out expansion.
Lastly, building digital payments infrastructure in our markets is difficult. National markets are small but national regulations differ. I bet that Stripe’s choice not to expand to the Caucasus/Central Asian market is a matter of the hassle not being worth it. For now at least.”
An opinion corroborated by Pakistan’s Safepay’s leadership:
“Stripe doesn’t operate in every country directly, and Pakistan is one of those markets where they’re not present. That said, they’ve invested in us and have been incredibly supportive from day one.
Payments is a highly regulated space, so in many cases, the best solution is one that’s built locally and tailored to that market’s specific regulatory environment.”
Excerpts from Payze: Stripe for the former Soviet Union and Safepay: Pakistan’s Stripe, both originally published in The Realistic Optimist
What did your MVP look like, and how did you carry out initial data collection?
For starters, we focused exclusively on Dhaka, the capital city. We knew we’d be selling our mapping infrastructure to internet businesses, the overwhelming majority of which were operating in Dhaka. If we built a great map of Dhaka, we would have a valuable product.
We sent people around Dhaka (mostly students) to map out areas. We asked them to send pictures via their smartphones to us, which we then compiled into a comprehensive map. Some people were furious that we were taking pictures. At our peak, we had 200 people mapping Dhaka, each assigned to a particular neighborhood. I then visited every place we mapped to audit it.
You couldn’t really sell anything until you’d put together a first, “sellable” map. How did you finance the business during that period?