Dear reader,
Except in frontier tech scenarios (ie: nuclear fusion), building the tech is rarely the hard part. What's difficult is acquiring and retaining customers.
A trite piece of advice is that doing so requires understanding customers' pain points. That advice is correct, but incomplete. Real insights comes not only understanding those pain points, but also ranking them.
A cash-strapped startup might only have the resources to solve one of the pain points it identifies. Defining the most salient one and going after it is key to the startup's immediate commercial relevance, and ultimately its survival.
Repeat founders might have an advantage in this. Especially if they keep founding companies in the same sector. Their granular understanding (and ranking) of customers' pain points is refined by years of operational grind.
That's the case for the company we cover today, Smartlane.
Smartlane is a Pakistani startup founded by three repeat founders: two in e-commerce, one in fintech. Unsurprisingly, Smartlane combines both expertises by offering logistics and financing solutions to Pakistan's e-commerce merchants. So far, they've onboarded 1200 merchants and have extended $28M in credit.
The Realistic Optimist's exclusive 2,500+ word interview with the founders covers:
1) How their Pakistani e-commerce experience helps them prioritize merchants' pain points (ie: starting with courier aggregation, not financing).
2) Their product journey from MVP to the three-pronged revenue stream they sport today.
3) A deep-dive into their cash-on-delivery (COD) settlement product, and the financing mechanisms undergirding it.
4) How Pakistan's instant payment system, Raast, impacts COD's relevance in the e-commerce landscape (ie: less than you think).
5) Operational challenges with their courier aggregation model.
6) Their international expansion strategy.
7) Best and worst strategic decisions so far.
8) Common pushbacks they get from VCs (and their response to them).
... and more.
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