Making It Work: Monis Rahman

Consider the following: Pakistan’s Biggest online job website, the Internet’s largest online Muslim social network and the country’s first online venture to attract VC funding and you get one name behind all this success – Monis Rahman. The CEO and Chairman of Naseeb Networks quickly turned his dream venture into the leading provider of online recruitment, social networking, classifieds and related services in Pakistan.
Capacity building is one of the biggest challenges that any company, anywhere in the world has to go through. “Simply put, we enable people to find what they are looking for. Whether it is on Naseeb.com where thousands have found their soul mates, or on ROZEE.PK where we surgically match talent with opportunity, our technology enables finding the most accurate results in the shortest time possible.” With 1.4 billion people online, we’re talking about owning a piece of a very large pie. “Ultimately it is not about the technology. Technology is just a prerequisite that must flawlessly match the objectives of a venture. Our key to success has been aggregating the largest inventory in our target categories giving our users the most options possible. This creates disproportionate value for them and fuels the growth of our websites”.
ROZEE.PK currently boasts 850,000 registered professionals and is used by over 16,000 employers. However, just three years ago, it was little more than an idea in Monis’ mind. He was quick to observe a frustrating trend and offer the market a solution. When he moved back to Pakistan from Silicon Valley, he struggled to find talent for his emerging software company. “Spending Rs. 300,000 on a newspaper ad was not an option for us. We were also not looking forward to sifting through hundreds of paper CV’s to find the right candidates,” explains Monis. “ROZEE.PK started off as a way for Naseeb Networks to hire internally and quickly grew into something much bigger. The advent of Web 2.0 coupled with an intuitive idea, long term vision and a dedicated team that provided a great deal of commitment, Monis turned the powerful technology into something that people needed. It clicked… and went on clicking!
But the question that keeps haunting much of the enterprise world regardless of the amount of experience they have is this – how do you stand out from the crowd? How do you create a brand that will stay on beyond the initial hype that you may create? There are hundreds of thousands of websites that pop up online every day and everyone has similar tools to use for promotion: keyword marketing, making sure their sites are Search Engine Optimized and so on and so forth. How do you make it through all the clutter? “Our goal from day one was to create disproportionate value for our users by giving them the most options possible. When you create something that is genuinely useful, adoption follows. ROZEE.PK is an indigenous grass roots word-of-mouth brand with a zero marketing budget. As my friend Tim Draper likes to tell me, one of his early investments, Hotmail, became a global brand with $0 spent on advertising.”
If you execute the right idea at the right time, it usually works. It’s tough, however, to know what the ‘right’ time is. Monis explains the scenario when he started off. “54% of the population is under the age of 19. If you translate that into the workforce, a lot of the workforce is inexperienced. The workforce becomes dominated with fresh graduates whose positions actually need several years of experience, but the employers are flooded with entry-level resumes. This is a need that we’re fulfilling. We’re telling people that this is a problem everyone faces and we’re offering them a solution.”
So you simplified a rather complex need by developing a solution for it and throwing it up in the cloud for everyone to access. How do you keep track on trends? “We meticulously monitor metrics and usage patterns on our websites all the time. We track the effect of moving a button from the left side of the screen to the right. One of the major advantages of online businesses is that the data is readily available. When our desired outcomes slow down, we quickly readjust the website to maximize results. Few offline businesses can be optimized this efficiently”.

Keeping the Brand Alive Beyond the Hype
As a suit what the biggest problem with the web is and they’ll probably say something along the lines that it is easy to put one up and just as easy to forget about it. In terms of creating a strategy for online, companies have none. But that’s not because they underestimate the power of the web. It seems to be more that they don’t know how. Monis helps a little to better understand this space.
“The key to building an online brand,” he says, “is to provide tremendous value to your customers and leverage the power of viral marketing. There is no better sales person for your product than a happy customer who infects their network with a pitch for your product. Many online companies have wasted millions in ineffective hoardings and newspaper ads. The ROI is simply not there. The conversion rates are close to zero. One new online business recently plastered Lahore with hoardings and pole banners at considerable expense. In focus group studies, that business did not even come in the top five in its category. Conventional advertising for online businesses should be used after the value proposition has matured so there is brand recall”.
But then what about the sales people? The marketing people? And all the people you need to hire to monitor the first two kinds of people? “We invest heavily on growing our business and strengthening our workforce. We are not in a hurry to maximize profits. We are feverish about growing our users and customer base. That’s our number one priority: winning market share. We are fortunate to have the staying power to pursue this strategy.” As with most things, the experienced entrepreneur gives some sound advice: even in this age of ultra-hyperactivity, slow and steady wins the race.

Taking the Leap
Monis started his career off as an engineer. After snaring nine patents for his innovative work at Intel as one of the youngest members of its elite microprocessor team, he decided to pursue a path where he could have more impact. “While spending five years at Intel, I worked with some of the brightest minds in the world. These were people I read about in my engineering text books and they had spent their entire careers at Intel. I did not want to become complacent in the cushy comfort zone that Intel offered, and decided it was time to spread my wings and take chances.”
Unlike most people who often thought about taking the plunge, Monis tucked his want to give back to the community under one arm, a laptop under the other and jumped. “It was a remarkable leap of faith, something very scary when I first started off. At some point you need to believe in yourself enough to walk off the cliff and know that you won’t fall. And then once things begin to go well, you get this amazing level of confidence in yourself. There is an amazing feeling that running a successful venture brings, but it’s always ongoing. What is a bigger rush than being in charge of your own destiny?”
When Monis first left Intel, it was to partner with former Intel colleague Ramana Bodepudi to start up eDaycare.com, which provided online services to parents who use daycare facilities for their children. He had the technical know how and knew the market well enough to launch a service which would allow people who left their children in a daycare center, to be able to monitor them remotely. Perhaps if you take a look at the kinds of ventures that Monis has been able to launch and build momentum on, have been largely catering to the existing demands. “Entrepreneurs must solve existing problems They must find better ways of doing something and alleviating pain for their customers. Businesses that have tried to invent needs and change consumer behavior around it have largely failed.”
Innovation in societies is largely the product of entrepreneurs with vision who have an appetite for taking risks. Large corporations are not well suited to rapidly innovate. Their bottom line is scrutinized by share holders and they tend to have bureaucratic machines that must process change. They are conservative by nature. Entrepreneurs bring fresh ideas and innovation to the forefront, and time and again, we see a lot of such examples around us. “They are agile and when they succeed, their ideas are adopted by the mainstream and often sucked into larger enterprises. The level of entrepreneurship is directly linked with the level of progress that a society makes.”
What about giving back to the community or assisting other youngsters whose fire, well, needs to be fueled just a bit. Most youngsters, regardless of whether they have plans to run their own businesses or not, need alignment. I guess people call this guidance, but its a little push and nudge to get them on a track that best suits them. Not being able to do start the right career, also has something to do with the inability of matching the needs demand with the supply. Monis had a solution for this ready. “ROZEE.PK launched an ambitious Campus Career Portal project which promises to connect 85 HEC accredited universities with 16,000 of ROZEE.PK’s employers at the click of a button. These include universities from Quetta, Mansehra, and Peshawar to Hyderabad and interior Sind. Our campus portals are already active at universities including LUMS, IBA, FAST, UCP and NUST with the remaining coming online every week. This program not only connects graduating students to employers for jobs and internship opportunities, but also connects them with alumni from their institutes who can further their career goals”.

Alignment. The need of the hour. Matching an opportunity with a solution before touting it a problem.

Naseeb Opens Up to VC
After eyeing the success that companies have had in Silicon Valley, every entrepreneur’s dream is to get venture capital that understands the product and is willing to put their faith into it. A business takes time to grow and regardless of what the general sentiments are about VCs, some can really work with you to take things to the next level.

“We reached profitability just six months after we launched our first site, Naseeb.com. ROZEE.PK was launched soon after. We were experiencing strong growth. I was not content with pursuing a linear growth path – when I did the numbers it was clear that a capital infusion could result in dramatic acceleration of our business. We were approached by a New York hedge fund and a Middle East private equity fund around this time. After several months of negotiations, it became clear that the dynamics of the deal that was forming was not optimal from our perspective.”
With that, Monis decided to go back to Silicon Valley and talk to the venture capital companies that he had worked with in the past. “After one week of intense meetings with eight VC funds, five emerged with interest. During the next three months, two dropped out due to perceived country risk despite the fact that the focus of our pitch was to sell Pakistan. Of the three funds that remained we chose the top two: ePlanet Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ). VC’s from both these funds are ranked in Forbes’ Top Venture Capitalists in the World list. They are responsible for creating companies like Hotmail, Skype, Overture and Baidu. We are thrilled to have them work with us.
We are especially proud that they chose to invest in us despite images on CNN of the burning streets of Karachi, a suspended constitution and routine bomb blasts. We raised our funding at one of the worst geopolitical times in Pakistan’s history.”
“For entrepreneurs who are thinking about establishing themselves, I would strongly recommend people to look at Pakistan. Our success is a great case study to examine. By leveraging the low cost skilled software developers that Pakistan has to offer, we spent only $60,000 just to establish ourselves – if we had built the same software in the US, we would have probably ended up spending more than a $1 Million. If you really want to stretch your money, look at offshoring in Pakistan. The talent is here as are the ideas.” Monis would know. He spent the better part of his life living in the US and returned to Pakistan about 5 years ago only to set up his company and put his money where his mouth was.
“Well, it wasn’t all that easy. Ironically, the hardest part about moving to Pakistan, was hiring the right talent. And we solved that problem by launching ROZEE.PK. Initially, there were many concerns on learning to operate a business in Pakistan’s very different landscape. I quickly learned that getting things done in Pakistan could be ten times harder than the US or ten times easier. In Pakistan, having the right network is of paramount importance to getting things done.”
A recent study by Morgan Stanley revealed that in 2007, Pakistan was the fastest growing mobile subscriber market in the world. The same report ranked Pakistan in third position for Internet user growth, with 5.5 Million Internet users added last year alone. “Indeed, with an 11% penetration rate of Internet users and 50% penetration rate of mobile subscribers, Pakistan is on the global radar. We are poised to see an unprecedented convergence between technology and business applications. Our entrepreneurs are well positioned to push through game-changing innovations. We are sitting at an inflection point where there is considerable arbitrage between actual and perceived value of the online medium.”
So you made it here once you decided to take your leap of faith even further. But one of the biggest problems we have seen is the widening void amongst Pakistanis across the globe. The distance for our disconnected characters just seems a little too much. Do you really think that the Web or reaching out over email or VoIP is the answer to all this? “The Internet has an amazing ability to aggregate fragmented groups of people. Pakistani’s abroad are avid users of the net and the best way to mobilize them to get involved with Pakistan is by building success stories. We need to build hope and create awareness. There is too much pessimism surrounding Pakistan despite the many exciting untapped opportunities here. Let us deny the naysayers and create success together.”
How can we initiate building these bridges? For example, what would you say to Pakistanis who are in their prime, a place similar to where you were before you decided to leave Intel? “For the majority of the Pakistanis who are working out of the US, especially out of Silicon Valley, I would ask them to look towards Pakistan. Increase collaboration and invest in the talent that is available here. This is the time that the country needs you, the community needs you and the time when you should build the bridge. Do not do it just for the sake of patriotism, do it because it genuinely makes business sense. Just ask our investors.”

Replicating the Success
Pakistan has a serious brand problem. In the West, the mere mention of Pakistan incites images of violence, extremism, explosions, suppressed women and backwards thinking. Time Magazine called Pakistan the most dangerous place on Earth. It takes extraordinary effort and enlightened customers to realize that the actual reality on the ground is quite different. Why shouldn’t we grab the opportunity to learn from people who have turned success out of something people had never heard of? So we asked Monis how he and others could possibly replicate the successes they’ve had with marketing and investing in their own businesses, to creating success strategies for Pakistan.
“The challenge” he says, “is to get beyond the global media focus on the war on terror and Pakistan’s central role in it. We need to build value for the global community. Let’s build the best software for the world and find our niche whether it’s mobile applications, quality assurance or BPO. We need to create success stories that over-shadow news of bomb blasts in Bajaur. We need accelerated entrepreneurship to help rebrand Pakistan. Above all we need our Pakistani brothers and sisters abroad to re-engage and build bridges so our talented entrepreneurs have outlets to expose the West to the true capabilities of our great country. When something good happens, let’s scream it from mountain tops – there is a lot of distorted noise that we are competing with!”

For more details, you can find out more about Monis and Rozee.pk at his corporate website.