Bonnishikha Chowdhury, MBR Team

MBR: How did the idea of Barikoi come into being? What motivated you to start Barikoi?

Al-Amin Sarker Tayef : Barikoi came into existence from my own personal experience. Being a techie, I am one of the early adopter of e-commerce and other delivery services. Every time I ordered something online the delivery man found it very hard to find my location even though I live in a fairly well-structured area of Dhaka. I understood the pain when I and one of my family friend Navil Mostafa along with his friends started the first motorcycle taxi company called “AmarBike”. We realized google maps is not accurate enough with addresses. We started losing money in almost every ride. Then I realized that this problem is not only ours but any business who needs addresses eventually loses their money. So we started thinking of a platform that goes deep into location where google is wide and Barikoi was born.

MBR: What is the business model of Barikoi? How pandemic situation has affected your business?

Al-Amin Sarker Tayef: Initially Barikoi business model was simple. We used to charge for our API/ Product usage on a monthly basis. While that part still exists, we have evolved our business model to a Flywheel one by offering vertically aligned services and value added products to B2B and B2G clients. The pandemic helped us in many ways. Companies that were looking for a cheaper alternative switched which helped us to gain traction faster.

MBR: How did you manage to raise initial funding to get started? How the tech part work of Barikoi? Specially the Rupantor System.

Al-Amin Sarker Tayef: We have put some of our own money in the initial days. After operating more than year, we were able to raise outside funds from an angel investor.

As a location data company, our tech works in a simple manner. We have built a smart data collection tool that feeds data into our data lake. From there we productize the data and release API’s for businesses to use.

Rupantor is one of our Flagship product. Rupantor makes unusable addresses usable by formatting unstructured or mal-formatted addresses into a formatted readable one using Natural Language processing.

MBR: Could you please give us an overview of Barikoi in terms of services you offer, number of users you have and the size of your business etc.?

Al-Amin Sarker Tayef: Barikoi offers maps, locations API’s like location search, autocomplete, find your location (reverse geocoding), rupantor, nearby search, routing, navigation. We recently added verify as an OPaaS (Operations as a service) using our mapping infrastructure. We have UrbanEngine – a geo visualization dashboard for City Corporations. Trace - Tracking Platform for making real time tracking easy for every company.

Currently we have more than 30 monthly active users, government and few enterprise who deal in the pipeline.

MBR: You have shifted the business from B2C to B2B and B2G in the initial stage. How did it help the business?

Al-Amin Sarker Tayef: Google is doing a very good job at B2C end therefore competing on B2C is a no brainer. We realized it very early and moved to B2B and B2G. B2G is a tough market to crack but it is a worthy one. B2B customer has a long sales cycle but also steady revenue cycle and longer life time value. Currently we are getting fairly good growth as our company position is maturing.

MBR: What is the core competitive advantage of Barikoi? Why will the customers use Barikoi instead of Google Maps?

Al-Amin Sarker Tayef: There are few core competitive advantage of being a local company like localization, client support, accuracy, faster upgradation, customization according to ones need. For B2B market, businesses come to us because we solve their problems that Google does not. Google is wide, Barikoi is deep. General use cases where we offer same services as Google or any other mapping company, customers will choose Barikoi because of the support, accuracy and ability to help them solve their problems.

MBR: What strategies and activities do you maintain to achieve the growth? What are the challenges Barikoi is currently facing in general?

Al-Amin Sarker Tayef: We have so far seen organic growth from the market. Content marketing helps a lot in terms of gaining new users and educating the market. Currently one of the challenges we are facing: data up-gradation. Keeping data up to date is a big challenge.

MBR: What steps will you take to expand the client base in future? What are the other future plans of Barikoi?

Al-Amin Sarker Tayef: Barikoi plans to be like Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) for location data in future. We plan to expand our client base to FMCG, Distribution, Retail, Pharmaceuticals and Banking etc.We recently expanded a vertical called verify which is currently serving one of the largest local consumer bank and few other companies. We will launch a product for Retail and for F-Commerce in Q3 2021.

MBR: What are the lessons you have learnt in terms of growing a business? What other entrepreneurs can learn from your growth journey?

Al-Amin Sarker Tayef: The most important lesson I have learnt- story telling. If we can sell a compelling story we can grow the business easily at the initial stage. As we scale up and gain some traction, we need to start looking for key people who can help you to scale both in product and sales.