Interviewed By Sumaiya Siddique, MBR Team

MBR: Will you please share with us the story of the inception of markopolo.ai? Is there any particular factor that motivated you to create the platform?

Rubaiyat F.: It all started when the two of us, Tasfia, and I, began to discuss solving digital marketing issues for small and medium businesses. Tasfia Tasbin, CEO of Markopolo, has experience of working in large tech companies, startups and consultancy. Her career started as an IoT creator at Datasoft Systems Bangladesh Limited. Besides being a part of several major government projects as a consultant, she worked in a visual AI startup, Gaze technology. Upon working with small and medium businesses and startups, she realised that these businesses can’t grow to their full potential because of how complicated and costly digital marketing is for them. Markopolo is my second startup, after my undergrad, I co-founded TiGrow, which was a global SaaS startup. Along with utilizing my tech skills, I decided to expand my range of knowledge towards business. Tasfia and I started to explore the scopes of facilitating digital marketing for SMBs.
From ideation to the development of Markopolo, our focus has been on making digital marketing accessible, affordable and efficient for the businesses by providing an A to Z solution including content creation, management, publishing and optimization. We integrated Ai because we wanted to provide the best service that consumes the least resource, be it time, finances or anything else.

MBR: The pandemic has thrown challenges upon all sorts of businesses. Will you kindly share how you combat the adverse impacts successfully?

Rubaiyat F.: Well, when it comes to such unforeseen events, it’s more about adapting rather than combating. The start of Markopolo was during the pandemic. We launched on Product Hunt in late June of 2021, where we became the fourth product of the day. We were also featured in their newsletter. This exposure helped us gain a lot of users. We have maintained a very active loop of user feedback and innovation for understanding the demands and efficiency of our platform. We have had one on one meetings with users from several industries and any issue or concern has been dealt with immediately. As we noticed how much marketing data is useful for our users, we decided to establish Markopolo Consulting Group (MCG) to provide in-depth marketing analytical services so businesses could have everything with Markopolo. For us, it’s a delightful experience to not only thrive as a business ourselves, but also the journey we have had with the users so far, making lives easier even during the pandemic.

MBR: Markopolo.ai has recently reached the Top 60 of the K-Startup Grant Challenge among 250+ global applicants. How will this grant help enhance your business?

Rubaiyat F.: Being a part of the K-Startup Grant has given us the honour of representing Bangladesh on such a large platform. This will help us to connect to a global market, while also creating a sales stream. The specialized training and support will greatly affect our strategizing process. We will implement our learnings from the other participants to add or modify our features. The Challenge has created a significant base for us to grow in the global startup ecosystem. We already have active users from 48 different countries and we hope to create many more customer success stories around the globe!

MBR: Digital marketing is still a fairly new concept in Bangladesh. Will you kindly share the prospects you believe the industry has?

Rubaiyat F.: We are inevitably moving towards a digitalized community. We at Markopolo believe that only conventional marketing isn’t enough and businesses will resort to digital marketing solutions sooner or later. The industry is bound to grow exponentially. Most companies in Bangladesh are indifferent about digital marketing because of the complexity and need of an infrastructural system. With digital marketing, the businesses can discover the untapped markets and go global. Hence, we are working on presenting this industry with a clear message that this is essential but not necessarily complicated.

MBR: What are the long-term plans you have for the company?

Rubaiyat F.: Our plan is to grow locally and globally by empowering businesses along the way. We want our platform to be the go-to solution for digital marketing of SMBs. We will be continuing our R&D, and will release updated features to solve growth inhibiting factors of our target group. We look forward to serving 1 million SMBs of South Asia within 2023 to strengthen the digital revolution for a better future!