Mauqa Case Study

A couple years ago, I met Suniya Sadullah Khan through my work with Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship. She and her co-founder, Muhammad Mustafa, had an idea for a social venture that would help poor, illiterate people in Pakistan get jobs as domestic workers (house cleaners, cooks, babysitters, etc.). 

Their thesis was that the gig economy had created opportunities for lots of people around the world, but most gig jobs are app-based or online-based, and it’s hard to use those tools if you can’t read. They believed they could change this by creating an online marketplace that included an app with a user interface designed for illiterate workers. Suniya and her co-founder began planning their venture, naming it Mauqa Online (mauqa is the Urdu word for “opportunity”).

Many founders would assume that the correct first step in developing the startup would be to build a minimum viable product (MVP) of the app itself. In fact, that’s the direction Suniya and her co-founder were headed in as they searched for a technical person who could help build an MVP. 

But then they attended a workshop on lean startup methodology, and Suniya remembers, “That’s when it clicked—if we stopped thinking that our MVP had to be ‘tech,’ we could start experimenting straight away to see what works and what doesn’t.”

The concept of “on-demand services” barely existed in Pakistan—Uber and its competitors had only launched a couple of years earlier, as had food delivery startups—so Pakistanis were slowly getting used to the whole idea. The only way this venture would work would be if there were enough clients interested in using it to find on-demand domestic helpers.

Suniya and her co-founder believed that there would be, but one of the key tenets of lean startup methodology is to test your hypotheses. Suniya “decided to first test if our hypothesis of clients wanting ‘on-demand domestic help’ was true. So, we started a Facebook page and just posted in different groups no advertising spend at all. A day later, we had a customer message saying she wanted someone to come and iron clothes for three hours. We didn’t have anyone, so my co-founder went and did the job!”

As they ran their new “marketplace” as a Facebook page, they continued to gain key insights. They realized their pricing was too low, so they adjusted it. They found out that some of the helpers didn’t have the soft skills clients expected in domestic workers, so they started offering soft-skills training for helpers who signed up.

They soon added a basic website linked to a Google form. The flow of new customers started to increase, and they began to experience some scaling pains. For example, in order to make sure helpers arrived at a client’s house on time, Suniya would often ferry them around herself—an approach that was clearly not scalable. So they entered into a partnership with Careem (recently acquired by Uber for 3.1 billion dollars) to handle transportation logistics.

Their next bottleneck turned into an inability to recruit employees fast enough, so they increased their salary offerings above the market rates and offered to pay employees every two weeks (a duration mostly unheard of in Pakistan).

In the aggregate, these learnings not only proved Suniya’s hypotheses but also provided invaluable learnings about how they needed to modify their business model—learnings they never would have gotten if they had started by building an MVP of the app itself.

“If we had started by building an MVP of the app,” Suniya says, “I honestly think our startup would have flopped. By instead launching it with manual processes, doing everything by hand, we started generating some revenue in our second month and were constantly learning every day about operations, supply, demand, and customer service points that we needed to address. We documented all of this and used the learning when we finally built our customer app, our back-end engine, and now for the helper app.”

Here’s the thing: In the case of Mauqa, the question wasn’t: “Could we build an app?” Of course they could build the app, so creating an MVP of the app wouldn’t have proved anything. Instead, the question was: “Is there marketplace potential in connecting poor, illiterate people in Pakistan with clients wanting on-demand domestic work? If so, what would the issues be in delivering a marketplace of that kind?” Choosing to create a non-digital MVP and doing everything by hand gave them the validated learning they needed to make their venture a success.

In 2019, Suniya landed a big funding round, and Mauqa started scaling up, adding two more big cities and improving the livelihoods of thousands of people across Pakistan—all because they figured out what kind of MVP they needed for the learnings required to build and scale a successful venture.

Note: Mauqa Online closed its doors in 2021 after scaling rapidly in three Pakistani cities and preparing to expand to the capital, Karachi. Suniya’s co-founder Muhammed Mustafa said, “We raised funds to operate in Karachi, but due to the tightening of the regulatory environment by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), our funds were stuck.” Despite this ultimate fate, I’ve still included the case study because it illustrates nicely the concept of building a successful MVP for a social venture. 

Key Takeaways:

There are several great lessons in the Mauqa story: 

• Most founders of an app-based startup think an MVP would be an early version of the app, or maybe a clickable digital prototype. But smart founders know that it’s important to be clear on what you actually want to test and learn from. For Suniya and her co-founder, they realized the correct MVP needed to be a manual, non-digital version of the service that would test the idea and provide them with key learnings and insights before building the actual app.
  

• For different startups, the risk is in different places. For Mauqa, the risk was whether the “gig economy” was a concept that would be embraced in Pakistan, and whether the logistics could be worked out. Great entrepreneurs are always thinking to themselves “What is the smallest possible experiment I could do right now that would provide the greatest possible learning?”.
  

• Founders need to do everything themselves for a long as possible. Suniya went into the neighborhoods where workers were and signed them up personally, calling them when jobs were available. Muhammed went and did an ironing job himself when they couldn’t find a worker. Founders who are on the front lines will learn insights much more quickly than founders who delegate those tasks too soon.