StartUp Cup Rocks Pakistan

This article first appeared on TechinAsia and is authored by Khurram Zafar. Khurram is a technology entrepreneur and investor formerly based in the Silicon Valey, now in Pakistan. He’s also a board member of the Plan9 Technology Incubator, visiting faculty for entrepreneurship at Information Technology University, adviser to the government of Punjab, and a securities trader. Find him on Twitter as @kayzafar

In Pakistan, a country generally and somewhat incorrectly perceived to be a troubled state due to disturbances in its remote areas and its participation in the global fight against terrorism, entrepreneurship is on the rise.

The past three days have provided for an exhilarating and personally rewarding experience as I mentored the participants of Pakistan’s first StartUp Cup, a wonderfully structured business model competition developed by Sean Griffin.

TiE Islamabad Chapter, in collaboration with some local and foreign sponsors, spearheaded this nationwide initiative to support entrepreneurship in the country. I was infected when the StartUp Cup reached Lahore.

Murtaza Zaidi, the executive director of the TiE Islamabad Chapter, told me that the competition received over 400 applications from across Pakistan, the highest ever among over 50 StartUp Cups organized in over 40 countries worldwide. A panel of judges had to filter the applicants down to fewer than 200. 50 of these startups were selected from Lahore.

Leaping into Lahore

The Lahore event, spanning two days, was organized at a local hotel and rallied together 25 prominent, local business leaders to mentor over 40 teams that attended the event. Over the course of the two days, the startups ranging from high-tech to bio-mechanical to social enterprises developed and refined their business models using a very well structured methodology.

The teams, as they were mentored, were also judged by the mentors to select the top 25 that will continue in the competition and track their progress over the next three months. The nationwide winners at the end of the competition will receive close to PKR 2.5 million ($24,200) in seed capital grants.

Aside from truly enjoying the palpable energy and infectious passion of the mostly young entrepreneurs that I had an opportunity to mentor, I loved the format and organization of the competition. Most initiatives intended to support entrepreneurship in Pakistan, or worldwide for that matter, fall in one of the following two categories:

1. Very short-term (typically one-day) business plan competitions typically arranged by universities
2. Long running programs that carefully screen and induct entrepreneurs into technology and business incubators.

The former generates a lot of excitement but the entrepreneurship capital generated is very short-lived typically. The winners generally collect the prize money but rarely use it to bootstrap the business thereafter.

The latter provides a lot more support to entrepreneurs but requires considerable capital and resources as well. Plan9 Incubator (Disclosure: As mentioned above, Khurram is a board member at Plan9), a project of the Punjab Information Technology Board, is probably the best example of a successful incubator in Pakistan, but aside from the hard work of a very committed team, required considerable resources from the provincial government of Punjab.

Mentoring ahead of the contest

StartUp Cup lies somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. It runs for three months but without a very elaborate support infrastructure. The startups are primarily guided by a well developed framework and sporadic mentor-driven interventions to keep the teams focused and gauge their performance against pre-defined milestones. It ensures that only the teams that develop their business idea into a well-running, sustainable business stand to benefit the most.

I wish the best to all the winners of StartUp Cup Lahore and hope that some of these startups evolve into high-growth businesses that aim to change the perception of Pakistan both within and (especially) outside the country. I hope they prove that Pakistanis are as inventive as they are tough and can be as successful as they are hospitable.

My favorite startups from the event

From among the participants of StartUp Cup Lahore, below are my favorites, in no particular order. It will give you an idea of the variety of businesses that took part in this competition.

1. Kamata Pakistan — an online service that connects blue-collar workers with employers.
2. BIOTECH — a low cost, EMG-operated prosthetic limb manufacturer.
3. Home Made Meals — a high-quality, home-made meals delivery service.
4. Mystic Charmz — art decor using temporary paints for groom cars and branded corporate vehicles.
5. Idea Centricity/OddJobbers — connecting low-skilled workers and low-wage earners with retail and commercial employers.
6. One Step Solutions’ xGear — a device that plugs into any car and provides the owner with useful data.
7. Pantera Engineering — a restaurant order management and analytics platform with social integration.

NoveltySoft, creators of an exciting Facebook-based card game, Rung or Courtpiece, deserve a special mention also.

(All photos: TiE Islamabad Chapter)

A/B Testing Trango.co

This article was originally published on Trango.co by the author.

When we launched Trango, we wanted to keep a very minimalist theme to try and give the greatest weight to the content and this proved to be a very successful strategy, by the end of our first month we were getting 2,000 visits per day. Its at this point we started thinking about how we want to take the website forward. We realized we had a lot of GREAT content that wasnt getting a lot of attention becuase it wasnt on the home page anymore, and the theme we had been using upto that point was excellent at attracting content, but mainly to the newest articles we were publishing. This meant great articles such as 10 Signs to Spot an Idiot on LinkedIn and The Making of Artsly were getting overlooked.

At this point we added features such as “Related Posts” that appear underneath each article which helped in improving our conversion rate (more on this later), but we felt it wasn’t enough. We decided that we should try and test whether we could use a different theme that would increase our conversion rate.

Tools

Finding a theme was easy, but then running a test seemed like a very tough call as in my mind I though we would have to make a subdomain where we would then direct traffic, or use a split testing tool such as VWO or Optimizely. All of these actually had their drawbacks, but then i came across some great wordpress plugins that would do the trick. With some quick testing on dummy sites to see how the plugins would work we decided on using two plugins.

The first was to set up the new theme properly called Theme Test Drive, which allowed us to configure the new theme properly with its menus, widgets and fonts.

The second plugin, SES Theme Split Test, was the one that actually split the traffic from one theme to the other and segmented the data within GA. This meant that we could start tracking within GA metrics like our bounce rate, conversion rate, Ad CTR.

Testing Themes

Before I go further into the test I wanted to introduce the 2 themes we had been testing. The original one is called On Topic, and the new test theme is called Memorable. Both are developed from the great hands of Woothemes (which i have used for the last 3 years now and can vouch for their awesome support team)

On Topic — Original Theme

Once we had the themes ready and the test running it was all a waiting game to see which one would have the best results. The primary measure for us is our conversion rate. Conversion rates are a tough thing to measure for blog/news sites. Unlike ecommerce ventures where conversions are easily measured by number of orders generated, or SaaS applications by the number of signups. At Trango we care most about writing compelling content that will create a loyal audience of readers for us. We want our customer to not only read the articles we write but also read a lot of articles, based on this we created two goals in GA.

1. 3+ Page views in a visit
2. 5+ min on the website in a visit

If either of these criteria is meet we could that as a conversion. This measure is somewhat arbitrary but we like it because it helps us see how much our readers are interacting with our content. No one (unless they leave the browser on) would stay on a website for more than 5 minutes unless they found it compelling, similarly people may end up visiting the home page and one article, but unless they found something they like they would not move on to a 3rd page.

Results

So with our conversion goals in mind we can now look at the results (GA results are posted here).

 ThemeVisitorsConversion RateAd CTRmemorable114210.95%0.19%ontopic11238.51%0.15%
Both theme got very a similar number of views over the course of the test, but their Conversion Rate and Ad CTR (click thru rate) are significantly different (at the 98% level to be exact). An extra 2.44% of visitors were more likely to convert (either visit 3+ pages or spend 5 min on the website) and the ad CTR went up by 0.04% which over the course of a year could be a significant amount of revenue.

Just the numbers alone shows that the new theme is performing better than the last. Further to that we were also, from our readers and writers, getting good feedback about the theme which is always good to hear. So with all this in mind we at Trango would like to present to you our new look and hope you enjoy it