A lesson in our illustrious corporate history

The idea of Lootmaar started in 2003, when we wrote a business plan for it as part of Jawwad’s entrepreneurship course at SZABIST. Noman and I had always craved for an online platform where we could sell our stuff, and buy gadgets at a bargain. The internet penetration of Pakistan at the time was a couple of million and growing rapidly,  Bazee was creating waves in India and hence the inevitable question: Why can’t we do this in Pakistan?

A bit of competitor analysis revealed that someone had tried (Bolee) and failed. There was too much wrong with Bolee and creating a successful marketplace, at first, seemed like simply fixing some of those things: interface, help, active moderation, dispute management etc. Furthermore, a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation showed that the potential was enormous. Just getting a small fraction of internet users in Karachi would make the model sustainable. It made sense, and so we started obsessively writing code. Looking back, it was such as awesome time. We were out to dominate the world, spending nights cloistered away in Adeel’s plush den, interrupted only by his mom’s luscious cooking. But then we graduated and the party ended.

With fervent ambition we pitched the idea to everyone who would listen- family, friends, passersby, but were told with a few exceptions, that its not the right time. At this point, I got an offer from IBM (Pakistan) and I put Lootmaar on hold to gain some “real world experience”. While at IBM, I secretly wore this invisible badge that said “I’m actually an entrepreneur” and I continued to toy with the idea of Lootmaar. It was partly because I was genuinely passionate about the idea, and partly because it was a coping mechanism of working in a narrow cubicle selling extremely expensive boxes. At IBM, only my supervisor and very dear friend, Faisal, knew about Lootmaar and he used to proudly call me the “that crazy kid” for my naive ambition.

In Spring 2006 I got accepted at Duke,  I quit from IBM Pakistan and joined Alchemy for the Summer in my first real brush with entrepreneurship. I don’t think I’ve ever posted about my time at Alchemy. Suffice to say for now that after my 3 months at Alchemy I had more to write on my CV than the 2 prior years at IBM. Alchemy was a training, not just in entrepreneurship, but also consulting, both of which I enjoyed thoroughly.

While at Duke, I met other crazy dreamers. I looked at some other possible startup ideas with Wynn, even got some NCIAA funding, but through that whole process I was stuck on Lootmaar. “You just have to do it to get it out of your system,” my mom once told me on the phone. Luckily, Noman was feeling exactly the same way. A couple of months into my MEM program, I called Nomi and after three full years since the original spark, Lootmaar the company was formed.

It had been three years since we had written the original code and much of it was outdated. We decided to develop a new system from scratch, and also in the interim, purchase and quickly customize an off-the-shelf auction system to launch early and test the market. This “simple” customization became an all-consuming nightmare and cost us over $15,000 in hard cash (not considering my or noman’s time).

We launched in beta in August 2007 generating a quite a buzz.

-Adnan

Tags: failure, history, Lootmaar

This entry was posted on November 05th, 2009 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.