(7/11) “All of our customers came through word of mouth. First it was friends. Then it was friends o
(7/11) “All of our customers came through word of mouth. First it was friends. Then it was friends of friends. After a year we were selling about 50 shoes per month. We were happy to have any business at all, but it wasn’t nearly enough to survive. And every week seemed like it would be our last. Our final hope was to launch a Kickstarter campaign. Our campaign launched on a Monday night. We set the goal at $15,000. Then we emailed the link to everyone in media and went to sleep. When we woke up the next morning, our goal had already been reached. Many blogs had decided to write about us, so orders were flowing in from all over the world. Waqas received so many calls from his family. Every day they would congratulate him on our progress. They’d say: ‘We are watching. And we are praying for you.’ But my parents never saw it. It was always: ‘We’ll look tomorrow.’ But they never did. At the conclusion of our campaign, we were the largest Kickstarter in the history of Pakistan. We sold over 600 pairs of shoes and raised $107,000. Finally I received a call from my mother. She said: ‘Now that you’ve raised all this money, it’s time for you to get married.’ Waqas wasn’t ready. He wanted our business to be stable. But I couldn’t bear the pressure any longer. I threatened him a bit. I told him it was going be him or somebody else, and he finally agreed. A normal Pakistani wedding lasts for five days, but we held our ceremony in a single afternoon. I went to the salon. Waqas took a bath. And afterwards we went to work. We didn’t have a honeymoon. There was no time to celebrate. Or take a rest. For the first time ever we had some momentum, and we were terrified to lose it. One of the first things we did was apply to an accelerator program in San Francisco called Y-combinator. It was the most famous program in the world. The admissions process was more selective than Harvard, and they’d helped launch companies like AirBnB and Dropbox. On our application we wrote that we intended to build an online platform for craftsmen all over South Asia. We knew it was a long shot. But we also knew that if we were somehow accepted, we’d be able to scale our company in the United States.” -- source link