Fireside | Airlift

Never underestimate yourself, believe in yourself and be unstoppable

At a fireside event recently hosted by daftarkhwan One, Usman Gul, the founder of Airlift took us through his journey of establishing a transportation service for daily commute in Pakistan.

Airlift is an app based bus solution that provides you with a cheaper, quicker and reliable way to travel across the city.

Airlift kicked off its operations in May 2019 and in a very short period of time, it has managed to raise a little less than $15 million and is currently serving over tens of thousands of weekly rides.

Coming up with an idea that caters to the masses is indeed a very challenging task and during the fireside chat, Usman Gul spoke about his idea generation process. If you see yourself as a future entrepreneur in the coming years or if your startup is struggling to raise finance, here are a few key lessons that we can learn from Guls inspirational journey.

1. One should never live in their own bubble and should always talk about their business idea with the right people. Every individual has different experiences in life and a different vision, so talking to them about the idea will definitely acquaint one with the required knowledge and exposure which will assist an entrepreneur in shaping their business idea better
2. Choosing one idea out of many is an intellectual challenge. He believes the process of choosing and executing one business idea has to be very data driven and experimental. An entrepreneur cannot sit in their own room and talk about the pros and cons of any business idea, this is where the role of experiments comes in. For Airlift, Google advertisements were put in and as a result of these advertisements conversions were viewed before making any decision. The conversion for Airlift was over 8% which clearly indicated that the problem existed for the masses and hence a solution was needed

If you think you have a great business idea, a few things to keep in mind are to make sure your business idea is data driven because data never lies and secondly try to look at the bigger picture, see if your idea is trying to solve a major problem

When it comes to raising investment, Gul is off the view that “scarcity is on the side of the founder”. He says that if an idea is being executed well, the money will seek you out. He also talked about looking for the ‘right investor’ rather than just an investor. A person asking for five-year financial projections for a startup you’ve been running for just 6 months may not be the perfect fit.

Check out his complete video: Fireside with Usman Gul