I walked into our makeshift call center on a Tuesday morning in early 2016 and found three operators sprawled on the concrete floor, phones glued to their ears, scribbling order details on loose papers scattered like confetti. “What the hell is happening?” I asked. One looked up and mouthed: “We can’t keep up.”
That was the moment I realized we weren’t running a small business anymore. The calls were coming faster than we could answer. Our Excel sheet had crashed. Our manual dispatch system had completely broken down. We had crossed the line from tea stall to tea empire, whether we admitted it or not.
In Bangladesh, a startup is anything that tries to scale beyond the guy who built it. Most people don’t know which one they’re building until it’s too late.
The Tea Stall Reality
The tea stall owner down the street knew his business cold. Thirty customers, maybe forty on busy days. He could disappear for a week and his assistant could run everything from memory. His success came from being exceptional at what he did, where he did it. He knew his regulars by name, their preferences, their payment habits. His business fit perfectly inside his head and his two hands.
When we started Pathao, I thought we were building something similar. Clean. Predictable. Manageable. Something I could control. But by month three, we had 200 active riders and I couldn’t track half of them. Our customer service was just me answering angry phone calls at all hours. When I took three days off for Eid, everything collapsed. Riders hadn’t been paid. Customers were furious. Two of our best operators quit.
That’s when the math forced the truth: we weren’t optimizing for control, we were betting everything on scale. The tea stall model would have killed us.
When Bangladesh Culture Crashes Into Startup Logic
Our biggest challenge wasn’t technology or funding. It was culture. Bangladeshi customers expected personal relationships with service providers. They wanted to negotiate every price. They preferred calling directly instead of using apps. All of this pushed us toward traditional business models that couldn’t scale.
I remember a heated argument with our head of operations in late 2016. He insisted we needed dedicated account managers for our top 100 customers. “These relationships matter,” he said. “This is how business works here.” He was right about the culture, but wrong about the math. Dedicated account managers meant our costs would grow linearly with customers. We’d be profitable with 1,000 users and bankrupt with 10,000.
The cultural expectations felt impossible to fight. Customers would call our call center to negotiate ride prices. They’d ask for specific drivers by name. They expected us to remember their preferences, their regular routes, their payment methods. Every interaction was personal, time-intensive, relationship-based.
Netflix faced the same tension when transitioning from DVDs to streaming. Customers loved browsing physical shelves and making deliberate choices. But that model couldn’t support instant access to thousands of titles. They had to retrain their entire customer base while building algorithmic recommendations that worked at scale.
We had to make the same choice. Build trust systems that worked at scale - ratings instead of relationships, fixed pricing instead of negotiation, GPS tracking instead of personal calls. It nearly killed us several times when customers rejected the impersonal approach, but it was the only way to serve hundreds of thousands of people instead of hundreds.
The Empire Mindset Trap
Here’s what nobody tells you about the empire mindset: it’s addictive and potentially fatal. Once you start thinking about scale, every small problem becomes a systems challenge. Customer complained about a ride? Build a ratings system. Driver verification taking too long? Hire a compliance team. Revenue growth slowing? Launch in new cities.
We were hiring 20 people per week by mid-2016, not because we needed them, but because growth demanded it. Our hiring process became desperation disguised as ambition. Instead of building automated verification systems, we hired armies of people to manually check driver documents. Instead of optimizing our backend, we threw more call center agents at customer complaints.
This is where most Bangladeshi startups die. They mistake activity for systems. They solve problems with people instead of processes. The tea stall owner who tries to personally serve 500 customers doesn’t become a successful restaurant chain - he burns out and fails.
Uber made the same mistake early on, manually dispatching rides until the manual system collapsed under its own weight. The difference: they had enough runway to build real systems before running out of money. Most don’t.
The Moment of Truth
The difference between tea stall and tea empire isn’t ambition. It’s approach. The tea stall owner optimizes for perfection within constraints. He knows his suppliers, his customers, his neighborhood. Every improvement is incremental - better tea, faster service, more convenient location.
The startup founder optimizes for replication without constraints. They ask: if this works here, where else could it work? If it works for these customers, what other customers might need it? How can I build a system that does this automatically, without me?
That mindset shift - from perfection to replication - is terrifying. It means giving up control. Trusting systems over instincts. Betting that your local success contains some universal truth worth scaling.
Spotify understood this. They didn’t try to build the perfect music experience for Swedish users. They built systems that could work for any music lover, anywhere. Playlists, discovery algorithms, social sharing - all designed to replicate the magic of finding great music at massive scale.
Most people don’t realize they’re building a startup until they’re already committed. They think they’re opening a tea stall - something simple, manageable, profitable. Then demand grows, complexity explodes, and suddenly they’re trying to manage something that’s outgrown them.
The trick is recognizing which one you’re building before you’ve spent everything trying to find out. The tea stall makes money from day one. The empire burns cash for years while building systems. Both are valid choices. But only if you choose consciously, with full awareness of what you’re signing up for.