Pakistan's kiryana dukan is the real disruption opportunity

A colourful decade from Houston to the Karachi agency circuit

The episode opens with Muzamil asking Saif Ali to walk through the past ten years. The answer is anything but linear. Saif was in Houston through high school, planning to become a biomedical engineer and accepted into the Cullen School of Engineering at the University of Houston. Family legal issues redirected the plan. He took what he calls “the desi route” — community college first, because it was cheaper, then transfer — before eventually landing back in Karachi at nineteen.

He found a job within a month at a Karachi BPO whose front office was in Boston. The CEO, an ex-PwC US partner, became what Saif describes as a kind of accidental graduate school. “That was really my BBA, MBA combined crash course,” he tells Muzamil — lean strategy, account management, business development, digital marketing, compressed into a few months before burnout pushed him out.

The Tribune came next, on the web desk as an editor. That, Saif says, was where the harsher reality of Pakistan landed. “As consumers we can choose to switch off whenever we want. But when you’re reporting news on a daily basis, it’s ridiculous.” From there the path moved through Punjab, back to Karachi in 2014, through Brand Crew and Spectrum, and into a two-year stretch chasing his own consulting practice in 2016 and 2017. He completed six to eight large projects and recovered about fifteen percent of his payments. The lesson, as he frames it to Muzamil, was not bitterness but self-reflection: “When you fail, you don’t really have anyone else to blame.”

What account management was supposed to be — and what it became

By 2018 Saif was at Echo, leading accounts for Domino’s, Shan, ICI Pakistan, and Martin Dow. Muzamil asks him to explain account management for the audience, and Saif starts with a joke that doubles as the thesis. “Account management basically is a munshi — someone who takes the client’s words and passes them to the rest of the team. That’s what an account manager does in Pakistan. I’m being sarcastic.”

The real role, he argues, is stakeholder management on behalf of the agency’s business model — selling creative work, defending it, and shaping the brief so the work can actually perform. He points to Ogilvy’s writing on the subject. In Pakistan, the role has flattened into order-taking.

Muzamil, drawing on the content side, agrees from his own seat. He describes agencies calling him with briefs the agency itself does not believe in. “I’ll say, the thing you’re asking me to do — you won’t get a sale, you won’t get viewership, you won’t get engagement. And the answer is, sir, you’re absolutely right, but the client wants it.” Saif’s response sits on top of that. “I’m trying to give you an expert opinion. What is in your favour, what is in his favour, how this value exchange happens in the best way possible. And the answer is: no, just bring us what we want.”

The data argument, and the brand team that “doesn’t see colleagues”

Saif’s longest-running argument with the industry is about data. “This has been my soap box for god, seven years,” he says. The brand teams he meets generally hit the brief by hitting vanity metrics — likes, reach, impressions — without measuring whether anything moved.

He frames the buyer’s incentive bluntly. “I can do everything right, but my colleagues don’t see it, and more importantly my boss doesn’t see it. So what’s the point of doing it?” The campaign that hits a fifty or sixty percent reach number is the campaign that survives the review meeting, regardless of whether it sold anything. Saif’s argument is not that brand affinity work is worthless — it is that it has been allowed to absorb sales-driven briefs it was never designed to deliver on.

Muzamil sharpens this with a specific story. In 2015 he sold a four-city shoot in Hyderabad with six talent on board for one and a half lakh rupees. The same brief today, he says, would not sell below thirty to thirty-five lakh. The valuation has shifted. The discipline behind the spending has not kept pace.

TikTok, and the 200 percent that nobody wanted to hear

The conversation turns to TikTok — a platform Saif spent two years pushing on brand teams, often with his own neck on the line. He describes a single launch campaign where seventy to eighty percent of the budget went to Instagram influencers and twenty to thirty percent, against client resistance, went to TikTok creators. “I’m putting my name on the line, without having any experience with TikTok. I was looking at it as a researcher, as a marketer.”

The result was, in his words, mouth-gaping. “In terms of ROI on the vanity metrics, TikTok performed about 200 percent higher than Instagram.” Same brief. The only difference was that TikTok creators were told to make the content their own way — the chair, the dress falling off the chair, the abrupt cuts that the brand team disliked on sight. “The brand team hated the content but couldn’t deny the results.” The same advertiser came back with another campaign on the heels of that one, and then another.

Muzamil and Saif converge on why this matters structurally. The Instagram consumer is already in the consumer market — TikTok, with twenty-seven million users in Pakistan against Facebook’s roughly forty million, is bringing a new consumer into the market for the first time. “TikTok is starting to build a middle class in Pakistan,” Muzamil says. “A very large middle class.” Saif agrees and underlines the female engagement — close to fifty percent on TikTok, far higher than on competing platforms — as the business case that should make itself.

The platform has been banned and unbanned arbitrarily, often without the TikTok team itself being notified of the reason. Saif wrote about this at the time of the first ban from a marketing and business lens, because the channel matters disproportionately for advertisers willing to experiment with it.

Affinity versus sales, and the affiliate model nobody runs

Muzamil pushes the conversation into the demarcation he says brand managers consistently miss: brand affinity versus sales. He describes clients asking him to drop sale codes on Instagram posts and links in captions. “The link doesn’t get clicked,” he says, citing the simple behavioural fact that users do not exit Instagram from a feed post.

Saif agrees and lays out the correct frame. Sales-driven conversion is an affiliate model. The world runs it that way for a reason. In Pakistan, lump-sum payment for a single post is the wrong instrument for the wrong outcome. “Every creator is overpaid for sales-based conversion,” Saif says. “And that’s why they hate the salesman-based model.” Muzamil’s restatement is sharper still: clients are buying brand affinity and asking it to do conversion’s job, then blaming the creator when the math does not work.

Both speakers agree the FMCG bias of the influencer market makes this harder. A Magnum or a Paddle Pop is genuinely difficult to track against an Instagram post. The honest version of the brief, Saif argues, is an RFP for affinity work — not a sales target attached to a creative deliverable that was never designed to carry it.

The four-stage funnel, and what is missing in the middle

Saif walks through the actual buyer journey he says every marketer is taught in school: awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty. He maps each stage to an influencer play that, in theory, could be run for it. Awareness is the transition video and the shirt reveal. Consideration is informative content about the product. Conversion is the story with the swipe-up and the discount code. Loyalty is the home-office campaign he saw recently from an accessories brand during COVID, where customers photographed their setups for a prize — natural integration, real participation.

His read of the market is that almost none of this exists in balance. “It’s all either awareness or purely conversion. But even the conversion is being dressed up like awareness. So what the hell are we doing?” Consideration campaigns are rare. Loyalty plays are rarer. The platform is being used as a megaphone rather than a funnel.

What Dastgyr is actually doing

Muzamil shifts gears and asks Saif to explain Dastgyr the way he would to a six-year-old cousin. Saif’s framing is clean. “Muzamil bhai, we sell toothpaste. Earlier we sold it from this side of the table, now we sit on the other side and sell ourselves.” It is B2B e-commerce. Daraz is B2C; Dastgyr is the layer above.

The number behind it is the point. Pakistan has roughly twenty lakh underserved retailers — kiryana stores, paan shops, milk shops, the places people actually buy from. The overall retail space, by Saif’s estimate, is worth about 120 billion dollars. The wholesale market today forces a shopkeeper in Landhi to close his shop, travel to a wholesale market on the other side of the city, and haul stock back himself. Volumes are too small for distributors to care about. “You buy two cartons. I won’t talk to anyone for less than fifty cartons. You’re out of my list.”

Dastgyr’s app lets the retailer place an order for fifty cartons of Coke and ten cartons of an Alpers product from his shop. Dastgyr’s sorting centres in Karachi and Lahore handle last-mile delivery. Twenty thousand customers had been served by the time of the conversation. The asset-light footprint matters: small sorting centres move millions of dollars of stock a month, and ten more can be opened tomorrow without the cost of warehouses.

The eventual move, Saif says, is a full marketplace model — multiple Alper vendors competing on the same listing — but the first year has been about digitising the existing value chain rather than disrupting it. Suppliers do first-mile in many cases; Dastgyr does the sorting and the last mile.

Buy now, pay later — and one and a half lakh that changes a life

The most concrete unlock Saif describes is credit. Dastgyr is preparing to launch a buy-now-pay-later option inside the app, underwritten by an Islamic bank so the structure is Shariah-compliant. The retailer selects credit at checkout, pays a flat premium fee instead of interest, and settles the invoice in fourteen or thirty days — long enough to sell the stock and use the margin to pay off the bill.

Muzamil pushes the implication harder. If a kiryana owner had access to one and a half lakh in working capital, what changes? Saif’s answer is sharp. “He can buy a fridge, he can add more shelves, he can improve the counter, he can add new categories. His bottom line grows, his top line grows, and his contribution to GDP grows. If we empower and uplift this kiryana segment, imagine what that unlocks for the economy as a whole.”

Muzamil’s instinct is to push further still — into POS integration, automated reordering, a closed loop where the shopkeeper does not even have to place the order. Saif acknowledges the logical end-state. “We have to surround the shopkeeper with technology.”

Article entrepreneurs, and ideas that solve problems instead of chasing money

Toward the end, Muzamil makes a broader observation about Pakistan’s startup scene. He calls them “article entrepreneurs” — IBA and LUMS graduates who have read a profile of a founder and sit down to engineer an idea that will make them rich. “More often than not, a great idea is not one that will get you money. A great idea is one that solves a very fundamental problem.”

Saif’s read on Dastgyr fits inside that frame. The founders came out of Airlift with the experience of building tech to move people. Connecting that core logistics capability to a fragmented retail problem that exists in the Philippines, Indonesia, and across Africa was not a leap of imagination — it was a recognition. “This is a global problem,” Saif says. “Trade is fragmented everywhere.” Grosari, Ula, Sokowatch — the same model, in different markets, for the same reason.

The conversation closes at the one-hour-five-minute mark, with Muzamil flagging his frustration that Dastgyr was explored so late in the conversation. “I was just like, yaar, B2B — sounded boring. And now I’m like, what a wasted opportunity.” Saif accepts the invitation to come back. The promise that lingers is that the pie is huge, the retailers are real, and the work is grounded in something more useful than another Instagram brief.