Six billion dollars a year already runs through Salesflo

A guest from a part of Pakistan the host admits he doesn’t know

The episode opens with Muzamil framing the conversation inside the ongoing Endeavor Pakistan series — fifty of the country’s most interesting businesses — and introducing Yasir Suleman Memon, the founder and CEO of Salesflo. He warns the audience that this one is, in the guest’s own words, “a very standard and uncool kind of space” — an enterprise software business that has been quietly compounding for a decade while everyone else chased total addressable markets and venture funding rounds.

Before any of the business is discussed, Muzamil makes an unusual move. He tells Yasir that as a “burger Islamabadi” he has limited exposure to people who grew up in interior Sindh, and that he would like to spend the opening of the conversation just understanding what that childhood was like.

Yasir was born in Hyderabad. He grew up across three towns — Tandojam, where his father was an agriculture professor; Hyderabad, where he went to school; and Jamshoro, where his mother was a librarian at Mehran University. His father, a Fulbright scholar, took a teaching exchange to Texas A&M, which gave Yasir two years in the United States in third and fourth grade. He pushes back gently on the stereotype of Sindh: “Tandojam has a lot of PhDs. It’s like any US town that would have a lot of academics going on.” His parents, both Fulbright scholars, flew back from the US in his mother’s eighth month of pregnancy because, in his telling, “for us, the country comes first.”

Why interior Sindh’s economy never compounded — and why he thinks it still can

Muzamil presses Yasir on a harder question: why hasn’t a Sukkur, a Hyderabad or a Larkana ever built an economic base the way Faisalabad or Sialkot did? Yasir’s answer separates capability from distribution. He argues that Sindh has produced — through his parents’ generation — extremely loyal and technically capable subject-matter experts, but those people sit inside academic cocoons. “They are at the same time not really shrewd, and they don’t know how to really make that into a business or look at the economic side of driving it or even the political side of driving it.”

He layers a second explanation on top: land fragmentation never happened in Sindh the way it did elsewhere. “There is this ultra-rich class which owns a lot of land. And then there are these workers at the very bottom — there’s nothing in between.” Without a middle layer, institutions that should have been independent and impactful stayed small and local. He volunteers a striking concrete example — a public-private partnership to build a nuclear-tunnel treatment facility for mango exports to the US, an initiative that kept getting blocked at the budgetary or political stage. He is careful not to villainise the politics; he simply observes that the institutions never solidified.

But he refuses to be deterministic about it. “You don’t need to depend on the government for everything,” he tells Muzamil. “Private enterprise, and apni madad aap — in Karachi, we have learned that. Gas nahi hai, cylinder laga lo. Bijli nahi hai, solar laga lo. Pani nahi hai, tanker manga lo.” That resilience, in his framing, is what private enterprise is for.

Remote work pulled the talent out — and now AI is pulling some of it back

Muzamil asks the question he has been seeing play out across Punjab: dollarised remote jobs have started repatriating talent to second-tier cities and revolutionising those local economies. Is the same thing happening in Sindh?

Yasir confirms it directly. Salesflo built its first backend engineering centre in Hyderabad. What he watched happen over the years was not what he expected. “We started losing that talent to remote jobs coming in, and Fiverr and other outsourcing platforms that were allowing these people to be sitting in Dadu or Sehwan or Hyderabad or any place and taking on these projects online and then delivering them for those dollar values.” AWS executives who visited his Hyderabad office discovered engineers who had come from Mithi in the Thar desert, from Sehwan, from Dadu — all hired over Zoom during the pandemic without ever having to make the five-hour bus ride to give an interview.

It is in this passage that the title quote of the episode sits. Yasir notes, almost in passing, that “the AI wave is reversing that to some level as well — what Cursor and everything is doing.” The implication is sharp: the freelancing boom that pulled Pakistan’s distributed engineers into the dollar economy is precisely the boom that AI coding tools are now compressing. He doesn’t lean into the prediction the way the YouTube title does, but the observation is unmistakable: the same wave that paid grass-roots engineers in dollars is the one now collapsing into agentic tools, and Pakistan’s freelance commodity-code layer is the layer most exposed.

He balances the prediction with a second observation that is, in his telling, the more important one. The same technology that compresses the bottom of the freelance market is the technology that lets self-taught engineers leap further than they previously could. He describes a recent internal AI-agent competition Salesflo ran across its Hyderabad office. “Did we teach them? No. They went on YouTube. They explored what tools they could use, what they could build, what value they could create.” His read is that technology has decoupled employability from geography in a way Pakistan has barely begun to absorb — and that the people who survive the AI compression are the ones who treat learning as a self-directed loop, not a credential. On the question of grass-roots schooling itself, he is brutal. On a scale of one to ten, he places Pakistan’s current education emergency at “probably one-point-five or two out of ten.” It is, he says, the one place he would start.

The shutter-shop garage where Salesflo actually started

After eight years at Unilever — where Yasir ran key accounts and category functions for businesses up to a hundred and twenty million dollars — he and his co-founder Sharoon both quit on the same day. The original business plan, Yasir admits without flinching, was wrong. “We had a shitty business plan.” They had planned to launch a quick-commerce business. Three months in, it had crashed.

Their wives took charge of the household cashflow and gave them pocket money. The total paid-up capital they put into Salesflo was twenty-four lakh rupees — a twelve-lakh car each. Their first contract came from Faisal Munshi at Hilal Foods: a four-lakh-a-month consulting retainer for six months. Yasir says he still has the first cheque framed. “As soon as that four-lakh contract closed, I looked at Sharoon, Sharoon looked at me, and we said — that’s eight engineers from GIK, LUMS and Zabist at fifty thousand a month. Let’s go.”

Their first office was a shutter shop. “We would open the shutter ourselves every morning, close it ourselves every night, and do the sweeping ourselves.” The first product, Storeviz, was a merchandising-automation tool for FMCG. Within a year they had signed Unilever, Hilal and Coca-Cola. Within two years, annualised revenue was thirty-six million rupees. In 2017, with cash flowing in, they began building what is now Salesflo.

The decision to leave Unilever, Yasir tells Muzamil, was not made on the numbers — the numbers were terrible. “The business plan made absolutely no sense. Absolutely no sense.” Both he and Sharoon had small children at the time; his son was two, Sharoon’s daughter was three. What carried the decision was that both wives were working and both sets of in-laws supported the move without conditions. “Luck and support,” Yasir calls it. He frames the timing the way founders rarely do honestly: not as conviction, but as energy. “I told Aamir — I am thirty, thirty-one years old. I have energy now. I will not have energy tomorrow. So whatever it takes to build a venture, that’s today, not tomorrow.” LUMS, where he had landed on a USAID scholarship after a sequence of cold-mailed rejections and a last-minute intervention by the dean of the business school, had taught him institution-building. Unilever had taught him what an institution actually felt like at scale. The shutter shop was the test of whether either lesson could be applied without a corporate balance sheet underneath it.

What Salesflo actually is, and why a Switzerland office reviews the contract

When Muzamil asks for a plain-English description of the product, Yasir gives one of the cleaner enterprise-SaaS pitches in the episode: “Whatever SAP does for a large conglomerate, we do exactly that for FMCG companies — for their downstream supply chain specifically.” Inventory, ordering, invoicing, sales-force effectiveness. Not optional software; backbone software.

The shape of the sales motion follows from that. When Salesflo closes Nestlé, it is not the Pakistan office that signs. “Nestlé’s Switzerland office was also involved in the deal. They evaluated our security protocols, they evaluated everything. They did a full KYC.” The same is true of Bayer, GSK and Mondelez. Ticket sizes run from seventy or eighty thousand dollars a year on the low end to four hundred thousand dollars on the high end. “Something you can’t be paying on a credit card.”

The business is dollar-denominated end to end. “Whether the revenue comes from anywhere in the world or from Pakistan, it is always dollar-packed. It is not a rupee revenue.” And — a point Yasir is at pains to make — there is no separate consulting line item. Salesflo deploys for free as part of the subscription, because the entire leadership team is composed of FMCG specialists, not software-sellers. “We don’t sell technology — we sell outcomes.”

Six billion dollars a year, and what that number actually means

Midway through the conversation, Yasir gives the number that anchors the rest of it. Pakistan’s GDP is roughly three hundred and seventy billion dollars. Retail and wholesale account for roughly sixty-six billion of that documented base. “Out of that sixty-six billion dollars, six billion dollars a year transacts on Salesflo.” Eleven countries, just over a hundred customers, recurring subscription revenue of three and a half to four million dollars.

He then extrapolates the second-order number. If the FMCG companies on Salesflo represent only twenty percent of any given retailer’s basket, the six billion of transactions actually maps to roughly thirty billion dollars of economic activity touching the platform — close to a tenth of the country’s documented retail base. That data layer is what Salesflo is now turning into a platform play, with industry-wide market-share data that historically only AC Nielsen could produce.

The next bet, he tells Muzamil, is agentic AI woven into the same platform — agents that complement the sales force on demand aggregation, demand creation, and customer support. Muzamil presses him to stay on the present, not the future, and Yasir grants that step one — actionable insights, not just dashboards — is already deployed.

Jugnu: the failure he is most willing to talk about

A subsidiary called Jugnu — a B2B distribution play for retailers, the same problem space Bazaar, Dastgyr and Tajir all attacked — was wound down in 2023. Salesflo itself injected the first two and a half million dollars into it. Total capital raised across the venture, including outside money, was around twelve to thirteen million dollars — the smallest war chest among the comparable players.

Yasir’s post-mortem is unusually clean. The problem was real. The opportunity was big enough. The team was strong. What killed Jugnu was external: “Our foreign investor also backed out and said they would not be investing in Pakistan anymore.” The political turbulence of May 2023 — and a particular foreign LP’s exit from the market — meant the committed follow-on capital simply never arrived. Warehouses were shut. The team was placed elsewhere.

The frame he uses to explain it is the part worth quoting. “Capital is not the first ingredient to solve it. That is very, very clear. It is probably ingredient number three or ingredient number four. First and foremost, you need a great kick-ass team that understands the problem. Then you have to be extremely, extremely ruthless on execution. Only missionaries on the bus, no mercenaries. Eighteen hours a day at the mission. And then capital.” The order matters, he tells Muzamil — getting capital first and team second is how most of the comparable plays got it wrong.

Going global from Pakistan: Saudi, Malaysia, and a pricing premium

Salesflo’s global revenue split today is roughly ninety-ten — ninety percent local, ten percent international — with boots on the ground in three countries. Yasir says they “landed boots on the ground” for the first time in January 2024. Malaysia opened recently; Saudi is the wedge into the Gulf and Africa.

The competitive landscape is regional. Accenture’s Newspage is the global incumbent — many of Salesflo’s largest customers, including Nestlé and FrieslandCampina, were Newspage customers globally before switching. In Saudi, the incumbents are Egyptian and Indian players. Yasir’s take on price is counter-intuitive and worth quoting directly: “In Pakistan, we charge close to five to six times an X player in terms of pricing.” Pricing, in his read, is not the determinant. Customer service is. Outcome delivery is. A complete vision for FMCG — including agentic AI and GIS layers — is. The price line is “a few basis points on their entire P&L.”

He is explicit that to actually scale globally, the company has to stop being Pakistani. “We need Egyptians, Jordanians, Lebanese, Saudis represented in the Gulf. We need Chinese, Indians, everyone on the Malaysia team.” He himself spends about a week in Saudi every month.

Muzamil presses on the capital question that necessarily follows. Salesflo, Yasir reminds him, has been cash-flow positive since inception, with the discipline of “you can only spend what you generate” baked into the company’s bones. But he is also candid that bootstrapping has a cost: “One of the things we learned the hard way is that you also need to learn to raise money on time, and not delay.” The LTV-to-CAC mathematics of an enterprise SaaS deal — eighty to ninety percent gross margins, ticket sizes of two to four hundred thousand dollars a year, a single top-end salesperson cost — are, in his words, “really, really powerful.” Two reasons would justify a raise now: AI investment inside the platform, and sales expansion in the markets where Salesflo has already cracked the repeatable motion. Saudi, he says, is the proof point that the model now repeats.

Why the IPO is non-negotiable, even if it isn’t in Karachi

Towards the end, Muzamil walks Yasir through a long observation about early-2000s Pakistani tech: a generation of software-house founders never let go, never institutionalised, never gave employees real equity that could be liquidated. The complacency, he argues, eventually became the lifestyle company.

Yasir agrees and then sharpens it. “We always used to joke that whatever happens, this company cannot be run by Yaya and Rania” — his daughter and Sharoon’s daughter. “Refounders” is the word he uses for the people who have grown into ownership of large parts of Salesflo from within. He tells a story about a Pakistani acquaintance who, in a meeting with Salesflo’s Saudi GM and COO, congratulated them on “starting their own business” — neither of them is a founder, but both carry the founder mindset so completely that they read that way to outsiders.

The point he then makes is the one the conversation has been driving toward all along. “IPO is not for raising funds. IPO is to convert this into an idara — an institution.” Until employee equity can be publicly traded, he argues, the paper is worthless. “If a person has worked with us for ten years and we can’t make them half a million or a million dollars, we have not done our job.” He is unambiguous on the destination — “we will not be selling out to some XYZ investor” — and confident on the trajectory. At a three-to-four-million-dollar ARR today, with growth of thirty-five to fifty percent annually, he expects Salesflo to be a hundred-million-dollar revenue company within five to six years. The open question is the listing venue — Pakistan’s foreign-remittance restrictions on locally listed companies make NASDAQ or NYSE the more rational endpoint.

”We have to be a set of believers”: closing on 2047

Muzamil closes the way he often does on Endeavor episodes — by asking Yasir to look out to 2050. Yasir corrects him to 2047, Pakistan’s centenary. He has, he reveals, booked the domain flightnumberPK2047.org.

His framing of the future is deliberately anti-extrapolative. “It’s a bit unfair to say extrapolate the current, because the future can never be a representation of just the past.” He cites Singapore and China as twenty-to-thirty-year transformations and refuses the generational pessimism Pakistan tends to default to. “The first thing is that we have to have hope. We cannot be hopeless.”

He acknowledges the joke version of his childhood ambition — make money, win elections, become prime minister, fix Pakistan — and notes that he eventually took the politics out and kept the business. “Even by doing business and creating value, you can create impact.” Tata in India is the example he reaches for; Syed Babar Ali and LUMS are the example he reaches for at home. The power, he tells Muzamil, comes from economic value creation. The variable is intent. “With the right intent, you get Singapore and China. With the wrong intent, you get Somalia or Nigeria.”

By the end of the conversation, the through-line is clear. The shutter-shop in 2015, the four-lakh first cheque, the eight engineers, the six billion dollars now flowing through the platform, the Jugnu closure, the Saudi office, the IPO that isn’t about money — they are all the same argument. Build a real business, in a boring industry, with the right people, in the right order. Capital comes third. Everything else is the work.