Why Monis Rahman won't charge sellers on Dukan

A dinosaur of Pakistan’s internet, by his own admission

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Monis Rahman as one of the people he has been hearing about for almost a decade — the founder of Naseeb Networks, the company behind Rozee.pk, a co-founder of Finja, and the operator now spending most of his hours on Dukan.pk. Monis accepts the framing but pushes back on the compliment buried inside it. “I disparagingly call myself a dinosaur, and people think it’s a compliment. It’s not,” he says. The point is not modesty. It is that the founder who started in this market when job ads still lived in newspaper classifieds has watched a very specific kind of transition twice now — first in the United States, then again in Pakistan — and the second one is happening at a scale neither of them have words for yet.

“The kind of offline-to-online transition we are seeing right now,” Monis tells Muzamil, “has not happened before in this country’s history.” That is the sentence that sits underneath the rest of the conversation.

From Riyadh to Wisconsin to the Pentium team at Intel

Muzamil asks for the backstory and gets a longer one than he expected. Monis moved from Lahore to the United States at three-and-a-half when his father went to do a PhD, did elementary school in the US, moved to Riyadh at eight when his father took a UN advisory role, came back to Karachi for high school at the American School, then returned to Wisconsin for engineering and computer science. In 1993 he joined Intel’s microprocessor team in San Jose — the same group that had shipped the 286 and was now working on Pentium and the Itanium chip.

He stayed in Silicon Valley through the late-nineties run-up. “A billion and a half dollars was being invested into startups in that area every month,” he says, describing the dot-com peak. He left AMD to start one of his own.

The webcam startup, the daycare cameras, and Tony Hsieh on the board

The startup was eDayCare.com. Monis and his Intel manager-turned-partner had an idea: stream a webcam over the internet and put the cameras inside US daycare centres so dual-income parents could check on their children from the office. He wrote the software himself, paying five hundred dollars a month for a 64k ISDN line — “I felt like a data centre,” he says — and they got cameras into around three thousand of the roughly one hundred thousand daycare centres in the country. They raised VC money. Tony Hsieh, the late Zappos founder, sat on his board.

Then 2001 happened. Monis was, as he puts it, “right in the middle of the bubble.” The story is told without drama, but it is the experience the rest of the conversation rests on.

The fifty million smartphones nobody is building for

The discussion moves to Pakistan today. Monis lays out the numbers carefully. Roughly 110 million adults. Around 80 million unique internet users. Roughly seventy percent of the adult population online. Fifty million smartphones added in the last five years — and, critically, “those phones went mostly to people with low education and low income.”

This is the population that, in Monis’s reading, the existing economy has not been built for. They already sell on Instagram, take orders on WhatsApp voice notes in Urdu, run live streams that move two or three thousand pieces in a session. What they do not have is an actual online store, because an online store still presupposes a developer, a hosting account, a payment gateway integration, an SECP-compliant business setup, and a marketing budget. “There is no reason they shouldn’t have it,” Monis tells Muzamil. Dukan, in his telling, is the attempt to remove every one of those reasons.

Dukan, in one minute and twenty-nine seconds

The walkthrough Monis gives is concrete. A shopkeeper opens the app, sets up a store in roughly ninety seconds, gets a globally viewable web address, uploads products and prices, and finds the payment rails — credit card, JazzCash, EasyPaisa, online IBFT — already wired in behind a wallet. When a delivery happens, the seller’s wallet is credited in real time. “The moment the rider says the cash has arrived,” Monis says, “the cash appears in your wallet.”

Logistics work the same way. Bykea, Trax, M&P and others are integrated as a marketplace of last-mile partners through open APIs. The seller does not negotiate with any of them. When an order comes in, the app shows who is available in the area and lets the seller pick. Inventory, accounting, and a built-in profit-and-loss view sit underneath the same flow. “Without them knowing what a P&L statement even is,” Monis says, “the accounting is running alongside every action.”

The point Muzamil keeps returning to is that this is a single rope through a problem that today requires a Shopify subscription, a TCS portal, a WhatsApp thread, and a separate accounting tool. Monis nods. “Their focus should be on their work, not on all of this.”

The wedge: 99.6 percent repayment, no collateral

The conversation turns to credit, and this is where Monis gets sharpest. The dominant culture of lending in Pakistan, in his view, is collateral-first — “house deeds, no matter what” — and he calls it a cancer that has held the country back. Finja, he argues, has already disproved the assumption inside it. “We have given fifty thousand loans to small stores,” he tells Muzamil, “with no collateral. Our repayment rate is 99.6 percent.” The decisions, he stresses, are not faith-based. They are made on transactional data the platform already sees — sales velocity, payment patterns, what each shop can actually carry without over-extending.

That data, in turn, is the reason Dukan and Finja are designed to feed each other while remaining structurally separate companies. “I wear that other hat when we deal with them,” Monis says. “If it isn’t in Finja’s interest, the answer is no. And often the answer is no.”

A social-media advertising platform a kiryana shop can actually use

Later in the discussion, Monis describes one of the newer experiments inside Dukan: an in-app advertising tool. The pain is familiar to anyone who has tried to run Facebook ads from Pakistan — account managers, credit-card limits, prepaid funding, dollar billing, agencies layered on top. The MSMEs Dukan is built for cannot do any of it.

“So we put it inside the app,” Monis says. A seller uploads an image, the app’s ad creator cleans it up with templates, the seller tops up the wallet with five hundred or eight thousand rupees, and the team posts it to Instagram or Facebook on their behalf. Monis is open about the fact that humans are still in the loop reviewing each transaction — “it’s a new experiment, we are watching it” — and equally open about the possibility that some of these experiments will fail. “But our DNA is experimentation,” he says. “We have to learn, because these are under-educated, low-income people coming online for the first time, and there are ways to help them.”

Why Dukan will never charge the seller

Muzamil asks the obvious question: if there is no fee to the seller, where does the money come from? Monis interrupts him before he can finish, because the answer matters more to him than the monetisation. “I want to tell you why I will not charge,” he says. He has now said it publicly, on air, so the internet can hold him to it. The reason is that taking a cut of the seller’s transaction contradicts the entire premise of the platform.

“These margins are sensitive. They connect the whole supply chain,” Monis says. “If we drop a fee into the middle of that, we have disrupted the economics of the chain itself.” The alternative he wants Dukan to occupy is a position alongside the seller — providing credit through Finja, sales through marketing, marketplace plumbing for buyers and suppliers, accounting underneath all of it — and to monetise the layers around the seller rather than the seller themselves. “If you are lazy and refuse to come online,” he adds, “you are going to lose. Because somebody else will arrive between you and your customer.”

By the time of the recording, Dukan has roughly 215,000 to 216,000 stores opened in two months. Monis is careful not to oversell that number. The number he actually cares about is active users — sellers from whom real value is being extracted by the platform, and to whom real value is being delivered back. “We have to hold their hand through the journey,” he says. “Every country has gone through this. We have to go through it with them.”

A Lego block for e-commerce, not a super app

Muzamil pushes on whether Dukan could one day plug into an existing retailer’s point-of-sale — an Outfitters integrating the stack across its stores, for example. Monis says the POS is already inside the app: multiple shopkeepers, multiple branches, up to a hundred users, online sales and walk-in sales sharing one inventory. From there, he reframes the entire product. “Dukan is the e-commerce operating system for MSMEs in this country,” he tells Muzamil. “It is a Lego block. It plugs into other Lego blocks. When you connect them, something new gets built.”

The ambition he names out loud is not modest. “I would love my last words before I retire,” Monis says, “to be that we helped increase the GDP of Pakistan by forty percent.”

Two futures for the ecosystem, and the discipline of expecting failure

The conversation returns, late, to the 278 million dollars of startup funding that has come into Pakistan in the year of the recording. Muzamil frames the binary: either this is the most money the ecosystem will ever see, in which case the experiment has failed, or it is the floor of something much larger, in which case there is no real competition yet and collaboration compounds faster than rivalry. Monis takes the second view, but with a clear-eyed warning attached.

“This has happened in India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Brazil, Bangladesh,” he says. “It is happening here now. The pattern is not identical, but the theme is. A lot of startups will raise. A lot of them will fail. And we cannot treat that failure as a verdict on the founder.” The culture he wants Pakistan to build, he tells Muzamil, is one where the founder who has failed once is treated as more valuable than the founder who has not started — because the next attempt carries everything they learned, and the attempt after that carries more.

The episode does not close with a slogan. It closes with a working operator, fifty-one years old, who has lived through one bubble and is now spending his hours making sure the people Pakistan’s economy has historically ignored are inside the next one.