Why PriceOye sells you a $500 phone before a $5 t-shirt

A seventh-grader running a web hosting business out of Karachi

The episode opens with Muzamil framing the scale of what PriceOye has become — second-largest e-commerce platform in Pakistan, sixty million unique visitors in the last twelve months, five percent of every smartphone sold in the country moving through a single website — and then walking it all the way back to a child in the seventh grade, in Karachi, in the early 2000s, who wanted a server but could not afford one.

Adnan Shaffi grew up in a household where dinner conversations were business conversations. His father ran a petrochemicals company, but his real distinguishing trait was an early-adopter relationship with technology — among the first Pakistanis with a Mac and Torch laptop, among the first with a mobile phone, the kind of person who joined a programming class after office hours rather than pay a contractor to maintain his own enterprise software. “He has always been progressive and very early adopter of technology,” Adnan says.

That curiosity passed down. Adnan and his older brother Adeel wanted to play with a server. US hosting at the time ran around three hundred dollars a month, which was not pocket-money territory. So they did the only thing that made the unit economics work: they resold the extra space. They opened the Yellow Pages, cold-called companies, talked their way past IT departments that did not yet know what IT departments were supposed to do, and built a small web-hosting operation while still in school. By the time they were done, they had ninety-five clients across Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. One of those clients, a large multinational, insisted on signing a physical contract at their office. The brothers showed up in ties. The receptionist eventually realised the people they were waiting for were children. Adnan’s father stepped in to sign as the legal adult.

This is the section that explains everything that comes later. The technical confidence is there. The cold-calling muscle is there. The willingness to look ridiculous in pursuit of an actual order is there. None of the later moves in the conversation are surprising once you have heard this one.

The first acquisition, and the year Adnan had to learn how to work

By university — Bahria, electronics engineering in the morning shift, computer science in the evening shift, because the introvert in a new city had nothing else to do — Adnan and Adeel were among the early Pakistani operators in what would later be called social media. They worked with international brands, became one of the top hundred social media experts globally, and then started their own publication, Chip Hazard, focused on technology and the security risks around it. They ran it from their bedroom on a two thousand rupee investment. Within a couple of years they had a team of twelve, some of them in the US, and an acquisition offer from a British private equity firm.

They were twenty-two. They had no idea what an acquisition was. The word “startup” was not yet in everyday Pakistani vocabulary. They thought the email might be the Nigerian-prince genre of scam. It was not. The deal closed in 2011 at what Adnan confirms was a seven-figure number — “we were shocked, the idea of becoming so rich at that time while you were just graduating. It was unreal.”

The post-acquisition stretch is the part most founders skip. Adnan does not. He admits the obvious risk: a young person with a real cheque in their account and no work history loses the incentive to grind. His brother went to do an MBA. His father refused to let him sit at home. “When you are working with your father, you cannot be undisciplined,” he says. “You have to put in those hours to be able to learn, because my father has always been like a person — you cannot start from the top. You have to start from the bottom. You sit with the labour, you eat with them, you spend time with them.” That one year, he tells Muzamil, is when his work ethic actually formed. Before that, he had skill. After that, he had a floor.

Pakistan is seven years behind Indonesia, and Indonesia is two years behind India

After his own KSBL MBA, Adnan and his brother took a year to travel. The trip is where the thesis behind PriceOye gets built.

In Indonesia they recognised something. Every consumer internet pattern they were looking at — the apps, the categories, the funding flows — felt familiar. They had read about it in India three or four years earlier. So they did the work. They plotted around thirteen hundred Asian startups on a single timeline, and two patterns came out clearly enough to act on.

The first was a lag. Whatever happened in India in consumer internet showed up in Indonesia with a two-to-three-year delay, and in Pakistan with a seven-year delay. “It was like a time machine,” Adnan says. “You can see what worked in India, what worked in Indonesia and then localize that for Pakistan.”

The second pattern was a sequence. The first wave of consumer internet is always e-commerce. The second wave is fintech. The third is social commerce. The order is not aesthetic — it is structural. Fintech without e-commerce has nowhere for the money to be spent, and its customer acquisition cost is brutal unless it is coupled to a transactional surface. Social commerce, where bulk orders are split among many buyers, cannot function without fintech to split the payments. “Pakistan में fintech e-commerce से पहले नहीं चल सकता,” he says — fintech cannot run before e-commerce. This was 2019. The Pakistani venture market was pouring money into fintech.

The brothers concluded that e-commerce was the only honest place to start.

The category nobody else wanted to start with

Muzamil presses for the next step. There was already a dominant Pakistani e-commerce player with a deeply negative net promoter score — Adnan estimates negative twenty-seven, meaning that of every hundred customers, twenty-seven would actively tell other people not to buy from the site. The brand was so damaged that “e-commerce” itself had become a suspect word.

Rather than pick the easiest category, Adnan picked the hardest. He explains the logic cleanly. Electronics has an average ticket size of fifty thousand rupees. The shipping logistics are standardised. The trust burden is at its maximum. “We are not in the e-commerce business,” he tells Muzamil. “We are in the business of creating trust.” If they could earn trust on a fifty-thousand-rupee phone, the thousand-rupee t-shirt would take care of itself. The reverse — building trust on cheap goods and trying to graduate the consumer into expensive ones — had no obvious path.

Before launching, they went to China. Twice. Each trip ran over a thousand street interviews — bags of chocolates, subway stops, basic questions about why someone buys a particular product on Taobao versus JD.com. They almost got arrested on the second trip when six hundred interviews in, the police explained that you need permission to do this. Their transcripts saved them.

What they learned in China is the foundation of how PriceOye is built. One of the founders Adnan met handed him a hundred dollars, ordered a Louis Vuitton bag on Taobao, and then walked the brothers into the LV store in Beijing three days later. The store authenticated the bag. The store changed its colour. The knock-off was that good. The lesson was that a pure marketplace — where anyone can register and sell — structurally cannot solve counterfeit. JD.com, the expensive-product platform, had grown precisely because it was a managed marketplace: only brands and their authorised sellers could list.

The same pattern repeated in Pakistan. Adnan describes a vendor who shipped two hundred thousand rupee phones on an eleven-eleven sale and substituted twenty rupee cartons of milk in twenty percent of the boxes — calibrated to stay below the marketplace’s complaint threshold. The marketplace’s only forensic option was to ask the courier what each box weighed. A phone and a milk carton weigh roughly the same.

PriceOye launched in March 2020 as a managed marketplace. Only registered or authorised brand sellers list. Every phone is PTA-approved. Every product carries an official one-year brand warranty. Phones that are in demand but lack official Pakistani warranty — OnePlus, Google Pixel — are not sold, despite the consumer pull. “We believe long term, if you have to scale, you have to build trust, and you cannot compromise on that.”

How a managed marketplace actually runs

The mechanics matter because they are the moat. Adnan walks Muzamil through it carefully. PriceOye owns no inventory. Vendors send product into PriceOye’s own warehouses, where each item is inspected against the brand’s guidelines before it is shelved and made visible on the website as in-stock. The platform takes three cost categories out of the price the consumer sees — the commercial rent of a physical shop, the air-conditioning and electricity, and the labour of a guard and a few salespeople. None of those costs exist when the storefront is digital. Volume does the rest: what a good neighbourhood electronics shop sells in a month, PriceOye sells in under an hour.

Then comes the consumer-facing trust layer. Every single order — Adnan is emphatic, every one — is filmed inside the warehouse as it is picked, packed and sealed into a flyer carrying a unique serial number. The video is sent to the customer over WhatsApp before the parcel leaves the building. A second WhatsApp message goes out when the delivery rider departs, with a photograph of the specific rider who is on the way. “Make sure कि यही बंदा हो जो कि आपको product दे रहा है,” Adnan says — make sure the person who hands you the box is the same person in the picture.

That second message is only possible because PriceOye, after starting with third-party logistics, built its own delivery fleet in four cities. The fleet exists for two reasons. The first is theft control. Riders are given full health insurance (“which no one else gives”), are called “delivery heroes” rather than riders, are taken to company retreats, are sent to five-star hotel iftars with coupons for their spouses, and are given stock options so that the company’s growth is also their growth. The second is a backstop with the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority: a stolen device gets blocked on the network, which turns a stolen phone into a brick and removes the resale incentive entirely.

Smaller cities, where e-commerce was always going to win

Muzamil’s instinct is that smaller cities should be where e-commerce works best, because their physical retail is thinner and more expensive. He is right. Sixty percent of PriceOye’s orders come from outside the three main metros.

Adnan’s framing of why is worth noting. The argument is not just consumer convenience. It is developmental. “If you have to uplift any region, digital penetration has to happen there, and the first step of digital penetration is a smartphone,” he says. A delivery rider working for a food app cannot work without one. A bottom-of-the-pyramid family cannot access most state services without one. PriceOye’s bias toward cutting margin rather than pocketing it — passing the saving to the consumer rather than milking the channel — is framed as the same project. The cheaper the smartphone, the more of the country comes online.

Steve Wozniak, Peter Thiel, and how to raise from people who have seen it before

The funding section of the conversation is a clean illustration of how Adnan thinks about networks.

The Wozniak connection began with a fight. While still running Chip Hazard, the brothers got leaked photos of the iPhone 4S from a fan working at an Apple-adjacent company in China. They had the images legally cleared and published them. Apple emailed threatening to sue, threatened their advertisers, pushed hard. The brothers refused to take the post down because they had the legal ground covered. “It’s about a principle,” Adnan says. Standing up to one of the largest companies in the world gave them visibility. Wozniak reached out. A mentorship followed. The signed book on his shelf is the artefact.

PriceOye has raised two rounds. The first, in 2020, was four hundred and fifty thousand dollars from a local syndicate — three Pakistani family offices: the Fatima group out of Lahore, Kohat Cement, and Artistic Group out of Karachi. The round was oversubscribed and they deliberately took less than was offered. “We will only raise enough money that we actually need.”

The second round in 2022, around seven to eight million dollars, is where the curation gets interesting. Adnan describes it not as a fundraise but as a selection. Each strategic investor was chosen because they had already lived through a comparable journey. Beenext, the Japanese fund, was an early investor in Tokopedia, the largest e-commerce company in Indonesia. Palm Drive Capital was an early investor in JD.com — a company that began in electronics and graduated into everything, the exact arc PriceOye is considering. Peter Thiel came in for what Adnan says was his first investment in the country. The Chainsmokers came in twice; Adnan, who genuinely did not know who they were, took the call distracted by a rainstorm interrupting his internet. They liked that he had treated them as an investor rather than as a celebrity.

The Beenext story is the cleanest example of Adnan’s approach. He had been setting up quarterly calls with the firm’s founder Teru — who had IPO’d his own price-comparison company on the Japanese stock exchange at twenty-seven — purely for advice. Teru kept predicting problems before they hit. When PriceOye crossed five million dollars in topline, Teru emailed: that was exactly the number at which he had invested in Tokopedia. He wanted in. Adnan said they had money in the bank. Teru said he would stop giving them his time unless they took his money. They opened the round.

PriceOye is now bottom-line profitable after tax. Adnan says explicitly that no further fundraise is planned. The excess cash is being reinvested into growth.

The vision is to make “PriceOye” a verb

When Muzamil asks whether the company will become an everything-store, Adnan’s answer is precise. Not for at least the next five years. The consumer journey for electronics is structurally different from the consumer journey for fashion. Electronics is a planned purchase — PriceOye’s own data shows an average two-week decision window before a customer commits. Fashion is impulse. Optimising for one ruins the other. “We want to make PriceOye a verb for consumer electronics.” That is the next five years.

The unicorn arithmetic that opens the episode hinges on this category discipline. If PriceOye stays only in smartphones, it has to grow from five percent of the market to twenty-five percent to clear a billion-dollar valuation by Muzamil’s projected 2037 — possible, but not certain. The shorter path is adjacent categories where the same trust infrastructure carries over: appliances, accessories, and the buy-now-pay-later layer that today’s instalment players occupy. Adnan does not name competitors directly, but the message is clear — there is margin to be unlocked by helping the consumer who cannot pay twenty-five thousand rupees for a phone today afford a thirty-thousand-rupee version on instalments tomorrow, and PriceOye intends to capture some of it.

Why Pakistan, and what 2050 actually looks like

The end of the conversation turns to the question every Pakistani founder has been asked at every dinner for the last three years: why are you still here?

Adnan does not duck it. He is direct about the structural problem. Pakistan has 250 million people and all the fundamentals are there, but the middle class is shrinking. GDP per capita has fallen for three consecutive years. Online commerce globally only enters its hockey-stick phase once GDP per capita clears two thousand dollars. Pakistan’s population is growing at 2.4 percent. Real GDP growth has been around one percent. That is negative growth, per capita, of roughly 1.4 percent a year. The fiscal space that has opened up because of softer global commodity prices is a window, not a permanent reprieve — the moment oil crosses eighty dollars again, inflation will return with force.

He is also direct about why he has not expanded regionally. Operation-heavy businesses do not travel the way SaaS does. A software developer in Pakistan costs two to three thousand dollars a month; the same hire in Saudi costs ten thousand. SaaS can arbitrage that gap by keeping the back office in Pakistan and selling into the Gulf — Adnan points to Dr. Saira Siddique’s MedIQ as a clean example of that pattern. PriceOye cannot. Once you cross the border with a logistics business, your costs reset to local. And the GCC already has Amazon and Noon; Pakistan is where the white space is.

There is a softer expansion underway. A small PriceOye team based in Abu Dhabi is exploring Africa under a low-touch model — partnering with a large telecom operator to embed PriceOye’s technology and supply expertise inside that operator’s existing consumer app, rather than launching a standalone brand. The platform becomes the engine. The partner owns the customer relationship.

On 2050, Adnan refuses to retreat into ifs. He cites the World Economic Forum projection that despite all the challenges, there is a ninety percent probability Pakistan ranks among the world’s top twenty-five economies. He is, in his own word, bullish. The cleanest signal he offers is personal. He says he was offered the nationality of two countries and declined both, because he wanted to build PriceOye on a Pakistani passport. “I do only have one passport. That is the Pakistani passport. It’s difficult to travel on, but it is.”

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil’s framing has shifted. What sounded at the start like a profile of a remarkable business looks, by the close, like a profile of a particular kind of operator — one who reads patterns before acting, picks the hardest category on purpose, treats trust as the product and the technology as the delivery mechanism, curates capital rather than collects it, and stays. PriceOye, Adnan says at the end, is still in net practice. The real growth has not started yet.