How to start a software company in Pakistan
Hello friends today I’m going to tell you how to start a software business in Pakistan. as a software company to export your IT services by offering digital products, customized solutions, market place or as a freelancer platforms.
I have been working since 2012 in Pakistan as a online web master and I have almost touched every profession of this industry and now I have decided to share my experience with others to help them grow financially and support them as a giveback to my community.
My Name is QASIM HUSSAIN and I live in Lahore, Pakistan
Let’s START :)
This is how it looks when you start the journey!
10 Things you need before starting a software business or a company
01. Good English
02. Digital marketing experience
03. Developers team
04. Minimum 3 lac rupees and 2 lac rupees as a backup “ Plan B”
05. 5 Marla house
06. From C for company registration and official company bank account
07. Minimum 4 laptops “ I personally prefer Dell i5x series “
08. Good Internet speed with UPS backup for electricity
09. Office furniture and tools
10. Green Tea :D
Setting up the office, team, and infrastructure
so first of all we need to find out at least 5 Marla house and we can get that easily in rent for office purpose. most house owners deny to give you their house to use for commercial purpose but if you are good in communication you educate them that you are not allowing any walk-in customers to visit and you are dealing with online business so that they will permit you.
make sure to have a house with ground / lower portion so that you can avoid going up-stairs
“ just to save your time “. the rent of 5 marla house is around 15k to 20k as a average rent within Lahore at the moment but if you live outside of lahore in any another city you may get much lower price.
after getting the house we need to setup the office but make sure you have at-least 2 rooms house so that you can make one room for office development and the another one for meetings room.
This is how our meeting room should look like
The development room
Alright so this is a very important and sensitive matter and we need to be very curious about this.
try to have a side bar on the walls or buy a work-station tables instead classical office desk-tables
I personally prefer to have side-bars because you can have more space to site and they are good to have a larger space to use your gadgets comfortably.
Here is my team and look out the sidebar pretty na!
Another option
Another option
You can use as a modern office desk in room as well but for that you must a large room and you also need to setup a remote screen sharing for all teams so that you guys may communicate easily while you are sharing your screens.
otherwise you have to walk-through every desk-table to talk and see whats happening in order to communication for real-time development which I personally don’t prefer but here is the look below :
The Team
Try to hire the experienced and senior developers. I know they are expensiveness but as a initial startup its very important for you to provide quality instead quantity.
Being a CEO of any software house you must have some technical skill-set too.
now you need to design and setup your own website.
make sure to buy the good domain name. dont go for desi names because when you are working online the entire world is your customer and you are dealing with every solution and services so please avoid using any none professional name such as :
hamariweb
apkiservices
netwala
servicespk
webpk
paksols
apnanet
Try to use minimal name such as 6 words max for example
dreamstouch
pazeer
phptravels
paidlance
google
facebook
netsol
micromedia
softsol
For web hosting I personally prefer these websites and try to buy VPS instead shared hosting
01. https://www.eurovps.com
02. https://www.hostgator.com
and if you are good and server management you can save money then just buy from linode.com and manage the server your self otherwise the above hosting are best to go.
now start working on your own website
make sure your website have at-least 12 pages for example
01. homepage
02. about us
03. contact us
04. our vision
05. our team
07. services
08. products
09. blog
10. privacy policy
11. terms and conditions
12. portfolio
please try to avoid using other peoples design on your website like don’t buy pre-buid or pre-designed themes also try to avoid copying the design from other website.
your first challenge would be designing your own website with your team.
ask your designer to design the UI
ask your backend developer to start developing a website using php frameworks codeigniter or laravel
or go with a simple core php that’s fine. but dont use wordpress or any other cms nor any purchased design / theme.
customers like unique designs and companies portfolios. as you know first impression is last impression
don’t compromise with the quality of your own website because this your internet shop and every customer will visit here if they found something bad they will never come back to you.
try to put livechat feature on your website and ask one of your team member to stay daily live to support and answer all the queries and visitors you encounter on your website each day.
we do use this service : http://www.livechatinc.com/ which is paid but you can go for free one. there are many free livechat available such as : https://www.tawk.to/
Office setup and tools
Alright so after setting up the house team gadgets and all the environment we need to start a business now. in my case it takes 10–15 days max to setup office, team, environment and all the gadgets + Tools.
make sure to do things quickly don’t wait for cheap prices in buying tools its fine go with the expensive one but make sure you buy a quality stuff.
in our office we are currently using internet of Zong and World-Call and its just a guzara net I personally not happy with internet service in pakistan like all others and this is why we are using 2 connections but in you case you may start with zong 50GB package which is enough for startups and it cost you monthly Rs. 2500 rupees
All good!
Ready for business
the best advice I can give you today is start working on digital products or on SaaS based solutions but they may take more time from you and your team to understand I will write soon about them but at the moment here is some platforms you may start your business from.
FREELANCER PLATFORMS
01. https://freelancer.com
02. https://www.upwork.com
03. https://www.peopleperhour.com
04. https://www.fiverr.com
05. https://99designs.com
MARKETPLACE PLATFORMS
01. https://themeforest.net
02. https://www.amazon.com
Further more I personally suggest you to build your own digital product such as :
School management system
ERP Solution
HR Solution
Stock management
Travel related services
Security services
House automation
Technology blog
Conduct interviews
Digital marketing agency
or any services, solutions which you feel have more potential.
I believe information technology is a wonderful business and everyone should give it try once a life time.
This was my first article and I hope you friends like it. I will keep sharing more information on this website if you like my article please take a moment to just click on share and below express how did you like it and don’t forget to comment so I can answer you for anything I missed to inform.
Cheers!
